58 SOLDIERS AND SAILORS obeying a divine and irresistible command. The Goths encamped under the walls which for six hundred and nineteen years had never been threatened by a foreign enemy. The wealthy, effeminate, corrupted nobles, and people of the Eternal City thought to terrify Alaric back by boasts of their numbers. His scornful answer simply was, "The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed." He demanded all their gold, silver, movables, and barbarian slaves. " What then, () King, will you leave us?" He grimly said, " Your lives." He was content, however, this time to accept a ransom, of which the most curious element was three thousand pounds of pepper. The folly, pride, and braggadocio of Honorius, or rather of his miserable court, brought Alaric a second time to Rome in 409. The city capitulated, and he raised Attalus to the purple as a rival to Honorius. But Attalus proved utterly incompetent, and the next year Alaric publicly and insultingly degraded him to a private position. In 4103 fresh insult and wrong inflicted on the Goths by Honorius brought Alaric once more to Rome. He burst in by the Salarian gate, and sacked the city, which was only saved from irretrievable destruction by the respect of the Goths for the churches, which they regarded as inviolable asy- lums. The pillage and conflagration of Rome, and the resultant ruin and misery, came on the world like a shock of earthquake ; but the Pagans saw that the catastrophe would have been yet more awful if the conquerors had not been Christians as well as the conquered. It seemed as if even the Imperial City could not fall without some circum- stance of irony and insult. Paganism may be said to have perished in two bursts of laughter : one when in Alexandria the Christian mob burst into merriment to see the rats scurry out of the rotten head of the shattered statue of Serapis ; and again when Theodosius and his soldiers laughed at the golden thunderbolts torn from the uplifted arms of the menacing statue of Jupiter. And Honorius managed to invest even the fall of Rome with ludicrous associations. He was a great fancier of fowls, and had a particularly large hen, which, out of compli- ment, he called Roma. When the agitated eunuch entered to tell him that " Rome had perished," " What ! " cried the Emperor, in a voice of deep concern, " why, she was. feeding out of my hand only an hour ago ! " " It is the city of Rome that has fallen, sire ! " " Oh, my friend," said the Emperor, with a sigh of relief, " but I thought you meant that my hen 'Roma' had died." Laden with spoils of priceless value, the creaking wagons of the Gauls went southward. Alaric meant to lead them to the conquest first of Sicily, then of Africa. But death overtook him amid the schemes of his ambition. He died after a short illness, and was buried in the bed of the river which washes the walls of Cosentia. The captives who reared the tomb were massacred, that none might know where the hero lay. The Visigothic kingdom of Spain, founded by the warrior tribe which he first led into the West, is one of the most perma- nent results of his invasion.
