knew him, they lowered their faces before his searching gaze. He wanted to say something to them at this last moment, knowing that they were not to blame, but suddenly his body was ablaze with agony and his throat was taut and wordless. For Valentinian had produced a long blade and thrust it up beneath his ribs. Aetius gasped and his eyelids fluttered and lowered. Through the haze he saw the emperor’s grinning face, his spittle-flecked chin almost touching his own as he twisted the knife.
The four guards let go of his arms and stepped back, and he staggered. Only then did the other courtiers and counsellors crowd around with their own daggers in hand, and join in killing the man who had saved them from ruin a dozen times. Old Quintilianus alone stood back.
His eyes filmy with death, glazed and misted, his body twisting and falling, his last breath exhaling, what did he see as he fell? Did he see the Triumphal Way, the City on the Seven Hills, the great Basilica of St Peter, the Capitoline? Did he see his beloved legions, scarlet plumes and pennants fluttering in the breeze? Did he see the grim face of his enemy, the Scourge of God? Or did he see a vision of Jerusalem?
As they stood staring down at the savaged body, Quintilianus spoke from behind them.
‘Your Majesty,’ he said quietly. ‘You have cut off your right hand with your left.’
For Aetius there were no songs of praise or lamentation. Reader, it is not I who concoct the ironies of history. I can but tell the truth. Only a handful mourned Aetius’ passing, a handful in all of Italy. Most of his friends had died on the Catalaunian Plains. If the news ever reached the island of Britain, there would have been mourning. In the Court of the Visigoths at Tolosa, there was deep, deep mourning. But in his homeland…
Attila the Destroyer went to his death praised and beloved and glorified by lavish funeral rites, much loved among his fierce people.
Aetius the Saviour, the last and noblest Roman of them all, to whom all of Christendom and the West owes an incalculable debt – his savaged body was wrapped in sacking and quietly dropped in a marsh. This much he has in common with his great enemy: none knows where he is buried.
But surely the believers must be right, and the history of this world is not everything; but there is another story, in which justice will be done. Oh, let it be so. Or else this world is not worth a handful of dung.
The widow of Emperor Theodosius, Eudoxia, was still in Jerusalem when she heard news of the death of Aetius. She immediately went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to pray. She prayed for a long time. And for many evenings after, she loved to sit on a moonlit balcony and look out over the Golden City of Zion.
She never returned to Constantinople.
Only a few weeks later, the Emperor Valentinian was watching soldiers drilling on the Campus Martius when he was set upon by two of them and slain. The soldiers observed, ‘He dies easily for a God!’ None of the other soldiers fought in his defence. Some say that the emperor’s killers had served with Aetius himself, and had even fought at the battle of the Catalaunian Fields. Some say that one of them was a centurion with an iron countenance and hard, unblinking eyes.
Two years later, the Vandals sailed up the Tiber and sacked Rome. They had sailed from Carthage. The sack was savage and merciless, for there was barely a defence force to speak of, and King Genseric had grown no less cruel since his three sons were slain in Gaul. Bishop Leo pleaded with him to spare lives. When the Vandals withdrew, they left behind them crumbling theatres and circuses, dazed and wandering remnants of the populace lost in the immense space and emptiness of their ruined public baths, once-stately libraries and halls of justice. All were ransacked and stripped bare. Yet from the Church of St Peter, hymns of praise still sounded. What were treasures and statuary compared with human lives? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, preached Bishop Leo. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
The Vandals did not grow rich from their raid. A huge summer storm blew up, and much of Genseric’s fleet was wrecked and sunk. All the treasures of Rome lie on the Mediterranean seabed somewhere between Rome and Carthage. They lie for ever in those silent depths among the weeds, half the treasures of the Ancient World: diadems of Indian pearls, Egyptian emeralds, silver chalices, that priceless chandelier of solid gold, hung with fifty dolphins, that once hung in the Lateran Palace. Perhaps even the Ark of the Covenant, which Titus had looted from Jerusalem four long centuries before…
After Valentinian there was a succession of emperors enthroned and then soon murdered, each one feeble and less memorable than the last. In the year 476 the last enervated act was played out.
The penultimate Emperor of Rome, Julius Nepos, was deposed by an old and treacherous soldier, and the soldier’s son, Romulus Augustulus, installed in his stead. Many said that the boy was in truth the old soldier’s grandson, but he lied to prove his potency. The old soldier must have been in his seventies. He was a Greek by birth, and his name was Orestes, and his son inherited his fair hair. In his younger years he had been Attila’s right- hand man. It was incredible, but it was so. The last emperor was Orestes’ son.
‘ Four will fight for the end of the world, One with an Empire, One with a Sword; Two will be saved and one will be heard, One with a Son and One with a Word.’ Aetius, Attila, Orestes and Cadoc, four boys who had played together on the Scythian plain, long ago. It was as the ancient rhyme had said.
But the reign of Romulus Augustulus was no more permanent than his predecessors’. Only two months later, Orestes’ own standard-bearer, Odoacer, an Ostrogoth, rose up in his turn and murdered Orestes. Romulus Augustulus was officially deposed on 4 September 476. It was precisely twelve centuries and six lustra since the first Romulus founded the city.
The Muse of Irony was not done yet.
Odoacer had previously visited Severinus, the most celebrated saint in Noricum. The huge Gothic warlord, clad in a black bearskin, had to bow low to enter the saint’s cell.
The saint said, ‘I give you two pieces of advice. First, go to Rome and you will become King of Italy. And second, mind your head on the way out.’
I write this in the Monastery of St Severinus, where the saint lies buried.
Odoacer slew the last emperor’s aged father, Orestes, who died as he had lived, speaking never a word in protest or explanation; but Odoacer could not bring himself to kill the boy. He was so small, aged all of six or seven, with blond curls, blue eyes, and looking quite absurdly like a cherub.
‘What would you like, boy?’
The boy stared up at the towering warrior and then whispered, ‘I’d like to grow vegetables in a garden.’
Odoacer despatched him to a monastery near Neapolis, to be cared for by the lay brothers. For himself, meanwhile, he disdained the imperial purple and diadem. He bluntly pronounced the Empire of Rome at an end, severed all ties and allegiances with Constantinople, set his borders at the boundaries of Gaul, Rhaetia and Noricum, and declared himself King Odoacer of Italy.
EPILOGUE
And I, the meanest of them all,
Am left to weep, and sing their fall…
Thus I, Priscus of Panium, in my ninetieth year, with crabbed and arthritic hand lay down my pen, in my simple cell in the Monastery of St Severinus.
I have a small gold coin on my desk before me. It is the only gold I own. It is beaded round the rim, crudely stamped with a stylised eagle, wings outspread, and it was given to me by the man they once called the Scourge of God. He now lies buried and silent along with the rest of the dead. When I go under the earth in my turn, perhaps the monks will find it and wonder at it, and keep it safe in the sacristy as a treasure. Or perhaps they will melt it down for cloison-work or foil for an illuminated Bible. Perhaps this gold from the hand of a pagan king will become leaf in a page of the Gospels. Ironies are many and nothing remains unchanged, not even gold.
At evening I can close my eyes peacefully in this Italian monastery amid the delicate tracery of stone carvings, silent but for the soft slap of sandals and the whisper of brown woollen habits over worn flagstones. Here the seven offices of the day are kept with a serene regularity for which I am thankful in a world given over to darkness and chaos. In a kingdom much tattered and torn, much threatened by the darkness beyond, but under the rule of a Christian King, Odoacer, I can give thanks with the rest of them for the triumph of Christendom.
