‘But, Illustrious Belisarius, the arrows of their infantry headed you away from the Mulvian Bridge, and their cavalry in enormous strength chased you all the way back to Rome.’
Belisarius wiped his lips with a napkin and said: ‘Excellent fellow-patricians, you have described exactly what happened, and this is the reason why I say that the Goths are already beaten.’
They muttered indignantly to themselves that he must be mad. But anyone with the least common sense would have seen at once what he meant. Their infantry had shown only defensive powers against him, and their cavalry also had been unable to ride him down, even with enormous superiority in numbers, and fresh horses. For, not being archers, they were obliged to keep their distance. We recalled another remark of Belisarius’s, made at Daras: rare as was a general who could handle 40,000 men, he was rarer still who could handle 80,000. What of Wittich, who had brought nearly twice that number against us?
The first night of the Defence of Rome passed, and no attack was made at dawn.
CHAPTER 15
THE DEFENCE OF ROME
THE first action that the Goths took against the city was to build six fortified camps, complete with ditch, rampart, and palisade. These were sited at intervals around the whole northern circuit, at distances from the walls varying between three hundred paces and one mile. Their next action was to cut every one of the fourteen aqueducts that had for centuries past supplied the city with abundant pure water fetched from a great distance. However, there were rain-water wells, and the western wall enclosed a stretch of the River Tiber, so we were by no means waterless; but the richer citizens took it very ill that they were obliged to drink rain-water and, if they wished to keep clean, to bathe in the river, being deprived of their own commodious baths. Belisarius was careful to stop up the aqueduct conduits with masonry at convenient points. He also built semicircular screens enclosing several of the city gates from inside, with only a small, well-guarded door in each of them, to prevent the citizens from making a sudden treacherous rush and admitting the enemy. The Flaminian Gate was so closely threatened by a Gothic camp that he blocked it altogether. He inspected the whole course of the defences very carefully, both from inside and outside, in search of a weak spot, inquiring especially about the exits of the city sewers; but he found that these emptied into the Tiber, under the water, so that nobody could enter by them.
The greatest inconvenience that we suffered at first was from the stoppage of the public corn-mills on the Janiculan Hill, which were worked by water from Trajan’s aqueduct. Since we had no horses or oxen in the city to spare for turning the cranks, for the time being we were compelled to use slaves. But Belisarius soon had the mills working again by water-power. Just below the Aurelian Bridge he tied two stout ropes across the river, tightened them with a winch, and used them to hold two large barges in position, head-on to the current and only two feet apart. He put a corn-mill in each barge, geared to a mill-wheel suspended between them, which the rush of water from under the arch of the bridge turned round at a good speed. When he saw that the method was successful he strengthened the ropes; and forty more barges, in couples with mill-wheels between them, were tied on to the original pair in a long line downstream. Thenceforward we had no difficulty in grinding our corn; except when a few days later the Goths, having heard of the mills from deserters, sent trunks of trees floating down the river, some of which were carried against the mill-wheels and broke them. Belisarius then tied an iron chain-work across the bridge, constructed like a shallow fishing-seine. The floating tree-trunks were caught in this, and boatmen pulled them ashore to cut up as fuel for the public bakeries.
The citizens of Rome had hitherto been entirely unacquainted with the trials and perils of war, but Belisarius soon let them know that they must not expect to be inactive spectators, like the audience at a play: what privations the soldiers suffered, they must suffer too. In order to spare a reserve force of fighting men who could be hurried to any part of the walls threatened by attack, he enrolled still more unemployed labourers as sentries. He gave some of them daily archery practice in the Fields of Mars, and others he trained as spearmen. But they were sulky soldiers and remained a rabble, however hard the officers and sergeants worked at them.
Wherever Belisarius went in the city, Romans of both sexes and every social class had only black looks for him. They were angry that he had dared to take the field against the Goths before he had received sufficient troops from the Emperor, and thus involved them in a siege that threatened to end in starvation and massacre. King Wittich was told by deserters that the Senate was especially indignant against Belisarius; and therefore sent envoys to the city to take advantage of the disharmony.
These Goths, brought blindfolded into the Senate House, were permitted to address the Senators in the presence of Belisarius and his staff. They forgot the courtesies of the occasion and spoke roughly to the luxurious patricians, accusing them of having broken faith with the Gothic Army of National Defence and admitted a mixed force of ‘Greek interlopers’ to man the fortifications of the city. On Wittich’s behalf they offered a general amnesty conditional upon Belisarius’s quitting the city at once; they would even undertake to give him ten days’ grace before starting in pursuit, which was most generous, they said, considering that the forces at his disposal were wholly inadequate to the defence of so enormous a stretch of walls.
Belisarius replied briefly that the Roman patricians had not been treacherous: they had merely admitted fellow-patricians into the city, together with the Imperial Forces that these noblemen lawfully commanded. ‘My Gothic lords, I am empowered to answer with the voice of this loyal Senate, being of high rank among them, as well as with that of my Serene Master. I reply, then, that it was not Goths or any other Germans who originally built this city or these walls – why, you have not even kept them in good repair! Thus it is you who are the interlopers and without any title to possession. Wittich, your king, is not even recognized by my Serene Master as his vassal. So away now, I advise you, excellent Goths, and use your eloquence to persuade your compatriots of their folly; or the time will come, I warn you, when you and they will be glad to hide your heads in bramble-bushes and thistle-patches to avoid our lances. Meanwhile, understand well that Rome is only to be won from us by siege-craft and hard fighting. Siege-craft is an art in which no Goth, fortunately for ourselves, was ever adept; therefore our forces, though small at present, are more than adequate to defend the walls which our ancestors built and which you Goths have abandoned without a struggle.’
King Wittich was anxious to hear from the returning envoys what sort of a man this Belisarius was. They told him: ‘He is a bearded lion of a man, has no fear, uses few unnecessary words; in feature and colour and bodily build resembles ourselves (but that his hair is dark and his eyes, which are blue like our own, are set deep in his head). His swift look and gracious bearing impose respect on all about him. We also saw Antonina, his wife, a lioness of the same breed, red-haired. King Wittich, you must be prepared to fight energetically.’
It was a fortnight before Wittich could complete his preparations for the assault. When, one morning at dawn, Belisarius saw from the rampart what these preparations were, he began to laugh; which caused a scandal among the citizens. They asked one another indignantly: ‘Does he laugh that we are to be eaten up by these Arian beasts?’
I must confesss that I, too, did not see where the joke lay, for as I looked I could make out, a quarter of a mile away, a number of formidable framework structures on wheels, being drawn towards us by teams of oxen and escorted by swarms of Gothic lancers. They were like towers, each with an inside stairway mounting to a platform at the top, and seemed to be of an equal height with our wall. There were also a great number of long scaling-ladders being carried forward by their infantry, and wagons piled high with what appeared to be bundles of faggots, and more wagons loaded with planks. It was plain that their intention was to fill up a part of our moat with the faggots, th
en wheel the towers across a plank road resting on the faggots and take the walls by escalade. There were also four smaller wheeled structures encased in horse-hide, each with an iron-tipped beam protruding. These I recognized as battering-rams; the beam is swung on ropes within the structure and by repeated pounding will eventually knock a hole in even the stoutest wall.
They chose the Salarian Gate as the main point of their attack, and Belisarius immediately concentrated on the neighbouring towers all the defensive artillery within reach. This consisted of scorpions, which are small stone-throwing machines worked by the tight twisting and sudden release of a hemp rope; and wild asses, a larger sort of scorpion; and catapults, which are mechanical bows, worked on the same principle as these other machines, from the grooves of which thick bolts with wooden feathers are shot with force sufficient to outrange any ordinary bow. We had a few wolves also, which are machines for hooking the head of a battering-ram as it strikes and hauling it sideways, with a pulley, so that the tower overturns.
Belisarius called calmly to his armour-bearer, Chorsomantis, a Massagetic Hun, and said: ‘Fetch me my hunting-bow and two deer-arrows, Chorsomantis.’ These were his weapons of precision. A Gothic nobleman, a cousin as it proved to King Wittich, was superintending the advance of the enemy siege-engines. He was armed in gilded armour and wore a tall purple plume. But while he was still out of bow-shot, as he thought, death overtook him: Belisarius, with careful aim, struck him in the throat with a deer-arrow, so that he toppled dead from his horse. The range was not less than 200 paces. Unaware that this was Belisarius’s customary accuracy of aim, the Goths were appalled by so evil an omen. A taunting cheer went up from the walls, and the Goths paused for a while while the dead man was carried away. Another nobleman, his brother, then took command; but as he signalled for the cavalcade to advance, Belisarius aimed again and proved, to anyone who might doubt it, that the first shot had not been a matter of mere luck. This time the arrow struck the Goth in the mouth, as he was shouting something, and the barbed head stood out through the back of his neck; he, too, fell dead. I began dancing for joy and cried: ‘Oh, well done, my lord! Give us leave to shoot now!’ For I had a bow in my hand, as had all my fellow-domestics.
He said: ‘Wait until the trumpet blows the signal. Then let everyone about me aim at the oxen.’
The trumpet sounded, we all bent our bows and let fly. More than a thousand Goths fell, and all the oxen, poor beasts. A fearful cry went up. Then, I remember, I aimed at a tall infantryman as he ran forward with a bundle of faggots; but I missed my mark, and the arrow struck a horse in the rump, which reared up and threw his rider. I aimed at the horseman as he lay senseless; after three shots my arrow kissed his shoulder and glanced off. Since he continued to lie there as if dead, I looked for other targets, but saw none; for the Goths had retreated in consternation and taken up positions out of arrow range.
A large Gothic force of all arms then moved off out of sight. Though we did not know it, they were ordered to attack the Wild Beast Pen near the Praenestine Gate, two miles away to the right of us. But since 40,000 men remained as a threat to the Salarian Gate, Belisarius could not spare any troops from here as reinforcements elsewhere.
In the meanwhile there was great danger at the Aelian Gate across the river, where Constantine was in command. Only a stone’s throw from the walls, just across the Aelian Bridge which leads to St Peter’s Cathedral, stands the marble mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian. This is a square building surmounted by a cylindrical drum around which runs a covered colonnade; the drum is capped by a rounded dome. In the construction of this wonderful edifice, no mortar at all was used, but only white marble stones, jointed together. Along the colonnade at intervals stand equestrian statues, also in white marble; they represent, I believe, the generals who served under Hadrian in his wars. The mausoleum was used as an outwork of the fortifications, the bridge being an extension of the City wall. It was here that Constantine’s 300 men stood on guard, with catapults and sharp-shooting archers and a small detachment of army-farriers provided with heavy hammers.
The Gothic commander of the force ordered to assault this place was a man of discretion. Realizing that the part of the main wall which was protected by the river on either side of the Aelian Bridge would be weakly held, he kept a number of boats ready for an attack at a favourable point half a mile away upstream. This was a mud-flat under the walls sufficiently firm and wide to plant scaling-ladders upon. Here it was his plan to send an escalade party across in the boats, as soon as the attack against the mausoleum itself had been launched.
He handled the mausoleum attack ably enough. His men – heavy-armed infantry, with scaling-ladders – moved under his direction down the covered cloisters which run from St Peter’s Cathedral to within a very short distance of the mausoleum. Constantine’s men in the colonnade of statues, though on the alert, could do nothing until the Goths emerged from the cloisters. They then defended themselves vigorously, but only with arrows and darts: the catapults could not be depressed to fire at such a steep angle. Next, large bodies of Gothic archers, covering all four corners of the mausoleum and protected by huge shields, opened a most harassing cross-fire upon the colonnade, causing the defenders heavy losses. The situation grew dangerous. Constantine, warned of the impending attack from the mud-flat, had to leave hastily with twenty men to repel it. There was no capable officer to take over the command from him.
Soon scaling-ladders were planted against the mausoleum walls, and up clambered the Goths in complete mail-armour. The defenders’ arrows and darts made little impression upon them. Then Rome would have been lost but for the sudden thought of a brave sergeant of farriers. He struck with his hammer at one of the statues and broke off a leg. His neighbour seized this huge lump of marble and hurled it down the ladder. The leading Goth fell stunned, involving in his crashing fall a whole row of climbing men behind him. The same farriersergeant broke off another leg, and down came the statue; this he frantically beat into convenient pieces which his neighbour distributed to all who needed them. Then the Goths were pelted from all their ladders with the mutilated limbs and trunks of these antique heroes and their steeds. They ran bawling away into the open, pursued by arrows; where they soon came within catapult-range. The whir of the great bolts, that would drive right through a man or a tree, made them run all the faster. Constantine easily checked the attack from the mud-flat, so that here on the western side the Goths failed in their hopes, as they failed also eastward at the Tiburtine Gate and northward at the Flaminian, where in each case the walls rise from a steep slope, disadvantageous for assault.
At the Salarian Gate the main Gothic force still threatened, but by now they kept well out of range, warned by the fate of one of their chiefs; he had been standing perched on the branch of a pine-tree, close to the trunk, shooting at us on the battlements. My mistress Antonina was managing a catapult, for she had learned how to lay a sight with these machines. Two men would wind the crank until the manager signed ‘enough’; while he was studying his target, his mate would put a bolt in the horn groove and release the catch when the signal came. I was acting as mate to my mistress, and two Roman artisans were at the crank. She laid carefully on this sharp-shooting Goth, and presently signalled ‘Release’. I pressed the lever, and the bolt whizzed out. Then a fearful sight was seen. The bolt, striking the Goth fair and square in the middle of his corselet, drove through and sunk for half its length into the tree; he was pinned there like a crow nailed to a barn-door as a warning to other crows.
My mistress was commanding here as lieutenant for Belisarius, who had now hurried away to help Bessas and his men at the Wild Beast Pen – a place close to the Praenestine Gate – where a strong attack had been launched. It was triangular in shape, formed by two weak outer walls at right-angles to each other built up against the main wall; and had formerly been used as a pen for lions destined for sport in the Colosseum. The outer walls could not be held by us, being low and of insufficient
thickness to allow a breastwork to be built upon them. Wittich was aware, moreover, that the main wall which they enclosed was ruinous, and that it would soon yield to the pounding of a battering-ram. Gothic infantry clambered across the fosse with picks to undermine one of the outer walls, which would meanwhile screen them somewhat against arrow-attack from the battlements. Once the Pen was captured he could have hopes of victory. Faggots and planks were ready, and scaling-towers and ladders, just as at the Salarian Gate. A large force of Gothic lancers stood by.
The Goths across the fosse swung their picks industriously; and after a time a portion of the wall fell outward with a crash and they swarmed into the Pen. Belisarius at once sent two strong parties of Isaurians down over the main wall, by ladders, upon the outer walls. From here they leaped among the crowded Goths and closed the entrance of the Pen; then butchered them at their leisure. For whereas the Isaurians carried short cutlasses, which are excellent for fighting in cramped quarters, the Goths had two-handed broadswords, which need plenty of space for effective use. More Gothic infantry ran forward to assist their comrades, but suddenly the Praenestine Gate near by swung open: out poured a column of cuirassiers of Belisarius’s Household, together with a few Thracian Goths. They charged the barbarian lancers, who were standing about in no regular order, and drove them in rout with heavy loss back to their camp, half a mile away. Then the cuirassiers turned and set fire to the scaling-towers and rams and ladders, which made a huge blaze; and so rode back in safety. A sudden sally was also made at the Salarian Gate, at my mistress’s order, with the same success: here also the Goths fled and the engines were burned. Then our men hurried out and stripped the dead. With my mistress’s permission, I went out with them and found the man whom I had killed: I saw that his neck had been broken. I took away his golden torque and the golden-hilted dagger from his belt – a eunuch house-slave playing the hero!