Neither Attila’s insatiable appetite for ruin, nor Rome’s own great, monolithic sternness, but a gentler way than either survived those evil days. Here where the quiet, sandalled brothers tend their vines and their olive trees, and bend to cut the wheat with their wooden-handled sickles, and the goatbells tinkle from the surrounding hillsides. Here indeed is another way, which I for one think might be true civilisation…
But who is to say that those who thought differently, and fought for a different way, were not heroes, too? Mine is only one version. God when he walked on earth provoked many versions.
And so in memory of these things, and of that man whom I think the noblest as well as the last of the Romans – at one time my recalcitrant pupil – I leave these scraps of history to posterity. I know that posterity seems to me now, in this year of Our Lord 488, a dark and uncaring place, where the scrolls and books of the histories of past ages will be regarded as so much tinder for kindling a fire. The light of learning is going out across Europe.
Yet, although it seems to me likely that posterity will not care what I write, and that the name of Aetius, the noblest Roman, will be lost in the scattered leaves of the coming years, which name should be as widely known as Alexander, or Hannibal, or Caesar – yet it is for him that I have written.
There is a shy and rather simple lad of eighteen or so who lives with us here in the monastery. A lay brother with a shock of golden curls called Romulus, who loves nothing better than to help the monks in the vegetable garden, and to feed the chickens and the goats. He has a little herbarium all his own, filled with coriander and parsley and chives. He loves to grow beans and lentils, radishes, lettuces, and is very fond of the humble, heavy- cropping turnip. Once, he sat on the imperial throne of Rome, and wore the purple – but that was long ago, and in another world.
Never again will an emperor sit in purple upon the throne, nor stand beneath his yellow parasol on the steps of the Capitoline to greet another Roman army returning south in triumph amid the sound of brazen trumpets and thumping drums, down the Flaminian Way, past the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, winding up the Capitoline Hill to the Temple of Jupiter. Never again will the sunlight dance upon the bronze helmets of the cavalry as their horses champ upon the Field of Mars, nor senators gossip and plot in the vast Baths of Caracalla, lounging over the chessboard or strolling among the shops and gardens, libraries and sculpture gardens of that thirty-three acre Palace of Water. What use have barbarians for libraries and baths?
Nor will fathers take their sons up the pine-clad Palatine, past Domitian’s Domus Augusta, to see the cave where the monster Cacus once dwelt, nor the fig tree beneath which Romulus and Remus were suckled. Never again will a quarter of a million Romans roar in the Circus Maximus as the chariots race and swerve round the spina, nor in the Colosseum at the feats of the gladiators and wild beasts. Rome’s far-famed Insula of Felicula, sixteen storeys high, is vanished into rubble, and how long will it be before another such wonder is built, tier on tier?
Europe is a land of log-cabins and mud huts now, of grass-grown roads, crumbling aqueducts, passing war- bands playing crude games with handfuls of coloured mosaic in the ruins of fallen villas. Whatever is done can always be undone. Already the Forum itself, where Cicero and Caesar once spoke, is the abode of wildcats. The Rostra is ruined which was once decorated with the beaks of captured ships; and, yes, with the severed head and hands of Cicero too. Rome was never perfect, but we loved her.
All these things will soon be forgotten in this new world. Never again will the great grain ships ply their way through the salt furrows from Libya and Egypt, never again will the harbour at Ostia resound with the cries of merchants and traders from halfway round the world, bringing copper and tin and Silurian gold from Britain, glass and leather from the Levant, gems and spices from far Ceylon. Never again these things, for they are all done now. Yet as we can begin to discern, most strangely, Rome was a world both lost and won. Her soul was not destroyed, but miraculously lives on, in other bodies, other forms. She was the mother who died in childbirth – a long, agonising century of labour, her off spring the stern but gentle faith of Europe’s new, barbarian kingdoms. Any other triumph would have been much worse; and it was for this that so many fought and died to defeat the pagan darkness of the Hun.
Everything in the human world must vanish and nothing shall remain, though some there are who cannot change but are caught in time like insects in amber, trapped and killed there in its bright, clear, mindless gum, for ever loyal to a world they do not realise has gone. Such was the last and noblest Roman of them all…
The People are moving on, over the endless plains, stumbling in the cracked earth, about their covered ears the ancient songs of penitence and ash. Songs of grief and the graveside, the young buried before the old, children buried by their parents, and sorrow immeasurable at the right way of nature overturned by war and famine and pestilence. Broken temples, falling towers, clouds of brickdust, bricks coloured like dried blood, hard-baked in the ancient ovens of Babylon, Nineveh and Tyre…
They will come at last to a green valley, those pestilence-stricken multitudes, the Angel of History always at their back, harrying them, her sword blazing cruel and bright as the sword of the cherubim at the gates of Eden. They will look out on that pleasant valley of quiet streams and pastures, and they will begin to build again. Oh, the pity of it, and the grandeur.
The very stone of their building destined to fall again, their house never safe, their building never done, they will never know rest from heaven’s weathering. Their buildings will always fall, they will always build again, they will never surrender. They will never stop wandering, searching, over the endless plains, a storm that will not cease. It is mankind itself that is the storm, god-driven, god-haunted mankind, most pitiful, most magnificent of all creation.
They will never despair, though their proudest towers are burned to ashes, though their cities are inundated by the waters of the deep, though plague and famine encompass them round, though the sun burn them by day and the frost chill them by night, though the day holds its labours and the night its terrors, though they are but so many small, weak, naked, biped creatures, so many little parcels of mortal flesh, and death walks beside them daily. They will never lose hope, walking on resolute into the coming storm which is their own reflection, unbowed, undismayed, undefeated. They were made to suffer and to endure, to fall and to triumph, and never to surrender.
Among all the wonders of the earth, most wonderful is man. So I salute him, recognising him as made by the very hand of the Living God, in the tragedy of his fate and in the greatness of his heart.
Hic finis Historiae Prisci Panii, Anno Domini 488
List of the Principal Place Names Mentioned in the Text, with their Modern Equivalents
Modern equivalents marked with an*asterisk are approximations only
Adrianople – Edirne, Thrace, European Turkey
Aemona – Ljubljana, Slovenia
Altai Mountains – mountain range in western Mongolia, sacred to the Huns and to many other peoples
Aquileia – present-day city dates only from Middle Ages
Aquincum – Budapest
Argentoratum – Strasbourg
Augusta Treverorum – Trier
Aureliana – Orleans
Azimuntium – in Thrace, precise location unknown
Bononia – Bologna
Britain – England and Wales
Burdigala – Bordeaux
Cameracum – Cambrai
Carbonarian Forest – the Ardennes*
Carnuntum – Petronell, Austria*
Carthago Nova – Cartagena, Spain
Catalaunian Fields – near Chalons in Champagne,
France, precise location unknown
Cisalpine Gaul – Lombardy
