A 5th century medallion showing
what is perhaps the only portrait we have of Galla Placidia (388-450
c.e.), the last (and the only) Western Roman Empress. The inscription
says "Domina Nostra, Galla Placidia, Pia, Felix, Augusta," that is "Our
Lady, Galla Placidia, Pious, Blessed and Venerable." A
contemporary of such figures as Saint Augustine, Saint Patrick, Attila
the Hun, and – perhaps – King Arthur, Placidia had the rare chance of
being able to do something that past Roman Emperors never could do; take
the Empire to its next stage which was to be, unavoidably, its demise.
As I was preparing this essay on
Empress Galla Placidia, I found myself giving an impromptu talk on the
subject to my students in chemistry on the last lesson before Christmas.
Later on, I thought that I could write my essay in the form of that
talk. So, here it is. It is much expanded in comparison to what I said
to my students on that occasion, but still it maintains the essence of
it. I have added headings and some figures.
Introduction: chemistry of an empire
I think there won't be a lecture in chemistry, today. We are close to
Christmas, there are just a few of you, and so it is better to skip a
long and boring lecture; we'll have it after the pause for the holidays.
So, we could simply leave for a coffee, but, maybe, we could use this
time we have in a different way. You know, there is a subject that I
work on when I have some free time: Roman history. So, I was thinking
that, instead of giving you a lecture in chemistry, I could speak to you
about that. How would you like to hear the story of a Roman princess
who married a barbarian king and then became Empress of Rome?
I see from your faces that - yes - you would like to be told this
story! But note that perhaps it is a subject that is not so far from
chemistry as you might think. You see, civilizations can be seen as huge
chemical reactions and you know that chemical reactions tend to flare
up and then subside; it is what we call "
chemical kinetics," you have
studied that. The same happens to empires; they tend to flare up and
then disappear; that's what happened to the Roman Empire, as you know.
So, civilizations and chemical reactions can be studied using similar
methods; it is a field of science that goes under the name of "system
dynamics". In a sense, there are forces pushing people to do things just
like there are forces pushing molecules to react. In chemistry we call
those forces “chemical potentials”, about people we might use the term
“destiny” or "karma" or something like that. But perhaps the difference
is not so great.
But don't worry about equations. I said that today I was going to tell
you a story, and I am going to do it. It is the story of Galla Placidia;
born a Roman princess, then Queen of the Goths, and, in the end,
Empress of Rome. It is a great story of love, sex, and war. So, let's
start!
The fall of Rome.
First of all, I am asking you to close your eyes and forget for a moment where
you are. Forget that you are in a classroom, forget that you are
students of chemistry, forget that you live in the 21st century. Try to
imagine something that existed way back in time: ancient Rome in the
first years of the 5th century of our era, fifteen hundred years ago.
Yes, Rome, the eternal city, the center of the world, the cradle of
civilization, the place all the roads lead to. At the beginning of the
5th century, Rome is still the largest city of Europe; the capital of
the Western Roman Empire. Think of the city as stretched over its seven
hills; surrounded by the massive Aurelian walls, full of marble palaces,
markets, amphitheaters, gardens, and fountains. The Roman Senate still
holds sessions in the
Curia and gladiators still fight in the arenas, as they have been doing for centuries.
But, with the 5th century, things have changed a lot for the Empire. The
victorious armies of old are gone; the Emperor himself doesn't even
live in Rome any longer. He stays in the small town of Ravenna,
protected by the marshes that surround it. And, in 410 A.D., Rome is
under siege.
Imagine that: outside the walls of Rome, there is a whole nation: men,
women, children, horses and cattle. Tens of thousands of people who have
marched there all the way from the North: the Visigoths. They are led
by their king, Alaric, and now they are besieging Rome. While the
Emperor, Honorius, is hiding in Ravenna, the only barrier that keeps the
Barbarians out of the city is the circle of the ancient Aurelian walls.
But that cannot last forever. Without an army to defend the walls, the
outcome of the siege could be only one. In August of 410, the Barbarians
broke in and they sacked Rome. That date was to be remembered in
history: the most powerful city in the world, the “eternal” city, had
fallen. The shock
for the event reverberated for centuries. Among other
things, it inspired Augustine's "The City of God," still well known
today.
Now, how was that the largest city in the world, the eternal city, had
ended up
taken and sacked by a band of Barbarians? It was just the
final point of a decline that had been going on for centuries. You know
that the peak of the Roman Empire had been at some moment in the second
century A.D. After that period, it had been all downhill: civil wars,
Barbarian invasions, epidemics, famines and all that. Not a smooth
process, of course. There had been very difficult periods and periods
when the Empire seemed to be able to recover. On the whole, the Western
Empire had managed to remain all in one piece up to the end of the 4th
century. But, with the 5th century, things were to change and, this
time, the Empire would never really recover.
Edward Gibbon gives us an especially poignant report of these events in his “
Decline and fall of the Roman Empire”.
In the year 405 (perhaps), Europe saw a very cold winter – so cold that
it froze the waters of the Rhine river. That river had been the Eastern
border of the Empire for centuries. It had been chosen after that the
Romans had been defeated by the Germans at Teutoburg, long before. But
when it froze, a great number of Barbarians crossed over. That was the
end of the border fortifications; the Romans simply couldn't defend them
any more. The walls were abandoned and left to crumble to dust for ever
and ever. It was an epochal change; from then on, the Barbarians were
inside the Empire and they would stay there.
In the great turmoil of those years, a large band of Barbarians marched
directly towards Rome. In 406 AD, they were met at the foot of the
Appennini Mountains, at the city of
Faesulae, by what Gibbon
calls "the last army of the Republic". The Romans had gathered there all
the forces they could muster and they succeeded in stopping the
Barbarians. Trapped in a narrow valley, the Barbarians were nearly all
killed or taken prisoners and sold as slaves. Their King, Radagaisus,
was captured and beheaded. These events are still remembered as legends
in the area where the battle was fought.
It was a great victory for Rome and in particular for the general who had been leading the Roman army: Flavius Stilicho,
magister militum,
commander in chief of all the Imperial Forces. But there was a problem:
successful generals are never liked by suspicious emperors. Besides,
Stilicho was a Barbarian himself, a Vandal, and that didn't make him
popular with the Romans. So, soon after the battle, Emperor Honorius had
Stilicho executed for treason. That was a big mistake, a very big one;
you might say that Honorius had shot himself in the foot with his
crossbow. By then, the Roman Army was composed mainly of Barbarians and,
with their chief, Stilicho, betrayed and killed, most of them deserted.
The army melted away and many of those who had deserted joined the army
of King Alaric. Now, you can understand how it was that Rome was left
undefended and it ended up falling to the Barbarians.
Galla Placidia: Roman Princess
I have been telling you the story of the fall of Rome as we
know it from the ancient chroniclers. Actually, very little is
left of those events in terms of contemporary sources; most of what we
have was written decades, if not centuries, after the events. So, we
need to put together all the sources we have to try to understand what
was exactly happening. And there is a human side to the events that goes
beyond the fact that Rome was in decline and that it eventually fell.
We can just barely imagine what was the atmosphere in Rome during the
two years of the siege, what people thought and how they saw an event
that - by all means - they must have found incredible; actually
impossible. Rome had not been besieged for a thousand years, it was the
greatest city in the known world. That it would fall to a petty
Barbarian lord, that was....
come on. It just couldn't be!
The problem is that when people face something that doesn't fit with the
way they think the world should be, they tend to ignore it. If they
can't, they may go crazy. And the Romans went crazy. They tried
whatever they could think of. They raised a new Emperor, someone named
Priscus Attalus, with all the pomp involved. But the Barbarian King was
unimpressed. Then, they sent to him a delegation of Senators, and they
told the King how numerous the Romans were. To
that, Alaric answered,
solemnly (I figure) “The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed” Now,
tell me if this is not the stuff legends are made of!
At this point, the Romans really went crazy. Yes, they went nuts,
bananas, watermelons, whatever you like to call that condition. They
started looking for a culprit, a scapegoat, someone to blame. Now, you
remember that Emperor Honorius had accused his general Flavius Stilicho
of treason; that is, of being colluded with the Barbarians. That was
already an effect of rampaging paranoia. But, in the besieged Rome,
paranoia went up
of a few notches. Someone noticed that Stilicho's
widow, Serena, was in Rome. If her husband had been a traitor, well, she
had to be a traitoress. Serena was the cousin of
Emperor Honorius, a
noblewoman of high rank. But when paranoia becomes the rule, it
generates pure evil. Serena was accused of treason, sentenced to death
by the Senate, and executed by strangling.
It is at this point that we have the first appearance of Galla Placidia
in history as an adult, she was around 20 years old at that time. We are
told by the chronicler Zosimus that the execution of Serena was done
"with Galla Placidia's consent."
We have a little story to tell, here. Let's go back
of a few years, when
Placidia's father, Theodosius 1st, "The Great" was the last Roman
Emperor to rule over both the Eastern and the Western part of the
Empire. He had two male children, Arcadius and Honorius, to whom he left
the Empire. Arcadius took the East and Honorius the West. But
Theodosius had also a younger daughter, Galla Placidia, who got nothing.
You may surely imagine that being female was not an asset when it was
question of
inheriting an Empire. But Theodosius may have understood that his two
male children would not make good emperors (they didn't) and so he kept
Placidia in reserve, sort of; something that turned out to have been a
smart move. Theodosius left her in the care of his best general,
Flavius Stilicho, who raised her in his household, with his wife Serena
who was also Theodosius' niece.
So, in the years of the siege, Placidia was in Rome, probably staying
with her foster mother, Serena. Now, we can barely imagine a situation
in which the Senate decides to sentence to death the cousin of the emperor, as Serena was. But Placidia was of even higher rank in terms of
nobility, with the title of "
puella nobilissima." I think you
know enough Latin to translate this as "most noble girl," which is, of
course, the equivalent of what we call "princess" today. So, in a sense,
the Senators got cold feet with their idea of killing Serena and they
asked to the highest rank noble in Rome, Placidia, to take the
responsibility of what was, in effect, a legalized murder. And they were
asking her to agree
on the murder of someone who was both her foster
mother and a close relative.
We can't say, of course, what passed in Placidia's mind at that time. We
can't even be sure that she actually approved anything. We know about
this story only from a line written by Zosimus, a Greek monk who wrote more
than a century after the events. But, if it did happen, it was the first
political decision taken by Placidia in her life; something that may
give us some idea of her way of thinking. Possibly, she simply cracked
under the stress of the moment. But she may also have reasoned that
opposing the Senate would have made no difference. They had already
decided on that crazy idea of killing Serena, what was to stop them if
they were to get even crazier and decide to kill also Placidia? After
all, she was Stilicho's foster daughter; she could have been a
traitoress, too. So, maybe Placidia just didn't try to fight a battle
she couldn't win. It was her style: don't fight the unavoidable. We'll
see that it will resurface more than once, later on. Placidia could be
flexible, adapt and thrive even in very difficult situations.
With the execution of Serena, the supposed traitoress, we may imagine
that the Romans expected that the Visigoths would vanish in a puff of
smoke. But, of course, that didn't happen. In 410 a.d.
the Visigoths
broke in, they sacked Rome, and not just that: they took a big
prize: Galla Placidia herself;
puella nobilissima, half sister of
the ruling emperor. The chroniclers don't mention anything like
Placidia being dragged away kicking and screaming from her palace –
actually they are totally silent on this point. Probably, that means
something. We don't have to think that Placidia was happy to join the
Barbarians, but, again, she didn't try to avoid the unavoidable. We can't
even exclude that she may have felt safer with the Barbarians than with
the treacherous Roman Senators. At least, as far as we know, the
Visigoths treated Galla Placidia with all the honors due to a Roman Princess.
The Visigoths stayed in Rome for just three days. As sackings go, this one
was rather mild. They burned and sacked a few buildings, but, mainly,
they ransacked what gold and silver they could find and then they left,
heading South, with the idea of reaching Africa and of settling there.
They were taking Galla Placidia with them. After a long and slow trip,
they arrived to the southernmost tip of the Italian peninsula, but they
couldn't cross to Africa because a storm destroyed their ships. Then, King Alaric died and legend has that he
was buried under the riverbed of the
Busento river, together with
his share of the gold sacked in Rome. Another event that rings of
legend. People are still looking for that treasure, today!
At this point, stranded in Southern Italy and short of food, the
Visigoths had no choice but to go back, slowly retracing their road toward the North.
They were led by their new king, Athaulf, half brother of Alaric. The
travel to Southern Italy had weakened them considerably and, when they
arrived close to Rome, they couldn't even dream to sack the city again.
They kept moving on and, eventually, they stopped in Southern France, by
then largely abandoned by the Roman Empire. And, on the way, Placidia
married Athaulf, perhaps in Italy, or perhaps in Narbonne, in France.
That was in 414, four years after the fall of Rome. Placidia was around
25 at that time.
The Royal Marriage
So, we have arrived to the royal marriage; it is something that most of
us seem to be very interested in! I think you are all visualizing Galla
Placidia and Athaulf getting married and, indeed, it must have been
something special. It was celebrated with great pomp and high Roman
festivities. We have a detailed description of the magnificent gifts that
were given to Placidia from the booty that the Goths had captured in
Rome. The wedding speech was given by a Roman Senator, Priscus Attalus,
who had been claiming the title of Emperor from the time of the siege of
Rome. Attalus even sang a song at the wedding; you know, that was
something: think of having an Emperor singing at your wedding!
Galla Placida, the Roman Princess, now gladly took for herself the title
of “Queen of the Goths”. I say “gladly” because she never reneged that
title later in life, no matter what happened to her – and we'll see that
a lot of things happened. But why that? I mean, she already had the
title of Roman Princess, she had good possibilities to marry an emperor
and become empress herself. Why would she want to become the queen of a
Barbarian nation? In addition, think that
Athaulf was the brother of
Alaric, the king who had sacked Rome. If you can imagine the daughter of
an American president marrying the brother of Osama Bin Laden, well,
then you can get some idea of what kind of decision Placidia took.
Of course, 1500 years after the event, we can't say what passed in Galla
Placidia's mind and we can't exclude that there was a romantic element
in her decision. That brings up the question of whether Athaulf was a
handsome man, but we have no portraits of him. We don't even know how
old he was at the time of this marriage. We know that he had been
married before, he had four children from his first wife, but we have no
idea if he was
still married and of what had become
to his first wife. So, we can only say that, probably, he
was older than Placidia, but that's about it. We know much more about
Placida, but we don't have a portrait that we can attribute to her,
either. Nevertheless, if we want to understand this story, we have to
figure out in our minds the faces of these characters. I am sure that
you have been “seeing” in your
minds both Placidia and Athaulf – our
minds are made in this way; we can't avoid that.
So, what could Athaulf and Placidia have looked like? About Athaulf, the
fact that he was a Barbarian King doesn't mean that you should imagine
him as Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie “Conan the Barbarian.” Not at
all, of course! Athaulf surely didn't go around dressed in a bearskin
and with a horned helmet on his head. The best we can do to visualize
him is to think of the one contemporary portrait of a high rank
Barbarian we have: Flavius Stilicho; the Vandal general who was
Placidia's foster father. We have an ivory diptych of him and of his
wife, Serena, and their son, Eucherius. In this image, Stilicho is shown
as tall and handsome; a bit solemn while wearing Roman clothes.
Athaulf
could have looked much like him: tall, handsome, and bearded.
And how about Placidia? Well, as I said we don't have a portrait of her.
We might try to get some idea of what she looked like from the portrait
of Serena, her cousin. She is shown almost as tall as her husband,
Stilicho, and as a handsome and imposing lady – she must have been in
her forties when that portrait was made. She wears a heavy necklace that
looks like being made of pearls. You know, there is a legend that says
that Serena was cursed when she took a necklace from a statue of the
goddess Rhea Sylvia – maybe it is just that necklace. Actually, the
whole household of Stilicho seems to have been cursed; he and his wife
both died of violent death, and the same happened to their son, Eucherius. But that's
another story; let's just say that the portrait of Serena tells us, at
least, how Placidia would dress in formal occasions; an elaborate
garment that was called a “
palla”.
But we do know something about Placidia's face. We can see it in some
coins minted during her later reign as Empress. The problem is that
these portraits are anything but realistic. It is the same problem we
have with Cleopatra, the Egyptian Queen. We tend to think of Cleopatra
as a very beautiful woman, but we don't have a portrait that we can
attribute to her for sure. So, looking at her face on
coins, well, she
looks frankly ugly. But, of course, those portraits on coins were not
supposed to be anything realistic and we can happily continue imagining
Cleopatra with the face of Elizabeth Taylor, who interpreted her in an
old Hollywood movie.
Now,
about Placidia, it is the same problem. If
Placidia looked the way she is shown on some coins, well, ahem...... We
might pity poor Athaulf who had to marry her. But, as for Cleopatra,
these coins are not supposed to be realistic. Actually, different coins
show different faces for Placidia; so we can reasonably be sure that, in
most cases, whoever made the portrait never saw the Empress' face. In
the end, the closest thing we have to a portrait of Placidia is a gold
medallion; one of a couple, the other showing her half brother,
Honorius. I think we can say that it gives us at least some idea of what
Placidia looked like. Looking at it, we see that she had fine features
and a slender neck under her elaborate hairdo. Surely, we have good
reasons to imagine her as a beautiful woman; after all, her mother,
Galla, had been said to be the “fairest woman in the Roman Empire.” In
the end, if you like to imagine her as Audrey Hepburn playing the role
of the princess in that old movie, "Roman Holiday," I'd say, why not?
So, let's go back to the imperial marriage. We have two handsome people
getting married: Athaulf and Placidia, but, of course, that can't be the
whole story. What we can say is that people do things for many reasons:
sometimes because of logic, sometimes they act on impulse. But don't
forget that real life is not a fairy tale. You know that love is a
chemical reaction and that chemical reactions have a way to go on by
themselves if there is a chemical potential driving them. And, as we
said before, this potential is something that we may call “destiny” if
we like. And I think that, in this case, there was a very strong chemical potential
that was leading Athaulf and Placidia to react with each other, to
marry.
King Arthur and Placidia
Now, I would like to ask you a question. Can you think of another figure
who was trying to do something similar to what Placidia was doing, just
in that period; that is, a Roman
marrying a Barbarian? It takes a small
jump of imagination to connect Galla Placidia to this figure. Think
about that for a moment and the name will come to your mind. That name
you know very, very, well: it is King Arthur!
Yes, King Arthur, the legendary hero. We can't say for sure that he
actually existed. At least, historians say that there is no proof that
he ever existed. But that doesn't mean that he didn't exist and if he
existed there is a chance that he was a contemporary of Galla
Placidia, during the 5th century. At that time, Britain had ceased to
be part of the Roman Empire and it is likely that Placidia never came to
know the name of a petty Barbarian King – Arthur – who ruled part of a
remote northern island. Arthur, on his part, surely knew little or nothing of the
events that were taking place in the far away Roman Empire. But, curiously,
Arthur and Placidia – contemporary or not – may have followed similar
paths in their lives.
You know that the core of the Arthurian cycle is the love of King Arthur
and Queen Guinevere. The way we often interpret the story is that
Arthur was a Roman and Guinevere was British (actually, Welsh). You may
have seen the movie “King Arthur,” the one that was released in 2004. It
ends with the scene of the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere. It is a
stunningly beautiful scene and it symbolizes the whole theme of the
film. It
is the marriage not of just a man and a woman, but of two
civilizations. So, their marriage implies the fusion of the Roman and
the British culture. That was happening in Britain earlier than in the
rest of Europe because, there, the Roman Empire had ceased to exist
already during the 4th century AD.
I am mentioning this movie to you just to show how we can still “feel”
quite a lot about an age as remote as the 5th century. The Arthurian
cycle pervades our culture still today, even though, as I said, we can't
even be sure that a king named Arthur ever existed. But the fifth
century was a great generator of legends. Think of the saga of the Nibelungs. You know that story; you know the names of
the characters: Siegfried, Hagen, Kriemhild. It comes from the same
period, the 5th century AD and
it echoes of
events of that age,
including the presence in the story of historical personages, such as
Attila the Hun, who also was a contemporary of Galla Placidia.
It is curious that of those characters, the one for which we do have the
most historical data, Galla Placidia, is the one who didn't generate
epic poems. I feel a bit sorry for Placidia because of this, but so it
goes. I think it is because civilization stymies creativity. Placidia's
foster-father, Stilicho, was rich and powerful enough that he could keep a house poet, Claudian, who was a "panegyrist;" someone whose job was to sing
the deeds of his masters. And Claudian did exactly that; he wrote poems
praising Stilicho and the members of his family, but almost nobody
remembers those poems today. When I was studying the story of Placidia, I
made an honest effort to read Claudian. I found that he is refined,
clever, much cultured, and unbelievably banal. That is, when I say “banal” I
mean real silly. You know, Claudian looks to me as something not unlike
our TV advertising: it is clever and often visually stunning, but, in the
end, it is just about eating hamburgers. As a note, Claudian mentions
Placidia once, as a child, all clad in gold, at the imperial coronation
of her half brothers. A glimpse we have of that time, so remote that
even a small detail is to be treasured.
Queen of the Goths
In marrying Athaulf, Placidia may simply have ceded to the unavoidable;
as it was her typical style. But in following her destiny, Placidia may
also have had a specific plan; surely she had a way to seize an
opportunity when she saw one. You see, she was a Roman princess and she
had this potential of becoming Empress. She couldn't do that as long as
her half brother, Honorius, was alive, but Honorius was childless. So,
Placidia must have had something in mind when she named her son
"Theodosius", the same name of his grandfather, Theodosius “The Great.” Placidia's idea was nothing less than taking over
the throne from her half-brother, Honorius, and starting a Gothic-Roman
dynasty that would have ruled the Empire. A bold plan, if ever there was
one.
But there was much more in Placidia's plans than simply ruling an
Empire. You see, the fifth century looks like our times for many
reasons; one was the great migrations. It was a time when people marched
on and on, searching for a place to settle, and that brought many
contrasts, battles and wars. For the Romans, the people who had entered
their empire were invaders or, in some case, immigrants; that was what
the term "Barbarian" meant: simply "foreigner". Legal or illegal as they
could be, they were looked upon with suspicion – just like today
we look at our immigrants. At that time, just like today, there were
people who wanted to send the immigrants back home, or just get rid of
them one way or another. But that wasn't easy and, as we saw, the
immigrants had become numerous and powerful enough that they had been
able to sack Rome. So, the Romans would have had to learn how to live
with their Barbarian immigrants; but at the time of Placidia many
Romans
just couldn't resign to the idea they had to do that. As I said, there
are remarkable similarities with our times!
In a way, what was happening was a big chemical reaction: the two
“reactants”, Barbarians and Romans, had come together in that fated
winter of 405, when the border fortifications of the Empire had
collapsed. Now, the reactants were mixed together, the reaction was
going on. It could not be stopped and Placidia's idea was to favor it.
Again, we see her style: don't fight the unavoidable, let it happen. In
this case, the unavoidable meant anticipating something that in actual
history would take several centuries to happen: the merging of the Roman
and German peoples in Europe. Placidia was taking this merging on
herself by marrying a Barbarian and bearing a child to him. According to
the chroniclers, it was she who convinced her husband, Athaulf, of this
idea.
Athaulf is reported to have said that initially he had planned to
destroy Rome and the Romans, but after that he had met Placidia, he
wanted to live in peace with them. Maybe it is a fancy story, but it
gives us some idea of what was passing in the minds of its characters.
It would be nice, at this point, to say that Athaulf and Placida lived
happily ever after and that their son, Theodosius, became Emperor of the
Romans and, at the same time, King of the Goths. But things didn't go
that way, of course. It was a beautiful dream, but also an impossible
one.
The military situation was changing. The Romans had managed to
re-organize and rebuild an army under the leadership of a new commander
in chief: Constantius. He seems to have been a competent general; he
never fought big battles, but almost always he obtained what he wanted.
The Visigoths started feeling the pressure and they had to leave
Southern France and move to Spain. Their retreat must have been rather
hasty, since they had to abandon Attalus, the usurper who had sung at
Placidia's marriage. He was captured by
Costantius and sent to Ravenna,
where he suffered the humiliation of having a hand cut off before he was sent to exile.
In Spain, the retreating Visigoths settled in Barcelona, which
a that time was a
fortified stronghold. There, everything went wrong. Little Theodosius
died before being one year old. Then, Athaulf was killed in a
conspiracy. Maybe it was the result of the loss of prestige that he had
suffered with the retreat from Southern France. Surely, there were
Visigoths much more aggressive than Athaulf in the way they thought they
should deal with the Romans; there may well have been something like a
“war party”. The new king was one of them. He was named Sigeric and,
just to give some idea of what he had in mind, it is reported that he
forced Placidia to march for miles on foot, while he was following her, riding
his horse. Fortunately, as I said, she was strong and in good health.
But Sigeric ruled for just one week; I think that the Goths were afraid
of what he was planning to do – and correctly so; as I said, the Romans
were now much stronger than they had been at the time of the siege of
Rome. So, someone got rid of Sigeric and a new, more diplomatic king was
installed - someone named Wallia. The new king started negotiations
with Costantius and, eventually, he sent Placidia back to Ravenna in
exchange for food and a peace treaty. That was the end of Placidia's
time with the Goths. For all her life, she maintained the title of
“Queen of the Goths”, but she would never be with them again.
Galla Placidia: the Empress
The story of Galla Placidia seems to have been conceived from the
beginning as the plot of an adventure movie. It is full of events and it
swings up and down as a
rollercoaster. So, we saw that Placidia started
as a princess, then she was a prisoner of the Goths, then she became their
Queen, then she was again their prisoner. A series of oscillations that
was to go on for quite some time.
With Placidia back to Ravenna, things changed again. It seems that
Constantius had something in mind about her; actually he may have been
an early suitor of
hers. Anyway, the two got married soon after arriving
in Ravenna. We can't say whether Placidia was happy about that, but, as
usual, she didn't fight the unavoidable and she followed opportunities
when she saw one. The couple had two children and, later on,
Constantius, as the husband of a member of the Imperial family, managed
to be raised to the title of “co-emperor” of the Western Empire. At this
point, Placidia obtained the title of "
Augusta." It was not exactly the same title as “
Imperator”
which means “commander” and has to do with leading armies. But, for all
practical purposes, she was Empress of Rome. You see? A big upward swing of the roller coaster.
Now, there is a lot to say about Placidia's life as Empress and the
roller coaster was to go through a few more swings up and down. But let
me go quickly with the story because, as you perhaps have heard, “the
art of boredom consists in telling everything.” So, Constantius died a
few months after having been raised to the Imperial Purple and the
situation in Ravenna evolved into a squabble where Honorius and
Placidia, Emperor and Empress, started behaving as the characters of old
western movies; you know, when they say, "this town ain't big enough
for both of us."
There are many curious details about the fight of Honorius against
Placidia. One is that Placidia was accused of incest with her half
brother; that may have been just bad press against her, but, who knows,
maybe she was using all the means she had to try to control him. That's a
curious facet of Placidia's personality, considering that she was a
devout Catholic and she was always said to be an exemplary spouse and a
chaste widow. Was this one true or false? We'll never know. Then, there
is mention of Placidia's Gothic bodyguards. They had accompanied her
since the time when she was Queen of the Goths (which she still was –
she never wanted to abandon that title!). So, the fight got ugly in the
streets of Ravenna and, no matter how brave Placidia's bodyguards were,
her brother Honorius managed to get the upper hand.
And here we have another swing down
of the roller coaster. Placidia,
thrown out of Ravenna, could only take refuge in
Costantinople; the
capital of the Eastern Empire. There, her nephew had become Emperor, with
the name of Theodosius II and Placidia arrived in front of him with little
more than the clothes she had on. But the roller coaster swung up again:
while Placidia was there, Honorius died and an usurper took his place.
At this point Theodosius II thought that he couldn't lose the Western
Empire; so he gave to Placidia a whole army to go back to Italy and
reconquer Ravenna. It was bad for the usurper; the poor guy didn't have a
chance. He was defeated, captured, had one hand cut off, then he was
paraded around on a donkey, and finally beheaded. We don't know if
Placidia ordered all that herself, but those were hard times and if you
wanted to be an emperor (or an empress) you had to take the risks
involved. No one ever said that Placidia was Ms. Nice Girl, anyway.
Then, in 425 AD, Placidia took the title of Augusta for herself alone,
although theoretically on behalf of her son, Valentinian. That was the
end of her rollercoaster ride in life – no more swings up and down from
now on. She was to rule as Empress for 12 years and she maintained a
strong influence at court as Empress Mother for 13 more years; until her
death, in 450 AD, when she was 62 years old.
Ruling an empire.
Now, let's play a little game, a game that I think all of us have played
in our minds. If you were the absolute ruler of the world, the
Emperor of Earth, what would you do to solve the world's problems? I am
sure you have plenty of ideas that you would put into practice; you
know, how to eliminate hunger,
reduce pollution, stop global warming,
make everyone happy - all that. Of course, that is only a dream for us,
but there have been people in the past who really had tremendous power
in their hands. Not on the whole world, of course, no single person has
ever ruled it. But there existed people who ruled sizable parts of the
world and their power was absolute and subjected to no rules. The Roman
Emperors of the last period of the Empire were of that kind. They were
called
porphirogenites, “born in the purple,” they were
semi-divine rulers. You know, if you were emperor at that time, you
couldn't turn your head left or right when you walked; your subjects
could speak to you only if you addressed them first, you had to wear
heavy clothes all the time, and God knows what else the imperial
protocol would impose on you. There is a curious detail about
Constantius, Placidia's second husband, who said that becoming Emperor
had been a terrible experience for him: too much protocol! That was the
price of absolute power.
Actually, “absolute power” is an exaggeration. Galla Placidia, as any
emperor before and after her, had limits to what she could do. One of
these limits was that she couldn't lead armies herself. She had to rely
on generals and that was a big problem: as it always happens in history,
successful generals tend to take all the power for themselves and, of
course, unsuccessful generals are totally useless. So, during her career
as Empress, Placidia's main problem was to control her generals by
balancing one against the other. One of these generals was named Aetius,
you may have heard the name. He was quite a character, he was a Roman
but he had been raised with the Huns, so they were his allies and they
would fight for him when he needed (not that he didn't need to pay them,
though). But Aetius was also the general who led the army that stopped
Attila the Hun from invading Europe at the famous Battle of Chalons, in
452 AD. So, Aetius and Placidia were often at odds but, on the whole,
they managed to get along together. After that Placidia was gone, her
son, Valentinian, killed Aetius, repeating the mistake that Honorius had
done earlier on with Stilicho. Again, by killing his best general,
Valentinian nearly destroyed the empire. But that's another story.
So, the story of Placidia as Empress would take an entire book, but, as I
said, the secret of boredom is to tell everything, so let's just say
that Placidia managed to keep the Empire more or less together. One of her achievements was securing the supply of
grain to Rome from Africa. That was despite the fact that North Africa
had been taken by the Vandals; yes, but they kept shipping grain to
Rome as long as Placidia was the Empress. After the death of Placidia, they
stopped sending grain and not just that; the Vandals sailed to Rome, took it and then
sacked it - this was a real sacking; one from which Rome would never recover. I
think it means that Placidia made a difference as long as she was in
Ravenna; she was really ruling the Empire; she was not just a doll
wearing expensive clothes.
But, from our viewpoint, we know that the Western Empire was doomed and
that it would disappear a few decades after Placidia. The question that
we may ask ourselves is whether she understood that the Empire was going
to fall. If she did, what did she do to avoid that? Think of being in
her shoes: if you were Placidia, what would you do to save the Empire?
So, let's see if we can understand in what kind of troubles, exactly,
was the Western Roman Empire at the time of Placidia. We said before
that empires are like chemical reactions and chemical reactions subside
when they run out of reactants. In the 5th century, the Roman Empire had
been running out of reactants. It had been growing on the profits made
from military campaigns, but, at some point around the 2nd century, it
had reached its limits. With no more easy conquests in sight, the Empire
had to live on its own resources and it never really learned how
to do
that. The empire, simply, could not tax its subjects high enough to
support the troops it kept. Over and over, the Empire continued to spend
more than it could afford for defense. It is typical of empires all
over history: empires destroy themselves by spending too much
for their
military apparatus.
Managing any large structure is difficult and we tend to do it badly; a
whole empire may be an especially difficult case. To do it well, we
would need to use a method that I mentioned before: system dynamics;
which is a way to describe systems and the relation of the various
elements that compose them. But it is rare that people can understand
systems in this way. What happens instead is that, in most cases, we
understand what are the critical points ("levers") that are causing
trouble, but we tend to act on them in the wrong way. It is something
that we learned in our times from Donella Meadows (like Placidia, a
strong woman, although not an Empress) who has taught us a lot about
system dynamics. It
is a very general trend: almost always we pull the
levers in the wrong direction and we worsen the problems that we are
trying to solve. That is even too clear in the case of the Roman
Empire, at least from our viewpoint. During the decline phase, Roman
Emperors struggled to keep the Empire safe from Barbarian invasions and
they understood that their problem was that they didn't have enough
resources to do that. But their answer was always the wrong one: they
kept trying to raise as many troops as they could. That was a
self-defeating idea: every time that the Romans fought the Barbarians,
they could win or lose, but each battle made the Empire a little poorer
and a little weaker. The empire was using resources that could not be
replaced; non renewable resources, as we would say today.
So, wasn't there a solution for the troubles of the Roman Empire? Well,
there was one if you think in terms of system dynamics. It is a question
of pulling the levers in the right direction. By raising troops and
fighting battles, the Roman Emperors were pulling the levers in the
wrong direction. They had to invert the direction: the solution was not
more troops but less troops. It was not more imperial bureaucracy, but
less, not more of a tax burden but less. In the end, the solution was
right there and it was simple: it was Middle Ages.
Middle Ages meant getting rid of the suffocating imperial bureaucracy;
transforming the expensive legions into local militias; having people
paying taxes locally, in short transforming the centralized empire into a
decentralized constellation of small states. Without the terrible
expenses of the Imperial court and of the Imperial bureaucracy, these
small states had a chance to rebuild their economy and start a new phase
of prosperity, as indeed it happened during the Middle Ages. The Empire
was going there; it was unavoidable and one could as well favor that
road. Of course, when the Empire was still strong and powerful, no
emperor had the power of disbanding the legions, nor the imperial
bureaucracy. But that was happening anyway during the 5th century and
what an emperor (or empress) could have done was to give to the events
just a little push in the right direction. Don't fight the change, ease
it. It is the way of pushing the levers in the right direction.
Could
Placidia have done just that? Incredibly, perhaps she did.
What Placidia could do as an Empress was, mainly, to enact laws. The
Empire still had a functioning bureaucracy and so the edicts from
Ravenna were not ignored, at least in the regions that the Empire could
still control. So, the law was the playground of Placidia and she did enact a
number of laws, many of which are still existing in the “Codex
Theodosianus,” a collection of laws compiled on behalf of Placidia's
nephew, the Emperor of the East, Theodosius the 2nd. The Codex
Theodosianus is an unbelievable mass of data; there are some 2500 laws
in it. Well worth giving a look, because it is full of hints and
glimpses of what was life in the Roman Empire at that time. But it is
impossible to go into any depth with it unless you are a specialist in
this matter – it is just too much. So, I learned about Placidia's laws
mainly from the report written by Stewart Oost, who wrote her biography
in 1966.
Now, as I said, it is a complex matter and very often we cannot say who
was exactly the mind behind a certain law. But there seems to be some
logic in what the Imperial Court in Ravenna was doing. That logic looked
a bit like the policy of Mikhail Gorbachev for the Soviet Union – let's
call it “Soviet Empire.” Gorbachev consistently refused to use force to
keep together an empire that was disintegrating – although he could
have done that. The court of Ravenna, it seems, took the same approach
during the first half of the 5th century. The Roman Empire still had an
army, they could have used to try to destroy the Barbarian nations that
had settled within the Empire's borders. But that would have meant only
squandering away those few resources that the Empire still had. It would
only have greatly hastened collapse.
It seems that Placidia was acting according to her style; ease the
unavoidable, don't fight it. Not that she knew system dynamics, but,
after all, system dynamics is just formalized common sense and it seems
that Placidia had plenty of it. So, consistently, we see the tendency of
reducing the power of the Imperial court. You see it in some details,
such as when she gave back to the Senate, in Rome, the gift of gold that
was customary for the senators to present to the Emperor every year.
But she did much more than that. Placidia forbade the coloni, the
peasants bound to the land, to enlist in the army. That deprived the
army of one of its sources of manpower and we may imagine that it
greatly weakened it. Another law enacted by Placidia, allowed the great
landowners to tax their subjects themselves. This deprived the Imperial
Court of its main source of revenues. All that meant just one thing:
Middle Ages.
If the purpose of Placidia really was to take the Empire to the Middle
Ages, we can say that she was successful. After that she was gone, the
Empire melted away. Her son, Valentinian managed to get killed a few
years after the death of her mother. Then, Rome was sacked by the
Vandals and that was a deadly blow. For a few decades, there were still
individuals in Ravenna who claimed the title of Western Emperor, but we
don't care much about their names just as, probably their contemporaries
did not. We only remember the name of the last Emperor, Romulus
Augustulus, who was deposed in 476, and that is just because he was the
last. After that, it was officially Middle Ages – the destination where
the Western Empire was going in any case.
This is just a possible interpretation of what Placidia did and I am the
first to say that it is just speculation. These laws may have been
enacted simply because the Imperial Court was forced to, or it had no
other choices. And, of course, we will never know what passed in
Placidia's mind. She left us only some letters that miraculously
survived in the Vatican's archives, but nothing that we could use to
penetrate her inner thoughts. We can only say that staying with the
Goths, although for just a few years, could have opened her mind enough
that she could have a vision that no Emperor, before or after her, could
have. And so she did something that no emperor, before or after her,
could do. Push the empire towards its destiny, fulfilling its chemical
potential, if you like. In a way, Placidia was the catalyst that made
it happen.
Galla Placidia's legacy
Now, I'll ask you another little feat of imagination. Close your eyes
again for a moment and imagine something that took place a long, long
time ago; 15 centuries before our time. Imagine a young princess.
Imagine that she has lived all of her life in beautiful palaces;
that she has been wearing splendid dresses and expensive jewels, that
she has been walking in closed gardens, rich of statuary and
fountains; always protected, always secluded, as it is the usual lot of
princesses. And then imagine her in a completely different situation:
she is somewhere in the mountains; around her, the slow, winding column
of wagons has stopped. The nation of the Goths has stopped for the
night. It is a cold night of an early winter and the women have lit
campfires while the warriors are sitting around, singing their songs.
These tall warriors are Christian, but they are Arians, while the
Princess is Catholic, and that makes a lot of difference.
It is likely that in one of those wagons they still carry the
wooden statues of their pagan gods: perhaps Hertha the goddess of earth,
and perhaps other gods of fire and thunder. Maybe, the prayers being
recited for these ancient divinities can be heard as a distant
whispering in the night. Placidia listens to these distant songs and
then she looks at the stars as she had never seen them. These are the
same stars that we can see today; dimly, because we have dirtied our sky
with our waste. But Placidia sees those stars in a sky of a clarity
that today we can’t even imagine; the sky of a world that was shrinking
to nearly nothing, its cities depopulated, its roads abandoned, its
farmland left to transform into forests. Just during those years,
Rutilius Namatianus gave us an unforgettable image of the lights of Rome
in the night, lights that he saw for the last time as he was abandoning
the city, to seek refuge in Gallia. But, around Placidia, there was no
human light, except the fires lighted by the Visigoths, and so she could
see that fantastic sky.
Now,
of course, this is just fantasy, but I am mentioning to you stars for a
reason. You see, I said that Placidia left us almost nothing in terms of
written words. At least nothing that we can use to understand what she
thought. But she left us a message that is perhaps even clearer than a
written diary. It is the mausoleum that takes her name in Ravenna; and
it is there that you can find a triumph of stars in the mosaics of the
ceiling. Big, bright, fantastic
stars that remind
to us a little
those
that Vincent van Gogh painted in that famous painting of his.
You know, those stars in Placidia's mausoleum always reminded to me of
"Christmas", in the sense of the way we celebrate it today. Not, of
course, the commercial holiday that it has become nowadays, but the
atmosphere of the "nativity scene" that is still commonplace in Southern
Europe and South America. Of course, in the mausoleum you won't find
the baby Jesus and not even the Virgin Mary. These figures would become
commonplace much later. At the time of Galla Placidia, Christianity was
something different than it is for us. But there is no doubt that
Placidia was a convinced Christian; she was a believer and she always
saw Christianity as an important part of her life. The mausoleum is just
part of this attitude of hers.
No one can say, of course, that these stars in the mausoleum in Ravenna
are there as a memory of Placidia's travels with the Visigoths, but I
think we can take this small creative license and see those stars as
such. It is, as I said, a way to get a feeling on the matter we are
discussing. We need it; you see, I could mention something that
Marguerite Yourcenar says in her “Memoirs of Hadrian”. She says that she
got a tremendous feeling of kinship with the long gone Emperor when she
could hold in her hands a jewel that, most likely, Hadrian had held in
his hands, once. We don't have a jewel that Placidia may have held or
worn, but we have that building, her mausoleum.
Actually, the building in Ravenna is not a "mausoleum" in the sense of
something built over one's grave. It is reasonably certain that Placidia
was never buried in there; she probably died in Rome and her tomb has
been lost long ago. We can't even be sure that Placidia had a role in
the design of that building; it is just a later tradition. Yet, if the
tradition exists, it has to be for some reason and I think it does. In
my opinion, that building was built under her influence. There are many
details in it that are absolutely clear to me. So, if you walk inside
the mausoleum, you know that you are walking in a place where Galla
Placidia has walked. And there is more: I can tell you that the
mausoleum is a message from her. A message that comes to us from these
remote times.
By now, Placidia is almost a creature of the mythical universe of Gods
and Heroes, just like Cassandra and Helen of Troy. Yet, she has not yet
vanished from memory. Her voice is faint, but if we listen carefully, we
can hear it. And you can still hear it if you go to see that small
building in Ravenna, her last message to us. It is simple and
unprepossessing in the exterior, but it is a triumph of colors inside.
That’s already a message in itself that comes from an age when whatever
there was that was beautiful had to be kept hidden to be saved from
destruction. But it was there and it could be enjoyed by those who had
the key to it. But it is not just that. That building is like a woman
who may show you something intimate of herself, but only if you deserve
it. Everything in there has a meaning; it is in the figures and the
images in it: it is her story, Placidia's story – that building will
tell it to you, but only if you deserve it.
I told you that the art of boredom consists in telling everything, so I
won't tell you the details of the decoration of the building and how
each detail fits so well with Placidia’s story. I'll let you just
imagine that and, if one day you'll have a chance to go there and visit
that mausoleum; do it in silence and listen. It is a faint, faint voice,
but you can hear it if you pay attention. After all, a Latin poet who
lived centuries before Placidia, Terence, said that, "nothing human is
alien to us." Placidia was one of us.
In her 62 years of life, Placidia was princess, queen and empress. She
did reasonably well in these roles and, during her reign as Empress, the
Western Empire remained relatively safe and the Romans had the food
they needed. She had defects; for sure. She failed to save her foster
mother from death when, perhaps, she had a chance to do that. She was
ruthless with her enemies and her way of being Christian may have veered
on the verge of bigotry. But she played her role as well as she could
in those difficult times and she may have played a fundamental role in
closing an era in which the very concept of “Roman Empire” had become
anachronistic. A judgment by a later chronicler, Cassiodorus, may say it
all about her role, "too much peace," even though it was intended as a
criticism. In the end, she was a human being like all of us and she
followed her destiny, her chemical potential, if you like.
And, if Placidia's destiny was to be empress, yours, boys and girls,
seems to be to study chemistry. Then, my destiny – my chemical
potential, if you like - is to teach chemistry to you. That's what we'll
do next time we meet in this classroom. Now, thanks for having listened
to me and we can leave and have that coffee!