hem, with confidence, that
he was 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, O 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
410 a 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 asylums. 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
circumstance 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 compliment, 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,