A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

allowed some of his allies to slip out, make a surprise attack, and slip back before Alaric had time
to recover his wits. This was the last straw. In a violent rage, Alaric marched again on Rome, once
again besieged it, and this time succeeded in breaking in. It was mid-August, 410 A.D., and the first
time invaders had been inside the city for more than six hundred years. Still smarting from the
surprise attack, Alaric’s men raped and slaughtered with the abandonment of soldiers who had
become bored, resentful and sex-starved. ‘The brutal soldiers,’ says Gibbon with a sigh of regret,
‘satisfied their sensual appetites without consulting either the inclination or the duties of their
female captives,’ and he goes on to discuss the interesting question of whether a virgin who had
been violated can still be regarded as ‘chaste’ and therefore still a virgin.
In Ravenna, one of Honorius’s eunuchs brought him the news. Honorius apparently kept chickens
and was particularly fond of a cock named Roma. When the eunuch said ‘Rome is lost,’ Honorius
gave a yelp of agony. ‘That’s impossible. He was just eating out of my hand.’ When told that the
eunuch meant the city, not the bird, he gave a sigh of relief.
After six days the Goths left Rome, which now had nothing more to offer them, and marched south,
taking Nola and Capua on the way. Alaric’s fleet sailed for North Africa; but his luck had run out.
They were scattered by winter storms, and Alaric died shortly afterwards.
It was the beginning, not the end, of Rome’s troubles; but the story of its remaining sixty-five years
as the capital of an empire has a curiously repetitive air. Honorius’s successor, the emperor
Valentinian III, was also lazy, foppish and vicious. During his unfortunately long reign, the
Vandals crossed from Spain to North Africa and devastated the Roman province there with a
thoroughness that has made their name a byword for mindless destruction. Valentinian’s sister was
a nymphomaniac named Honoria, who got herself pregnant by the court chamberlain and was
packed off to the care of some religious aunts in Constantinople. Bored and sex-starved, she wrote
a letter to a sinister barbarian named Attila the Hun, begging him to come and rescue her. Attila
was a descendant of the Mongols who had been driven out of northern China, and Honoria was
undoubtedly unaware that he was short and squat, with a face like an ape. Attila probably had no
sexual interest in Honoria; he already had several dozen wives and, to a puritanical savage, the
knowledge that she had already got herself pregnant would seem disgusting. But the opportunity
for blackmail was too good to miss; so Attila sent Valentinian a message asking for his sister’s
hand, and demanding half the empire as dowry. Valentinian refused indignantly, and Attila
declared war. Fortunately for Italy, he decided that Gaul would be an easier target, and swept
across Europe, capturing city after city. If he had captured France, present day Englishmen and
Frenchmen would probably have slit eyes and yellow features. But a Roman general defeated him
at Chalons, and Attila led his army back into Italy, where Valentinian was forced to bribe him to go
away. Soon after this, Attila died in a manner worthy of a conqueror, bursting an artery in the act of
taking the maidenhead of a beautiful virgin.
Valentinian himself was eventually murdered by a general named Maximus, whose wife he had
raped. Maximus made the mistake of marrying Valentinian’s empress Eudoxia, who disliked him
so much that she sent a message to the Vandals in North Africa asking them to come and save her.
Honoria’s example should have taught her better. The Vandals came and sacked Rome, and when
Eudoxia rushed with outstretched hands to meet them, stripped her of her jewellery and carried her
and her two daughters off to Africa as slaves.