members of that assembly, asserted that “this is not a treaty of peace but of servitude.”  Thus the senate was alienated from Stilicho, and not the senate only but the army also, which was exasperated by his affection for the barbarians.  Nor was the great general more fortunate with the emperor, who had come of late under the influence of Olympius, a man who, Zosimus tells us, under an appearance of Christian piety, concealed a great deal of rascality.  Stilicho had promoted him to a very honourable place in the household of the emperor; nevertheless he plotted against him.  At his suggestion Honorius proposed to show himself to the army at Pavia, already at enmity with Stilicho.  The result was disastrous.  For the occasion was seized for a revolt in which the best officers of the empire perished.  Stilicho, not daring to march his barbarians from Bologna upon the Roman army, and by this refusal incurring their enmity also, flung himself into Ravenna and took refuge in the great church there.  On the following day, however, he was delivered up by the bishop to Count Heraclian and slain.

Thus perished in the great fortress of the defence the great defender, leaving the whole of Italy in confusion.  He was not long to go unavenged.

[Illustration:  Colour Plate S. AGATA]

Stilicho was slain in Ravenna upon August 23rd, 408.  In October of that year Alaric, who had watched the appalling revolution that followed his own defeat and the annihilation of Radagaisus, after fruitless negotiations with Honorius, descended into Italy, passed Aquileia, and coming into the Aemilian Way at Bologna found the pass open and without misadventure entered Italy at Rimini, and, without attacking Ravenna, marched on “to Rome, to make that city desolate.”  He besieged Rome three times and pillaged it, taking with him, when he left it, hostages.  As we know he never returned, but died at Cosentia in southern Italy, and was buried in the bed of the Buxentius, which had been turned aside, for a moment, by a captive multitude, to give him sepulture.

Among those hostages which Alaric had claimed from the City and taken with him southward was the sister of the two emperors, the daughter of the great Theodosius, Galla Placidia.

This great lady had been born, as is thought, in Rome about 390; she had, however, spent the first seven years of her life in Constantinople, but had returned to Italy on the death of Theodosius with her brother Honorius, in the care of the beautiful Serena, the wife of Stilicho.  She does not seem to have followed her brother either to Milan or to Ravenna, for indeed his residence in both these cities was part of the great defence.  She remained in Rome, probably in the house of her kinswoman Laeta, the widow of Gratian.  That she had a grudge against Serena seems certain, though the whole story of the plot to marry her to Eucherius, Serena’s son, would appear doubtful.  That she initiated her murder, as Zosimus[1] asserts,