Stilicho’s Son

A profligate prince and his defiant slave
challenge the power of Christian Rome.

 

 STILICHO’S SON
a novel of Late Rome
by Teresa Wymore
Coming from Drollerie Press

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CHARACTERS | OVERVIEW | EXCERPT 1 | EXCERPT 2
CHARACTERS | LIFE IN LATE ROME | RESOURCES | EXTRAS

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Eucher (Eucherius Flavius). Stilicho's Son.

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Gallus

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Overview

By 408, Rome is neither a noble Republic inspired by civic virtue nor an indomitable Empire crafted by political artisans. This is Christian Rome, where a Sacred Consistory coddles a timid emperor and hoards the fruits of a brutal empire. EUCHER is the nineteen-year old son of Stilicho, the half-barbarian Master General of the Western Empire, whose military failures have fueled rumors of treason.

A Gothic army invades Italy, igniting racial and religious conflicts that have smoldered in Rome for decades, and the rebel son finds he must choose between a pauper’s life on the run and a traitor’s execution. Despite solicitations from notables of the age, such as St. Augustine and the heretic, Pelagius, only the threat to his beloved slave complicates his choice, while the true reason for his persecution may be all that promises him a future.

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 Historical Figures From STILICHO’S SON After 408 A.D.

Alaric was a Christian, sometimes Arian and sometimes Catholic. As a Germanic chieftain, his power was predicated on success in war, and he maintained his power for decades, alternately serving and then attacking the empire. He seemed to covet the titles of Rome more than her gold, and without Stilicho’s counsel, Honorius rejected Alaric’s petition for the office of Master General of the West and precipitated the Visigoth’s final, successful campaign to sack Rome in 410. He died near the south Italian shore the following year.

Arsace (Arsacius) was promoted from attendant of the Sacred Bedchamber, to Senior Eunuch. In 410, when Stilicho’s remaining supporters gained revenge, Arsace was exiled to Milan.

Faust (Faustus, Bishop of Riez) became one of the most outstanding intellectuals of his age. He abandoned secular pursuits while still a young man and entered the Abbey at Lérins. He was ordained to the priesthood, became Abbot in 432, and later Bishop of Riez in southern Gaul. He died a very old man, and his flock built a basilica in his honor.

One historian records that Eucher (Flavius Eucherius) and his imperial escort escaped a close encounter with Alaric’s forces and reached Rome, where he was executed sometime in the winter of 408.

Honorius (Flavius Honorius Augustus) was one of the most ineffectual and long-lived emperors in Rome’s history. From safe Ravenna, he ruled the West for another thirteen years after Rome fell to Alaric, managing the feat by accepting as “co-emperor” one rebellious general and invader after another. He died peacefully in 423.

Olympius became ascendant after Stilicho’s execution and replaced Stilicho’s men with his own. Three men held separately the military posts once combined under Stilicho, weakening the effectiveness of the western military command. When the war with Alaric continued to go badly, Olympius was discredited. In 409, Honorius exiled him. He returned briefly to favor again in 409/10 but was exiled to the East a second time and clubbed to death on the secret orders of Stilicho’s surviving allies.

Paulinus (Meropius Pontius Anicius Paulinus, Bishop of Nola) guided his diocese for another 23 years. He supported debtors and the poor in his own home, practiced ascetism, wrote psalms and poetry, and corresponded with men throughout the empire. He died shortly after his good friend, Bishop Augustine, in 431.

Pelagius (Britannicus Pelagius) fled amid the stream of refugees who abandoned the City in 410. Pelagius believed grace was not necessary for salvation, that men can live saintly lives through the efforts of their own free will. One pope absolved Pelagius of a charge of heresy brought by the African bishops and led by Augustine. Another pope excommunicated him. He died condemned as a heresiarch, though his heresy was to resurface in every succeeding age.

Proba (Anicia Faltonia Proba) donated her grain reserves to feed the people of Rome when Alaric blockaded the City in 409/410. Legend claims that when Alaric finally succeeded in entering the City in 410, it was Proba who opened the gates for his army. She fled to Africa amid the many other wealthy refugees in 410 and spent the rest of her life in the Holy Land.

Volusian (Caeonius Rufius Antonius Agryptnius Volusianus) achieved the office of Proconsul of Africa in 410, Quaester of the Sacred Palace before 412, Prefect of Rome in 417 and Praetorian Prefect of Italy in 428. Throughout his life, he corresponded with notables of the age, such as Paulinus and Augustine, who tried to convert him. Volusian was baptized hours before his death, his sainted niece, Melania the Younger, at his side on Epiphany, 436.

After Alaric sacked the City, Augustine (Aurelian Augustin, Bishop of Hippo) wrote his monumental City of God to reassure Rome that such an event was not, in the end, the horror it seemed. But he was wrong. Although the West continued as an empire until it became merely a barbarian kingdom in 476, the years following the death of Stilicho were a slow descent from a civilization that had been a millennium in the making.

The Dark Ages had begun.

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Life in Fifth Century Rome

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An adult alive at the beginning of the Fifth Century would have remembered the establishment of Catholicism as the state religion, the outlawing of sacrifice and pagan temples, the permanent splitting of the empire between Theodosius’s sons, the unprecedented rise of the barbarian Stilicho, the last gladiatorial games, the end of the Olympic Games, relocation of the western capitol from Rome to Ravenna, a handful of army revolts, imperial defeats, provincial usurpations, and a series of invasions by Alaric and his Visigothic Confederacy, which would culminate in the sacking of Rome for the first time in eight centuries.

The controlled resettlement of migrating tribes in the West had become a barbarian invasion, and since men sought to avoid military service through exemption or deception, the army dug deep to fill its ranks, even enlisting barbarian tribes to guard frontiers they had been ravaging the year before. The empire ceased to expand, its armies no longer paying for themselves with new lands and booty, leaving the poor and middle class with the burden of financing an empire. Taxes had tripled in living memory, but the rich were often sheltered by exemptions. Many families began to sell their lands to the wealthy and attach themselves to working a plot, where they remained virtual slaves for generations. Those who failed to meet their tax debt could sell their children, and a thriving yearly market developed in southern Italy. A man could even sell himself into slavery, which was officially illegal, but like everything in Late Rome, the law served those who could afford to enforce it. There were no police.

A citizen could be flogged. He could be tortured. He could be extorted by corrupt officials. He ate porridge, drank watered-down wine, worked the land, enjoyed chariot races, and engaged in riots spurred by dogmatic controversies. If he lived in a city, he used a public bathhouse and public latrine, a bench he shared with as many as twenty others at a time. He belonged to a guild that obliged him to serve in the fire brigade or dredge rivers or another unpaid service. A man would not likely live beyond the age of forty and die from an infectious disease. A woman would not live beyond thirty and die from a disease or in childbirth. A slave would not live beyond twenty, and he could be beaten, raped, or killed with impunity.

The senatorial aristocracy turned away from traditional duties, such as funding repairs, building aqueducts, or providing shows, and funneled their money into the growing Church, which replaced the declining civil government by establishing its own courts, care of the poor, land cultivation, and administrative hierarchies. Bishops became emperors of their domains, with slaves working Episcopal lands and a treasury spent at the bishop’s discretion. Catholic Christians worked to get other Christian sects declared heresy by imperial decree. Constantine had ended the persecutions of Christians generations before, but it was Theodosius who stripped off the symbols of worldly power and knelt before Ambrose, the stern little bishop who excommunicated an emperor. The relationship between imperial Rome and the once-persecuted Church would never be the same.

As a dark age of orthodoxy descended on Rome, heretics were fined, beaten, deported, barred from civil and military service, not allowed to inherit, their property confiscated, their worship prohibited, and occasionally, they were even executed. There were no atheists. There were no pagans. And soon there were no heretics.

Welcome to Christian Rome.

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Resources & Bibliography
The Later Roman Empire and the Patristic Age

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Augustine. The City of God and Confessions. Robert Maynard Hutchins [ed.]. Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 18. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. 1952.

Beard, Mary, John North, and Simon Price. Religions of Rome. Vol. I: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998.

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 1969.

Brown, Peter. Authority and the Sacred. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1996.

Brown, Peter. The Making of Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1978.

Brown, Peter. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1992.

Brown, Peter. Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine. Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers. 1972.

Bury, J.B. History of the Later Roman Empire: From the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian. Vol 1. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1958.

Casson, Lionel. Travel in the Ancient World. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1994.

Claudian. Against Eutropius, Panegyric on the Consulship of Fl. Manlius Theodorus, On Stilicho’s Consulship, Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of the Emperor Honorius, The Gothic War. Claudian. Loeb Classical Library, No. 135 and 136. E.H. Warmington [ed.]. M. Platnauer [trans.]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1972.

Cowell, F.R. Life in Ancient Rome. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons/Perigee Books. 1961.

Dixon, K.R. and P. Southern. The Late Roman Army. London. 1996.

Fox, Robert Lane. Pagans and Christians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1987.

Frend, W.H.C. The Rise of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. 1984.

Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vols. I and II. Robert Maynard Hutchins [ed.]. Great Books of the Western World, Vols. 40 and 41. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. 1952.

Grant Michael. From Rome to Byzantium. New York: Routledge. 1998.

Jones, A.H.M.. The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey, Vols. I & II. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1992.

Juvenal. The Satires of Juvenal.Juvenal and Persias. Loeb Classical Library, No. 91. G.P. Goold [ed.]. G.G. Ramsey [trans.]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999.

Markus, Robert. The End of Ancient Christianity. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993.

Matson, Wallace I. [ed.]. A New History of Philosophy. Vol. I: Ancient and Medieval. Chicago: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1987.

Maxey, Mima. Occupations of the Lower Classes in Roman Society as Seen in Justinian’s Digest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1938.

Pelagius. The Letters of Pelagius and His Followers. Rees, B.R [trans.]. New York: The Boydell Press. 1991.

Pelagius. Pelagius’s Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. De Bruyn, Theodore [trans.]. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993.

Platner, Samuel Ball and Thomas Ashby. A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Rome: L’erma di Bretschneider. 1965.

Propertius. Propertius: The Poems. Guy Lee [trans.]. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996.

Rees, B.R. Pelagius: A Reluctant Heretic. New Hampshire: The Boydell Press. 1988.

Ulansey, David. The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World. New York: Oxford University Press. 1989.

Veyne, Paul [ed.]. Arthur Goldhammer [trans.]. A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1994.

Wiedemann, Thomas. Adults and Children in the Roman Empire. New York: Routledge. 1989.

Williams, Stephen and Friell, Gerard. Theodosius: The Empire at Bay. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1994.

Wright, Wilmer Cave [English trans.]. The Works of the Emperor Julian. Vol I-III. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1923.

Zosimus. New History. Ronald T. Ridley [trans.]. Canberra, Australia: Australian National University. 1984.

Online

Christian Classics Ethereal Library: Translated. Thousands of public domain texts of ancient and medieval authors. Hosted at Calvin College.

Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World: Extensive site. Specifically, links to images collections. Stoa Consortium at University of Kentucky.

Ecole Initiative: Hypertext of Early Church History: A few major articles and hundred of glosses on famous figures and events in early Church history. Archived. University of Evansville.

JSTOR – The Scholarly Journal Archive: Archive, but not current issues, of many journals.
Academic or research affiliation necessary to access.

Justinian Code from the Corpus Juris Civilis: Translated. The Seventeen Volume set of the Civil Law Codified By Justinian. Vitaphone Website, San Francisco.

Lacus Curtius: Roman history, archeology, architecture, images, literature, maps, military history. Hosted at University of Chicago.

Medieval Sourcebook: The Institutes, 535 CE: Translated. The Institutes was intended as sort of legal textbook for law schools and included extracts from the two major works. Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies.

Perseus Digital Library: Classics Collection: Hundreds of primary sources and some secondary. In Greek, Latin and translated. Department of the Classics, Tufts University.

Plan of Rome: In English, French, Russian. The site examines the scale Model of the City created by Paul Bigot in the early 20th century. Virtual recreations. University of Caen. Leo Currain [trans.].

Project MUSE – Scholarly Journals Online: From current issues to archive of many journals. Academic affiliation necessary to access.

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EXTRAS

This is 1152×864 wallpaper based on Thomas Couture’s lovely 1847 painting Romans of the Decadence.Click the thumbnail to the left to open the larger image to download.

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Excerpt 1
Eucher With His Slave, Gallus, at Rome

Another letter was waiting for me when I arrived at my family’s mansion in Rome.

My father’s first letter had ordered me to Ravenna to help him prepare for a military expedition to the East, where he planned to steal back the throne from a boy. The curious thing about his plan was not that he pursued a dream best left buried with Theodosius, but that he wanted me with him while he did it. He had been Master General of the Western Empire for most of my life, but mine was not a military post, nor an important one.

I tossed the letter aside and let my attention wander to Gallus, where I found lechery a dearer companion than my father’s call to duty. I dismissed my other slaves, along with the morning’s sour melon, and dragged Gallus down beside me. My gold ring ground into the knobby protrusion of his wrist, and he pried at me, his hands inarticulate, weak, warm for the nails.

“Another summons,” I told him, my grip not loosened by his struggle. “Seems the Patrician has grown impatient with his tribune. He threatened to have me arrested.”

“What does he want?”

“My company, apparently.” Letting go, I watched Gallus watching me. Since fate, not nature, had made him a slave, his caution was gratifying but not altogether acceptable. “There’s no talking my father out of anything. An expedition to Constantinople will leave Consistory unwatched, but he doesn’t listen to gossip. He thinks fear will keep the Senate in line and gold will keep Alaric across the Rhine.”

Gallus nodded but seemed concerned less with the letter than with my hand, which had moved to rest on his thigh. I obliged his fear by pushing him to his back and reminding him it was the nature of men that what is soft makes them hard, what runs draws their chase.

“Animals are like that,” he said. “Wolves.”

“Rome is full of wolves.” I touched the damp beard that streaked his cheek. His hair was dark as Egyptian granite and lay slick from days under the tortuous summer sun. We had yet to visit the baths since our return from Africa, so I called for a wine girl and a fan to make the morning more pleasant, while he took the opportunity to put some distance between us.

The anxiety haunting me resolved itself in a moment of prurient clarity. “Throw the bones, and we’ll see if the gods abide a contest of obscene gladiators this morning.”

He left the couch, opened the silver box on the table, and removed three ivory dice. As I nodded, he let them tumble to the floor. Twenty. I gathered the dice and shook them a long time in my hands before dropping them at his feet. Twenty-five.

“Never defy the gods.” I drew him back down to the couch, where his hair fell like night over the white cushions.

As I stripped off his blue tunic, his guileless eyes told me he did not desire this, that he did not want to desire this, that he desired this more than he could say. The troubled ascetic facing his final temptation, our customary roles. Like any slave, his desires were mine. Like any Christian, he was made brittle by the disease of the sublime. He had no idle pleasures, only desperate ones, incompetent and needy, like thieves in a bakery at dawn.

After turning him onto his stomach, I raised him to his knees and drew aside my tunic. His breathing labored as if he had reached the losing end of a struggle. I knew I could not make it easy for him, so I never tried. His fight was not with me.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
STILICHO’S SON
Copyright © 2007 by Teresa Wymore. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any form without permission, except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. http://www.teresawymore.com

Coming From Drollerie Press

 

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Excerpt 2
Eucher Visits Volusian at Tibur

 
After waiting for an hour at Volusian’s villa, I was pleased when he finally arrived, entering the room like a whirlwind.

“Eucher!” he exclaimed.

I took a moment to look over my boyhood friend who had become a man in the year since I had seen him. Though he lived in Ravenna as a member of the Imperial Order of Companions, he escaped to his villas when he could to avoid observant eyes. I grasped his shoulders, and he kissed me.

With a smile, he dropped onto an elegant bronze couch. “Cow horns have been hung on the Aventine, and the Christians are near to rioting.” He laughed. “Did you make a sacrifice to Jupiter? Of course not. What would your father say?”

“That I spend too much time at shows.”

“To my relief, or I might never have seen you again.”

I smiled at the memory of his verse and the stripper who had accompanied it. “Jupiter himself could not have delivered a better invitation.”

“Only the best for my Eucher. Just come from seeing Proba?”

I nodded. Volusian’s palace was magnificent, sealed with ivory-inlaid doors and capped by gilded ceilings. An orange mosaic covered the floor, its theme a stag hunt. I peered from the wilderness to his urban sophistication.

After a slave brought us figs and licorice root, Volusian picked at them distastefully. “You shouldn’t wait so long to visit, or I may have to take offense. I thought I might see you at the chariot races last month, but you weren’t there. You missed the riot. Green won, and the Blues rioted. They say a hundred men were killed in the fight afterward. Do you remember that cloakroom attendant from the baths?”

Unable to recall the boy, I shook my head.

“He was about to loose his freedom, bad bets, the chariot races, you know. I placed him as a charioteer’s boy, attending one of the Blues. Now he refuses to honor his contract with me. Such generosity, and this is the gratitude. But the gods adore me, after all, because he lost an eye in the riot. Great Mithras! He lets the load of a freedman bloat his cheeks and thinks to refuse me?”

He stretched back on his couch, brushing his scarlet tunic off his knees. “You haven’t mentioned anyone in a long while,” he said. “We used to share the appetite, my friend, if not the taste. Did you know the emperor has been talking about running the prostitutes out of the City?” He paused to gather my reaction, but I had none. “Ah, what would you care of my concern? My dearest friend, my boyhood sweetheart. You’re not even married. What would you know of that worrisome charge of adultery and a wife observant of every wink?”

“I didn’t know about the prostitutes, but I heard about the African petition.”

“Ridiculous! Prostitutes and now second marriages. Why are the bishops obsessed with what women spread their legs for?”

“And how is Italica?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. His marriage was the single virtue that tormented his otherwise perfectly indecent life. He was young at nineteen to be married, but it seemed an advantageous thing. His wife was fifteen and well known for her piety, which would help his ambitions even if it ruined his pastimes.

He stared down the fig in his hand and appeared to win. “Ah, but how long has it been since I’ve seen your handsome face? Too long. Those shoulders, so broad. That blonde hair so shiny. Your slave leaves your beard uneven, though I can tell how very soft it is.” He frowned and glanced at Gallus. Leaning toward me, he whispered, “Will your slave gossip?”

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “I haven’t told you about Appian.” He reached for another fig. “A boy from a new family. Nothing outrageous, you know. I’m not a passive.” He sucked on the fig and swallowed it. “Except for you, of course.”

“You’re as subtle as a harlot.”

He laughed with glee and then sized up Gallus. “Is he your taster?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” His eyelids dipped suspiciously. “You wouldn’t think I’d try to poison you?”

His mind was as nimble as a dancing girl, and it took a moment for me to catch up. “Maybe you’d have me beaten?”

“Hemlock is nobler.”

“Expensive.”

“Yes, but you, my illustrious Eucher, should go the way of Socrates. Beatings only for those I don’t love.”

Without considering which one, I took a fig and ate it.

“There, you see? No poison.” After watching me, he complained, “You could be more seductive about it.”

“I don’t eat for your pleasure.”

“You do nothing for my pleasure,” he said petulantly. He returned to looking Gallus over in his lecherous way. “I don’t remember him.”

“Gallus? He’s always with me.”

Volusian used his game of forgetting to keep his friends and guests repeating themselves until any lies were contradicted. “I assume you gave him that name, from Propertius’s poem?” He left his couch.

“He hates the name.”

Volusian brushed Gallus’s fine beard. “Hates the name,” he echoed. “How wonderfully perverse! You allow your slave an opinion.” His hand slid down Gallus’s chest, and he turned to me, a lewd smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, my dearest, you’ve always lusted after Greeks. You’re my capricious Zeus, but what’s this handsome boy, a mere slave, have over me?” He cupped Gallus’s groin with his hand and added, “Not this?”

As Gallus stared hard at the ground, I distracted Volusian. “It was you in Capua trying to convince that boy you were ‘swift-footed Achilles’. You should have been an actor.”

“Ah!” He clasped his hands to his chest. “And I suppose you’d have me a prostitute, too, and offer to pimp me.”

“We could make a fortune, you and I, if you weren’t so eager to give it away.”

His laughter was enchanting, like the spray of a waterfall, but then it fell away to be replaced by sobriety again. “No one seems to know who fills your time these days.” He kissed Gallus’s cheek. “You manage your secrets well.”

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
STILICHO’S SON
Copyright © 2007 by Teresa Wymore. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any form without permission, except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. http://www.teresawymore.com

Coming From Drollerie Press