Honorius intrenched himself at Ravenna, and refused to treat with the magnanimous Alaric.  Again, consequently, he marched against the doomed capital; again invested it; again cut off supplies.  In vain did the nobles organize a defence,—­there were no defenders.  Slaves would not fight, and a degenerate rabble could not resist a warlike and superior race.  Cowardice and treachery opened the gates.  In the dead of night the Gothic trumpets rang unanswered in the streets.  The old heroic virtues were gone.  No resistance was made.  Nobody fought from temples and palaces.  The queen of the world, for five days and nights, was exposed to the lust and cupidity of despised barbarians.  Yet a general slaughter was not made; and as much wealth as could be collected into the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul was spared.  The superstitious barbarians in some degree respected churches.  But the spoils of the city were immense and incalculable,—­gold, jewels, vestments, statues, vases, silver plate, precious furniture, spoils of Oriental cities,—­the collective treasures of the world,—­all were piled upon the Gothic wagons.  The sons and daughters of patrician families became, in their turn, slaves to the barbarians.  Fugitives thronged the shores of Syria and Egypt, begging daily bread.  The Roman world was filled with grief and consternation.  Its proud capital was sacked, since no one would defend it.  “The Empire fell,” says Guizot, “because no one belonged to it.”  The news of the capture “made the tongue of old Saint Jerome to cling to the roof of his mouth in his cell at Bethlehem.  What is now to be seen,” cried he, “but conflagration, slaughter, ruin,—­the universal shipwreck of society?” The same words of despair came from Saint Augustine at Hippo.  Both had seen the city in the height of its material grandeur, and now it was laid low and desolate.  The end of all things seemed to be at hand; and the only consolation of the great churchmen of the age was the belief in the second coming of our Lord.

The sack of Rome by Alaric, A.D. 410, was followed in less than half a century by a second capture and a second spoliation at the hands of the Vandals, with Genseric at their head,—­a tribe of barbarians of kindred Germanic race, but fiercer instincts and more hideous peculiarities.  This time, the inhabitants of Rome (for Alaric had not destroyed it,—­only robbed it) put on no airs of indifference or defiance.  They knew their weakness.  They begged for mercy.

The last hope of the city was her Christian bishop; and the great Leo, who was to Rome what Augustine had been to Carthage when that capital also fell into the hands of Vandals, hastened to the barbarian’s camp.  The only concession he could get was that the lives of the people should be spared,—­a promise only partially kept.  The second pillage lasted fourteen days and nights.  The Vandals transferred to their ships all that the Goths had left, even to the trophies of the churches and ancient