395-423.] CHAPTER IX. 'Bless'd is the womb that bare HIM-bless'd Who hear His word and keep it well, The living homes where CHRIST shall dwell, -KEBLE. HONORIUS-VALENTINIAN III.-MAXIMUS-AVITUS-MARJORAN SEVERUS-ANTHEMIUS-OLYBRIUS, GLYCERIUS, NEPOS. ROME thrice shines out on the page of history, during the first ten years of the Fifth Century, with awful clearness, seen by the lurid light of its own flames. Thrice, during that short period, the terible Goths crossed the Alps as ministers of Divine vengeance; the first time under Alaric; the second under Rhadagasius; the third again under Alaric. At the first siege of Rome the heaps of unburied corpses produced a pestilence. In vain the Senate tried to soften the conqueror. Alaric scorned alike their money, their despair, and their pride. When they spoke of their immense population, he exclaimed-'The thicker the hay, the easier it is mown.' On his demanding an exorbitant ransom, they humbly inquired, 'What, then, do you leave us?' 'Your lives,' replied the insulting Goth. The second siege of Rome was attended by such a terrible famine, that the population was reduced to the most loathsome and abominable food. The Romans, though they had no bread, had still their public games, and in the midst of them it was awful to hear the cry, 'Fix the tariff for human flesh!' The third siege of Rome surpassed in its horrors everything recorded in profane and sacred history. Jerome, in his secluded cell at Bethlehem, heard such a report of its terrific woes that, in his vivid fancy, he heaps together the awful passages in the Scripture on the capture of Jerusalem and other Eastern cities, and Virgil's noble lines on the sack of Troy, as but feebly descriptive of the night in which fell the 'Moab of the West.' And yet, in his very next letter, he declares that the capture and its horrors are not merely mitigated, but amply compensated to Rome, and to the world, by the profession of virginity made by Demetrias, against the wishes of her whole family, and therefore the greater the merit! Neither of the degenerate sons of the great Theodosius succoured the stricken city, from which they had long withdrawn. ARCADIUS ruled in Constantinople, and more and more absorbed in the cares and calamities of the Eastern Sovereignty, he and his successors, till the time of Justinian, made no attempt to exercise imperial power in Rome. His brother HONORIUS, as timorous as the chickens which he delighted to feed, fled before the barbarians, until he found a secure retreat in Ravenna. This city, from its almost inaccessible situation on the coast of the Adriatic, about ten miles from the most southern of the seven mouths of the Po, had attracted the attention of the Emperor Augustus, who constructed there a capacious harbour, and extensive arsenals and barracks, which rendered it one of the most important fortresses in Italy. The principal canal of Augustus poured a copious stream of the 395-423.] HONORIUS AND HIS CHICKENS. 359 waters of the Po through the midst of the city, to the entrance of the harbour; other canals introduced the same waters into the deep ditches that encompassed the city walls, and divided the streets into a multitude of small islands, between which the communication was maintained only by boats and bridges. Ravenna, like Venice, whose appearance it resembled, was raised on the foundation of wooden piles, and the surrounding country for many miles was a deep and impassable morass, through which ran a narrow causeway, easily defended, connecting the city with the Continent. The gradual retreat of the sea for nearly four miles from the modern city increased the natural strength of the place, by protecting it from the enemy's fleet, for already the port of Augustus was converted into pleasant orchards, and a lovely grove of pines covered the ground where the Roman fleet once rode at anchor. To these impregnable fortifications and morasses Honorius, anxious alone for his personal safety, retired; and his example was imitated by his successors, the Gothic kings, and after them the Exarchs, who occupied the palace at Ravenna, not one venturing to fix his residence at Rome, and inhabit the mouldering palaces of the Cæsars. Even the nobles of Rome were scattered abroad after the capture of the city, and centuries passed before those great feudal families grew up, which so often humbled the popes by insult, or exile, or compulsory appointment at their own factious will. Still the majestic name of Rome attracted to it the commerce and the concourse, the sympathy and reverence of Christendom. Its Bishop also held the seat of Cæsar's tribunal, to which the Roman world had acquired an inveterate habit of appeal; for the feeble Emperor Valentinian II., to relieve himself of trouble and perplexity in religious questions, had legally invested the Roman bishop with his own imperial prerogative of hearing appeals in religious cases. Hence whilst Honorius was cowering in his stronghold from the perils which were convulsing the Empire on all sides, and feeding his chickens, bishop Innocent I., with infinitely more ability, ambition, and boldness than any bishop before him, was seated firmly on the Episcopal throne of Rome, and asserting his almost despotic spiritual control over the very provinces which were withdrawing their doubtful allegiance, or in danger of being lost to the Emperor! So utterly abandoned was Rome by Honorious that he was alarmed, it was reported, when informed of its capture, till he understood it was not his favourite chicken of that name, but only the ancient capital of the world that had been taken! What a golden opportunity for an ambitious bishop's prosecution of his claims to spiritual supremacy! Upon Innocent appears first distinctly to have dawned the vast idea of the Roman bishop's supremacy over Christendom, dim as yet and shadowy, yet full and comprehensive in its outline. He declares, in one of his earliest epistles, that all the Churches of the West, not of Italy alone, but of Gaul, Spain, and Africa, having been planted by St. Peter and his successors the bishops of Rome, owe filial obedience to Rome, are bound to follow her example in all points of discipline, and to maintain a rigid uniformity with all her usages! His pretensions to supremacy were further favoured by the bitter feuds which drove all the Eastern Churches to court the alliance of Rome, which could hardly be without some compromise of their independence. In defending against his Alexandrian rival, the celebrated John Archbishop of Constantinople, surnamed Chrysostom, or Golden-mouth, from his wondrous eloquence, Innocent sagaciously took not only the better, but the more popular side. Chrysostom was born at Antioch, and studied oratory 400-423.] CHRYSOSTOM. 361 under the philosopher Libanius, who used his utmost arts, and displayed all that is alluring in Grecian poetry and philosophy, to bring up his promising pupil as an ornament and a pillar of falling Paganism. But his Christian mother Anthusa's watchful care preserved her son from the snare, by interesting his young mind in the study of the Holy Scriptures, and at the age of eighteen he left the bar-where he had highly distinguished himself-and was appointed a reader in the Church. Then a source of oratory infinitely more exalting and noble than the dead philosophy and paganism of Greece, a heart full of the love which flows from Faith, gave to his native eloquence, cultivated by the study of the ancients, its animating charm, and burning zeal did the rest. A friend inflamed by example the fervour of his piety; and they proposed to retire together to one of the most remote hermitages in Syria. So the greatest Christian orator of his age was almost self-doomed to silence, or to exhaust his eloquence in ejaculations, heard by no human ear. His mother again preserved him to a life of Christian usefulness. There is something exquisitely touching in the domestic scenes which sometimes flit across the busy pages of Roman history, and such are our feelings in reading the life of Chrysostom. His mother had been a widow at the age of twenty, and devoted herself to the care of her child. Chrysostom himself, with affecting simplicity and tenderness, tells us that when she heard of his determination to retire to a hermitage in a distant region, she took him by the hand, she led him to her chamber, she made him sit beside her on the bed, in which she had borne him, and burst out into tears, and into words more sad than tears. She spoke in mournful accents of the cares and troubles of widowhood; grievous as they had been, she had ever one consolation, the gazing on his face, and beholding in him the softened image R |