Chapter 5 - Religious Reaction to the Fall of Rome

Summary

The reactions to the devastation of parts of Gaul and Spain, and to the activities of the Visigoths within Italy did, however, have their religious side. Some pagans attributed the taking of Rome by the barbarians in 410 to the aban-donment of the old gods, while some Christians saw the disaster as a just retribution on a sinful world. One need only recall the letters of Jerome and Pelagius, and the sermons of Augustine, written in the immediate aftermath of the Sack of Rome; or the subsequent, and very much more considered, response of the bishop of Hippo in the City of God. Orosius reversed the pagan argument: the destruction had been unleashed by God on the ungrateful city, and indeed the major damage to the forum had been caused by a divine thunderbolt, which destroyed all the idols. Even so, in his view, the three-day sack in 410 was as nothing compared with a fire that had devastated the city 700 years after its foundation (i.e. in 54/53 bc), not to mention the one that lasted six days during the reign of Nero or the total sack of Rome by Brennus following a six-month siege in ca. 399 bc. In any case, the Gothic sack famously morphed into a religious procession after Alaric ordered the restitution of “the sacred vessels” to the Church of St Peter.

It is worth pausing here for a moment on some of the ideas relating to the Empire and its demise that were current in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Eusebius, of course, had set out a very positive view of the Empire as the fulfilment of Christian history. In one way or another his view was adapted in the East to fit the developments of the fifth century—the reigns of Theodosius II (401–50) and of Marcian could still be seen as belonging to the triumph of the Christian Empire. In the West, despite the fact that Eusebius's Chronicle, in Jerome's translation, seems to have been better known than it was in the East, it was harder to follow a pure Eusebian line. Not surprisingly there is an apocalyptic strain to be found in a number of chronicles of the period, notably that of Bishop Hydatius writing in north-west Spain in the middle of the fifth century.