Two years into the decadent reigns of Valentinian and Valens, on the morning of the 21st of July, great earthquakes shook the world of the Romans. The eye witness military historian, Amianus Marcelinus, saw the Aegean Sea recede and spied a rotten ship in the mud of the sea bottom. All manner of fish could be taken by hand. Then the sea returned with a vengeance and washed miles inland, depositing ships on top of houses. Alexandria alone lost 50,000 souls in that instant.
According to the fanatic zeal of the age, the Earthquakes were caused by heresy, by politically incorrect thought in regards to the doctrine of heavenly nature, and that the inundations, the great rains and floods, were caused by the simpler root of sin. These scientific causes established, as discoursed upon by the most learned men of the age [1], a great convenience was given to Church and emperors, who cooperated in confiscating the property of heretics and sinners to appease the Higher World.
Meanwhile, the worse plague that afflicts man was on its way, in the form of men. Gibbon notes that, “Man has much more to fear from his fellow creatures…” then from natural calamity, and thence came “the rage of war.”
Gibbon descends into a pleasing history of the Scythians, Huns and Alans, citing ancient Chinese sources. He notes that “It is much easier to maintain the appetites of a quadroped than to that of the philosopher,” and that “the revolutions of the north determine the fate of the South.”
The nomadic hunting life is described effectively, in Gibbon’s keen maxims on power: that “prompt and accurate judgment of the ground, distance and time…” is “the school of war.” Also that the confederate nations that are the “power of union,” come about from the facts that “the weak are desirous of support and the strong of dominion.”
The Huns are described as “an ugly and even deformed race,” and that their wars on China were largely instigated by the desire for prettier women! The Chinese had to give an annual tribute of silk and maidens to the rude barbarians. One Chinese woman composed a poem of being held in a chief’s tent wishing she could turn into a bird and fly away home.
The Chinese reckoned the advent of the Hun menace as having begun in 1210 B.C., almost the exact year of the fall of Troy, of the Bronze Age Collapse in the west. A similar ecological change in climate would propel the Mongols out of the same hinterlands in A.D. 1218 to conquer most of the world.
It seems that by the A.D. 100s, strong government in China had resulted in punitive expeditions against the nomads. One general marched 140,000 soldiers into the barbarian regions, erected a pillar after much slaughter, and returned with only 30,000 men. This was called victory, and it was. Gibbon’s knowledge of Asiatic geography was excellent.
As the Huns were chastised by China, they split into two groups, the Northern Huns who exchanged silk for furs, and the White Huns, who settled on the Persian borders. 58 hordes went with the sun, west, for thousands of miles. On the way they conquered the Alans, who were savage blond men, related to the Scythians and Sarmations and Masagate. These Alans intermarried with the Huns, which may account for the lack of racial difference between Huns and Goths in the Poetic Eddas.
Within 150 years of their turning from China, the Northern Huns were raping virgins on the Atlantic coast. At this point, in the 370s, a migration of 30,000 soldiers and 100,000 plebes out of Britain met, on the shores of what is now Brittany, the savage horse lords of rapine and plunder. Young Gratian even dressed like an Alan and kept them as guards, infuriating his soldiers.
The world was sinking on all sides, falling to internal madness over fine points of religious doctrine, being administered by transgender creatures with no children, being educated in doctrine rather than reason by the brightest minds of sterile bodies with no children but their ideas.
Then, the army of the Goths invaded in desperate flight from Hun and Alan hordes, the Alans known for hanging enemy scalps form their horse reigns. At the battle of Hadrianople, 375, Valans and most of the Roman army were butchered by the Goths who spread themselves about as bandits, robbers and mercenaries in service to Rome. From this point forward, there is no more Roman Army that would be recognized as Roman by Scipio, Caesar or Trajan, but a series of Roman Chief Executives who paid and sometimes led armies of mercenary bands and tribal allies.
Theodosius was recalled from his estate in Spain and promoted to most powerful man in the world by the man who had his father killed. [2] Theodosius would kill Maximus for the murder of Gratian in usurping the throne of his young benefactor.
Under Theodosius, the empire was barely welded together in three great portions. No sooner had the young Valentinian II been propped up on his throne, then Arbagestes, a Scythian chief, murdered him and challenged Theodosius for dominion. The decisive battle was decided by a natural disaster, a tempest that blew in the face of the usurper’s army down out of the Alps. The rebel slew himself and the most powerful man in the world submitted to the rule and chastisement of Ambrose Archbishop of Milan, a severe fanatic. Ambrose represents a very modern phenomenon of power, that celibate and homosexual men, such as the eunuchs and priests that ran the empire, have immense reserves of will power as well as an inclination to meddle in a world that is to them, peopled with their multitude of children, as ideas are their only true offspring.
This is exemplified by the figure of Theodosis groveling and repenting before Saint Ambrose. The occasion of the Emperor’s great sin was as follows:
The citizens of Thessalonika loved chariot races and worshiped these athletes like Americans worship NFL players. The chief of the garrison, a heathen barbarian named Botherick had a slave boy. The charioteer raped that slave boy. Botherik, and some of his men, on trying to punish the hero homosexual, were killed by the mob. Theodosius authorized the barbarian garrison to avenge this by inviting the chariot fans to the circus and butchering between 7,000 and 14,000, a just act if ever there was one.
But, the saint, the heroic decider of who entered Heaven and who did not, Ambrose of Milan, decided that this was a great imperial crime and demanded the cuckhold submission of the man whose hero father was murdered in recognition of his faithful service. The orphan emperor, as helpless as an American president in the hands of his handlers, was made to repent as a sinner, to grovel in public eight months, for offending the Homosexual Order of Civilization.
Cuck that he was, Theodosius was fearful of taking his last military action until he had dispatched Eutropius, the eunuch, to the deserts of Egypt. Here, a hermit, John of Lycopolis [Wolf town], had locked himself into a cell for 50 years and acted as a Christian counterpart of the female oracles of pagan tradition. Two days a week he opened a window and answered questions and prayers, granted prophecies. The son of the great, murdered warrior knew better than to trust to God or to the sword, when his world was ruled by celibate priests dedicated to conspiracy and the castrated creatures who were their implements.
Rome was dead. As cruel a mistress as She had been, the sanction to rape the slave boy of a general in good standing and then to murder that general, had never been granted by the often corrupt priests of the Old Gods. Barbarians, at least, had a native decency, utterly lacking in the effete soul of the Theodosian Rome.
Theodosius, a decent man, it seemed, compared to fiends such as he had replaced, had lost a wife to illness and had been sick for some 20 years. While in Italy, sorting out the aftermath of the civil war that he was permitted to conduct on the authority of Ambrose and John, after losing his beautiful young second wife in childbirth, he became sick and passed on the empire to his two sons. So the founder of yet another Roman dynasty passed even as their world sank.
At the end of this chapter, Gibbon, the pleasing and eminent historian who cites so many sources in his footnotes, sorrowfully takes leave of Amianus Marcelanius, the last Latin historian of antiquity, the last student of observation, inquiry and accuracy, a soldier, like Xenophon, who, in his declining years left the chronicles of Rome to those younger men, who never appeared.
Rome was now afflicted with not only delusion, oppression, invasion and climate change, but of amnesia as well.
I, likewise, take leave of Edward Gibbon, who has taught me so much. For, although his 8 guilt volumes from the Literary Guild were once my most prized possessions, I had to gift them off and am not strong enough to carry books. The audio files on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, so pleasingly read by David Timpson, end at the 27th chapter, being the 2nd chapter of Volume III, ironically at the final crushing of the indigenous Roman martial soul, the retirement of the only reliable ancient historian remaining, just as Rome of the 380s had become morally indistinguishable from America of the 2020s. Might it be that, like the Roman Emperors from Diocletion to Theodosius, who were forced on pain of death to take the throne, that our own presidents are the imprisoned creators, indeed puppets, of those vile monsters we sometimes refer to as The Deep State?
…
Notes
-1. It is a tragedy that the sharpest minds of Late Antiquity, those physically sterile fanatics who planted the seeds of the Dark Age in the minds of their teaming mobs of celebrity obsessed meat puppets, were members of the clergy. That the social control apparatus had been transferred from the strongman to the manipulative mind control of the academic charlatan, is a direct parallel with Late Modernity and its media politics.
-2. Theodosius the Elder may have been killed by the order of Gratian, his father Valentinian, or his uncle Valens. I am unclear as to who gave the order.
