when starving people killed each other over a rat, one of the great voices of the Church, St Augustine of Hippo, closed his eyes upon the ruins of a world which he had so desired and feared. He died on the twenty-eighth day of August, aged seventy-five. A few weeks later Hippo was taken and burned almost to a shell. But Augustine’s writings and his personal library were by some miracle saved: two hundred and thirty-two books, plus treatises and commentaries, epistles and homilies, and those immortal works the Confessions and The City of God.
The years passed, the Vandal conquerors made North Africa their own, and the young and hesitant Emperor Valentinian hesitated. Aetius argued for reconquest by land and sea, vigorously at first, and then furiously. When Galla Placidia concurred with the general and urged her son in the same direction, the weak and paranoid adolescent rebelled against them, called them ‘bossy’, refused point blank to do anything about Africa, and sent Aetius into exile.
Not for the last time, Aetius took refuge at the court of the Visigoths in Tolosa. Valentinian, meanwhile, sued for dishonourable peace with Genseric, the wrathful, debauched king of the Vandals, who had once been a hostage prince in the court of Rome, with his younger brother Beric; the latter had long since died in an ‘accident’.
Genseric was fierce and blood-thirsty, delighting always in spectacles of the utmost cruelty and depravity. He especially liked to see women forced to couple with animals, in supposed tableaux of ancient myths: a wild bull, representing Zeus, mated with a naked slave-girl, representing Europa, tied down over a cartwheel. Perhaps Genseric believed that, by showing his appreciation for such entertainments, he was demonstrating his affinity with the elevated culture of the classical world. He spoke little, was short in stature, and he struggled to sleep with women in the normal way. When he did so, it was with hatred.
To the dismay of many, the Vandal kingdom of North Africa under the rule of the monstrous Genseric became an established fact. Rome’s resources shrank still further.
Indeed, the streets of Rome were filled with more and more threadbare and starving refugees from the Vandal fury in North Africa, and tiny wooden boats bobbed across the Mediterranean from the Numidian or Mauretanian shore to make landfall in Italy. More and more desperate, hungry mouths, and less and less grain to go round. But still the people lived blithely, and did not want to see that the blood-dark cloud now nearly filled the sky.
12
The years passed, and Valentinian’s sister, Honoria, grew into young womanhood. No sooner had she reached that turbulent age, not sixteen summers old, than she betrayed her true character, and the name ‘Honoria’ showed itself absurdly unsuitable for this inveterate lover of pleasure. ‘Oh, incongruous name!’ one monkish chronicler has written. ‘For never was there a female so shameless in her carnal appetites as the Princess Honoria!’
It is not for a humble scribe like myself to have opinions one way or another about the girl’s behaviour, but many other chroniclers have felt differently, describing her as ‘a she-daemon of sensuality’, ‘a succubus who inflamed men’s flesh and scoured their souls’, and even ‘the Great Scarlet Whore whose appearance marked the End of the World’. The more censorious have written that they could not possibly commit to writing the horrifying stories they heard about her lusts and depravities, before going on to do so in extensive and unblushing detail. Whatever the truth about the princess, as a responsible historian I must record what I have heard about her without demur.
Honoria was born three years after her brother, in 422, the daughter of the gloomy Flavius Constantius and his chaste and upright wife the Princess Galla Placidia, so that in the year 437 she was just 15. She appeared to have only three interests in life: beautifying her body; attracting attention to herself, from both men and women; and sensual pleasure. No greater difference between mother and daughter could be imagined, so that palace wits said that surely Princess Galla must have borne her daughter not by the noble if taciturn Flavius, but rather following a visitation from one of the insatiable and lecherous gods of the pagan pantheon. Perhaps Zeus had visited Galla in the likeness of a shower of gold, as he did Danae; or a swan, as he did Leda. For the daughter of Galla, like the daughter of Leda, Helen of Troy, would prove irresistible to men, both because of her beauty and because of her evident lustfulness. And she would set off a train of events as calamitous and tragic as that caused by Helen, providing a similar feast of entertainment for the sardonically laughing gods above. For the sorrowful tale of Troy is known to those high gods as the Wrath of Achilles, but humanity remembers it as the Death of Hector.
If not Father Zeus, perhaps it was the great god Pan, or some ithyphallic satyr in his train, who fathered Honoria upon the chaste and haughty Galla as she slept in her icy composure and self-restraint. Certainly the disparity between mother and daughter was great, and often remarked.
Beauty alone in a woman is not enough to reduce men to love-struck foolishness. Such a woman must also make it clear, by the fluttering of her eyelashes, and by the glittering steadiness with which she returns a man’s gaze, with the dark kohl-rimmed drowning-pools of her eyes, and by the pretty pouting of her carmine lips, and by the gentle touch of her fingertips upon his arm, and by bending forward to retrieve, shall we say, her napkin from the floor, giving him a heady glimpse of her sweet and fruitlike breasts with their erect and roseate nipples – such a woman conquers men, as I say, both by her beauty and by her explicit sensuality. For which reason, as St Augustine has warned us, ‘women are the greatest snare that the devil has set for men’; and as the Bible itself reminds us, ‘All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.’
All these tricks and harlotries Princess Honoria understood very well from her earliest years; and no sooner had she begun to show the first outward signs of womanhood, if palace gossip is to be believed, than she was demanding sexual pleasure from her slaves. No Agrippina, no Messalina, was ever so debauched as she. And in the morally dubious palace of Ravenna, with its slaves numbering some twenty thousand, each one bound to do the bidding of master or mistress, there was no scarcity of potential servants for her lust.
More shocking still was the princess’s indifference to whether her companion in the pleasures of the flesh were male or female; for, like Sappho of Lesbos, whose works are largely lost to posterity, Decency be thanked, she took her pleasures where she found them: her love being not only towards men but, with rather too much generosity, towards all humanity.
It was said that one person was particularly responsible for the first awakening in Princess Honoria of her desire for pleasure. One day a new slave-girl came into her private chambers from the slave-markets of Alexandria. Her name was Sosostris, which means simply ‘Sister’ in the old Egyptian, and is a typical term of affection for a slave. Other slave-names, signifying even more than mere affection, and reminding the bearer of the name that they existed to pleasure their owners on demand, included Desire, Kiss, Pleasure, Beloved, and even Sexy. Sosostris herself might well have borne any of these alternative names, as it turned out, such was her hot temperament. ‘Sister’ was a more ambiguous term, perhaps; but many was the slave-master who took perverse pleasure in calling his ‘sister’ to his bed at night.
Sosostris was some eighteen or nineteen years of age, an Egyptian, slim and dark-skinned and very beautiful. Now, you know of the reputation of the Egyptians, both men and women; for in ancient times, before the coming of Christ, the utmost lubricity was common in Egypt, and women went not only bare-legged but even bare-breasted throughout the day. At evening they sat at table with their husbands and their husbands’ friends, boldly conversing as if they were men’s intellectual equals! Their full round breasts were on proud and wanton display, the allure of their dusky nipples even augmented by subtle applications of cosmetics and rouge!
But I digress.
Regarding Sosostris and Princess Honoria, I heard it from another scribe in the court of Ravenna, who heard it from the Egyptian herself, whom he later took to his own bed, deriving much lewd and revolting pleasure from hearing her recount her youthful adventures in the arms of men and women alike; such are the corruptions of the times. And although it is true that Rumour is never so speedy on her feet, nor so wholly unreliable, as when she hastens to report in the market-place on matters which belong in the bedroom, I feel that there may be some lamentable truth in the scenes that were laid before my shocked imagination by the luridly detailed description of this shameless scribe. They are scenes that I have turned over and over in my mind many times since, in my pure desire to know whether they could be true or not; so that it is now almost as if I witnessed such appalling scenes
