1. Why this case is the suite’s clearest demonstration of self-defeat
Every case in the suite illustrates the phenomenon’s self-defeating character to some degree, for the destruction of a deliverer always removes a capability the regime may later need. But in most cases the self-defeat is visible only in the longer view, inferred from what the regime forfeited rather than displayed in an immediate and undeniable collapse. Saul fell to the Philistines, but a reign separated the driving-out of David from the disaster on Gilboa. Athens forfeited the counsel of Themistocles, but the Persian danger had already been broken and the city endured for generations. Rome lost the services of Scipio, but Carthage was already defeated and the Republic’s decline lay a century off. The late Roman West is different, and this is the reason the suite gives it a full case and pairs its two figures in a single paper: here the self-defeat is immediate, visible, and twice repeated, the destruction of the deliverer followed within months or a few years by the very catastrophe the deliverer had been holding off.
Stilicho was executed, and Rome was sacked within two years. Aetius was murdered, and the emperor who killed him was himself assassinated within months, the Western government collapsing toward its final dissolution thereafter. In each case the regime removed the one man capable of its defense and was overtaken almost at once by the disaster he had prevented, so that the cause and the consequence stand close enough together to be seen in a single glance. The late Roman West offers the phenomenon’s self-defeating arithmetic stripped of the delay that elsewhere obscures it, and it offers it twice, in two successive generations, which establishes beyond the reach of coincidence that the connection between the destruction of the deliverer and the collapse of the regime is causal and not accidental. This is why the two figures are studied together: they are not two separate cases that happen to resemble each other but a single demonstration, repeated, of what it costs a regime to devour its defenders, performed by an empire in the act of dying.
The pairing carries a second value. Stilicho and Aetius were the two great defenders of the Western Empire in its last century, the two men whose capability stood between Rome and the forces that would destroy it, and the destruction of each by the court he defended shows that the phenomenon was not the misfortune of one general or the failing of one emperor but a settled disposition of the dying regime, a court so consumed by fear, faction, and the protection of imperial prestige that it twice killed the man holding the frontier and twice paid the immediate price. The suite reads them as a matched pair precisely to make this point, that an empire facing destruction could not refrain, even once and even at the edge of the abyss, from turning on the men who were saving it.
2. The first defender: Stilicho and the holding of the frontier
The Western Empire that Stilicho served had passed its zenith and faced pressures along the Rhine and Danube that the divided and weakened state could barely contain. Stilicho, a general of Vandal descent who had risen to the highest military command, became the effective ruler of the West as guardian of the young emperor Honorius, son of the emperor Theodosius who had entrusted his children to Stilicho’s protection. For more than a decade Stilicho was the bulwark of the Western Empire, the one commander whose skill held the frontier against the gathering storm, and his deliverance of Rome from destruction, the first criterion of the phenomenon, rests above all on his defeat of two great invasions that, unchecked, would have overwhelmed Italy itself (Hughes, 2010).
The first was the invasion of Alaric and his Goths, which Stilicho contained through a combination of battle and negotiation across years of campaigning, repeatedly checking the Gothic threat to Italy. The second and more spectacular deliverance was the destruction of the vast host led by Radagaisus, a horde of barbarian peoples that crossed into Italy in numbers the sources describe as overwhelming, threatening to swamp the peninsula and to take Rome itself. Stilicho gathered what forces he could, trapped Radagaisus’s host in the hills near Faesulae, and destroyed it utterly, capturing and killing the leader and breaking the invasion that had seemed certain to end the Western Empire then and there (Hughes, 2010; Heather, 2006). This was deliverance in the strict and undeniable sense the suite requires, the turning aside of an existential threat to the survival of Rome, attributable to the skill and resolve of one commander, and it placed Stilicho at the summit of his prestige as the savior of Italy.
That very prestige, and the power that went with it, made Stilicho the object of the court’s fear, and the phenomenon’s third criterion, fear as the operative motive, is met in the intrigue that gathered against him. Stilicho’s position as the indispensable general and effective master of the West, his control over the young emperor, his barbarian ancestry that his enemies used against him, and the sheer magnitude of his power made him the target of a court faction that worked on the fears of Honorius, persuading the weak and suspicious emperor that his guardian and general aimed at too much, that he was dangerous, that his power must be broken (Hughes, 2010). The accusations were the usual ones, ambition, treachery, designs upon the throne or upon the succession, and as in the other cases of the suite the historian must ask whether they were true. The evidence will not sustain them. Stilicho had served the dynasty faithfully for years, had been entrusted with the empire by the dying Theodosius, had defended Honorius and the West through invasion after invasion, and there is no credible sign that he sought to overthrow the emperor he protected. The charges were the instrument of a court faction’s fear and ambition, the means by which the indispensable general was reclassified as a threat, and they worked upon an emperor temperamentally disposed to believe the worst of the man whose power overshadowed his own.
3. The destruction of Stilicho and the sack that followed
The destruction, when it came, was swift and treacherous. In the year 408, Honorius, worked upon by the faction and gripped by fear of his too-powerful general, ordered Stilicho’s arrest. The soldiers loyal to the court turned against him, his supporters were massacred, and Stilicho, who had taken sanctuary in a church, was induced to come out on a promise that his life would be spared and was then seized and beheaded on the emperor’s order, submitting to the execution without resistance though his own troops might have saved him, choosing not to plunge the empire he had defended into civil war on his behalf (Hughes, 2010; Heather, 2006). The general who had destroyed Radagaisus and held the frontier for over a decade was killed by the court he had saved, on the orders of the emperor he had raised and protected, on charges that served the fear of his power rather than the punishment of any crime. The manner of the killing, the false promise of safety, the treacherous seizure, is the same device the suite has met before, the regime luring the deliverer to his death under a guarantee it does not honor.
What followed is the self-defeat that makes the case the suite’s clearest demonstration. With Stilicho dead, the court compounded the catastrophe by turning on the families of the barbarian soldiers in Roman service, massacring them, and driving tens of thousands of those soldiers, the men who had fought under Stilicho, into the arms of Alaric (Heather, 2006). Alaric, no longer checked by the general who had contained him for a decade, marched on Italy unopposed, for there was now no Stilicho to stop him and no army loyal enough or capable enough to take his place. He besieged Rome, and in the year 410, two years after the execution of the man who had defended it, Alaric’s Goths entered and sacked the city of Rome itself, the first time in eight hundred years that the city had fallen to a foreign enemy, a blow that resounded across the whole Roman world and that Christians and pagans alike understood as a sign of the empire’s mortality (Heather, 2006). The connection between the two events is not the historian’s inference but the plain sequence of cause and effect: the court removed the one man capable of defending Italy, drove his soldiers to the enemy, and within two years the enemy took Rome. The deliverer was killed, and the city he had delivered was sacked, and the interval between the two was short enough that no one could mistake the relation. The regime’s fear of its savior produced, with terrible speed, the disaster the savior had been preventing.
4. The second defender: Aetius and the breaking of Attila
A generation later the Western Empire, by then much diminished and clinging to a precarious existence, found in Aetius a second defender of the first rank, and the phenomenon repeated itself with a precision that establishes its structural character. Aetius was the dominant military and political figure of the West through the middle decades of the fifth century, the general who held together what remained of the Western Empire through a combination of arms, diplomacy, and the management of the barbarian peoples now settled within and around the imperial frontiers (Hughes, 2012). His deliverance of the West, the first criterion, rests above all on the campaign that broke the most fearsome threat the age produced, the invasion of Attila and the Huns.
When Attila led his vast confederation into Gaul, threatening to overrun the Western provinces and to extinguish what remained of Roman power, it was Aetius who met him. By a feat of diplomacy as much as of arms, Aetius assembled a coalition of Romans and Visigoths and other peoples, persuading the Visigothic king Theodoric to join him against the common danger, and with this combined force he confronted Attila at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains, one of the decisive battles of the age (Hughes, 2012). The fighting was immense and the Visigothic king fell, but Attila was defeated and forced to withdraw, his aura of invincibility broken, and though he invaded Italy the following year he was turned back without conquering it, and his empire dissolved soon after his death. Aetius’s defeat of Attila was a deliverance of the West and indeed of more than the West from a threat that had seemed unstoppable, and it placed him, like Stilicho before him, at the summit of his prestige as the savior of the empire and the one man whose capability stood between Rome and destruction.
That prestige, and the power it represented, made Aetius the object of the same court fear that had destroyed Stilicho, and the phenomenon’s mechanism repeated. The emperor Valentinian III, weak, resentful, and worked upon by courtiers who feared or envied the general’s dominance, came to see Aetius not as the defender of his throne but as a threat to it, a man whose power so overshadowed the emperor’s own that the emperor felt himself a cipher in his own palace (Hughes, 2012). The fear was the familiar one, the resentment of a sovereign for a general whose capability and prestige had grown beyond what the throne could tolerate, sharpened by the intrigues of a court faction that worked on the emperor’s insecurity. As before, there is no credible evidence that Aetius sought the throne or plotted against the emperor he had served; he had defended Valentinian’s empire for decades and broken its deadliest enemy, and the charge that he was a danger to the throne served the fear of his power rather than any real treason.
5. The murder of Aetius and the right hand cut off by the left
The destruction of Aetius was even more direct than that of Stilicho, for Valentinian did not delegate it to soldiers or hide it behind a trial but performed it with his own hand. In the year 454, the emperor summoned Aetius to the palace, and there, in the midst of a discussion of state business, Valentinian suddenly drew his sword and, with the help of a courtier, fell upon the unarmed general and killed him on the spot, the emperor himself striking down the man who had saved his empire (Hughes, 2012). The murder was as treacherous as Stilicho’s execution and more personal, the sovereign cutting down his defender in his own palace, and it provoked the remark that gives this section its title and that the suite treats as one of the phenomenon’s defining utterances. A Roman, asked by the emperor whether he had not done well to rid himself of Aetius, is reported to have answered that whether well or ill he could not say, but that the emperor had cut off his right hand with his left (Hughes, 2012). The saying states the self-defeat exactly, the regime destroying with one hand the instrument that was its own defense, mutilating itself in the act of striking down its servant, and it stands beside Tan Daoji’s cry of the demolished Great Wall as the phenomenon’s own diagnosis of its folly, spoken this time not by the victim but by an observer who saw at once what the emperor had done to himself.
The self-defeat followed at once and was total. Having murdered the one man capable of defending the West, Valentinian survived him by only months, for in the following year two retainers of the dead Aetius, loyal to their murdered general, assassinated the emperor in revenge, cutting him down in his turn (Hughes, 2012). The murder of the deliverer thus destroyed not only the deliverer but, within the year, the murderer, and with both the general and the emperor dead the Western Empire entered its final descent, the throne passing through a rapid succession of short-lived and powerless emperors until the Western imperial office was extinguished altogether some two decades later. The defender was killed, the emperor who killed him was killed in turn, and the empire that had been held together by the defender’s capability fell apart for want of it. As with Stilicho, the interval between the destruction of the deliverer and the catastrophe was short enough to make the causal connection undeniable, and the repetition of the pattern in two successive generations removes any possibility that the connection was coincidence.
6. The phenomenon analyzed: the four concepts in the late Roman cases
The four analytical concepts of Paper 1 are present in both destructions, and the pairing allows them to be seen operating twice in the same dying institution.
The convertibility of capability into threat appears in the dual character of both generals’ power. The military capability and the control of armies that made Stilicho and Aetius the defenders of the West were the same capability and control that could, in a suspicious emperor’s imagination, be turned against the throne. Each man, as the indispensable general and effective master of the Western state, held a power that overshadowed the emperor’s own, and that power, indispensable against the external enemy, presented itself to the court as a standing internal danger. The very magnitude of the threat each man defeated, Radagaisus’s horde, Attila’s confederation, was the measure of the capability the court then feared, for a general great enough to break such enemies was great enough to be feared by the throne he served. The capability that saved the empire was the capability the empire’s rulers could not control, and they destroyed it.
Prestige as a rival source of legitimacy appears in the way both generals’ standing eclipsed that of the emperors they served. Honorius and Valentinian were weak emperors, their legitimacy resting on dynastic descent rather than on any capability or achievement of their own, while Stilicho and Aetius possessed the prestige of demonstrated deliverance, the loyalty of armies, and the practical mastery of the state. This asymmetry of standing between a feeble emperor and a capable general was intolerable to the throne, for the general’s prestige was a rival pole of authority that made the emperor feel, and appear, a nullity in his own empire. The court factions worked precisely on this, on the emperors’ resentment of being overshadowed, and the destruction of each general was, in part, the throne’s attempt to reassert its own primacy by removing the man whose prestige exposed its emptiness.
The asymmetry between the irreplaceable individual and the self-preserving institution appears with a cruel twist in the late Roman cases, for here the institution’s act of self-preservation was its self-destruction. In the other cases of the suite the regime survived the destruction of its deliverer, paying the cost in a weakened capacity for future crises; in the late Roman West the regime’s removal of its defender brought the crisis at once, so that the institution, acting to protect the throne from the general’s power, destroyed the throne’s own defense and brought down upon itself the disaster the general had prevented. The asymmetry was resolved, as always, in favor of the institution’s perceived self-interest, but the perception was catastrophically wrong, for the institution’s true interest lay in the general’s survival, and its fear of his power blinded it to its dependence on that power. The right hand was cut off by the left, and the body died of the wound.
The use of form to legitimate the destruction appears in both cases, though in degraded versions that reflect the dissolution of the regime’s institutions. Stilicho’s killing was framed as the execution of a traitor on the emperor’s order, the charges of ambition and treachery providing the legal color, and the false promise of safety the means of the seizure. Aetius’s murder was barely clothed at all, the emperor striking him down in person with only the pretext of his supposed danger to the throne, a killing so direct that it dispensed with the forms almost entirely. The contrast between the two is itself instructive, for it shows the phenomenon’s legal apparatus eroding as the regime decayed, the careful trial of Scipio and the constitutional ostracism of Themistocles giving way, in the dying empire, first to a treacherous execution and then to a naked palace murder. The fear remained constant; the forms that had once disguised it fell away as the institution that maintained them collapsed.
7. The late Roman variant and the standard of the suite
Read against the cases that precede it, the late Roman material confirms the phenomenon’s structure and contributes its starkest demonstration of self-defeat, the variant in which the destruction of the deliverer is followed not in the long term but at once by the catastrophe he had prevented. As in Saul’s pursuit of David, in Athens’s exile of Themistocles, in Rome’s persecution of Scipio, and in the Chinese founding executions, a genuine deliverer is destroyed by the regime he saved, out of fear of the capability and prestige the deliverance created, through forms, here a treacherous execution and a palace murder, that serve the fear rather than punish any real crime. The late Roman variant is distinguished by the immediacy and visibility of the self-defeat and by its repetition in two successive generations, which together make the case the suite’s clearest proof that the destruction of the deliverer is not merely unjust but self-destroying.
The pairing of Stilicho and Aetius establishes a further point that the closing paper will develop, that the phenomenon can become a settled disposition of a regime, a pattern repeated rather than an isolated act. The Western court did not destroy its defender once and learn from the catastrophe that followed; it destroyed a second defender a generation later, in the same way and for the same reasons, and paid the same price a second time. This repetition shows that the fear at the root of the phenomenon is not a corrigible error that experience can teach a regime to avoid but a structural feature of certain kinds of regime, a disposition so deep that even the visible catastrophe of the first destruction did not prevent the second. The dying empire could not stop itself from killing the men who were saving it, even when the cost had been demonstrated within living memory, and this incorrigibility is among the most disturbing of the suite’s findings, for it suggests that the phenomenon arises not from ignorance of its consequences but from a fear that overrides the knowledge of them.
The two sayings the case has preserved, the right hand cut off by the left and, behind it, the emperor’s question whether he had done well, stand as the late Roman contribution to the phenomenon’s self-understanding. Where the Chinese deliverers named the mechanism and the folly from within, the late Roman observer named the folly from without, seeing at once that the emperor who killed his general had mutilated himself. The empire that did this twice, and fell, is the suite’s demonstration that a regime governed by fear of its deliverers will destroy itself by their destruction, and that the fear of man, which Scripture names a snare, can become the settled policy of a state and the instrument of its dissolution. Honorius killed the man who broke Radagaisus and lost Rome; Valentinian killed the man who broke Attila and lost his own life and his empire’s future; and the dying West, twice offered salvation in the person of a great defender, twice destroyed it, and died.
References
Heather, P. (2006). The fall of the Roman Empire: A new history of Rome and the barbarians. Oxford University Press.
Hughes, I. (2010). Stilicho: The Vandal who saved Rome. Pen & Sword Military.
Hughes, I. (2012). Aetius: Attila’s nemesis. Pen & Sword Military.
