of Adrianople. In that disastrous defeat even the wife of
Alaric, if we may believe the poet Claudian, was taken prisoner.

[Illustration: Alaric in Athens.]

Alaric retreated through Lombardy, and the feeble Emperor Honorius--"a
crowned nothingness"--celebrated at Rome, in 404, that triumph which
was signalized by the last display of the brutal gladiatorial games.
No sooner had the first blood been shed than the Eastern monk
Telemachus sprang down into the arena to part the combatants. His life
paid the price of his glorious temerity. He was hewn and stoned to
death. But that death was not in vain. The horrid massacres, at which
not only men but women gazed in demoniac pleasure and excitement, had
been condemned centuries before by the genius of Christianity. It was
monstrous that an emperor calling himself a Christian should preside
at such a spectacle. But the martyrdom of Telemachus at last touched
the callous and torpid consciences of nominal Christians. Thenceforth
the games of the amphitheatre were abolished. But it was too late for
repentance. Alike "the incomparable wickedness and the incomparable
splendor" of the Imperial City were doomed to destruction. Even the
blood of a Christian martyr voluntarily shed would not atone for the
blood of hundreds of brave barbarians who, in that huge Flavian
amphitheatre, had been

"Butchered to make a Roman holiday."

The day was near at hand when the Goths would arise and glut their
ire.

Alaric, though he had retreated, was still in a position to dictate
terms to Stilicho. He fixed his camp at AEmona, and was promised large
pay and the government of a Western province under nominal allegiance
to the Western Emperor. But the pledges made to him were broken, and
their fulfilment delayed. In 408 the promise of the oracle was
fulfilled, for he led his troops under the walls of Rome. The feeble
and timid Honorius had retired to Ravenna, where he was safe behind
the marshes, the pine-woods, and the stone walls against which Alaric
said that he did not fight. In 408 the wretched court filled to the
full the brimming cup of its iniquities--first by a massacre of
barbarian auxiliaries at Pavia, and then by the foul, ungrateful
murder of Stilicho himself, at the command of Honorius. No army barred
the path of Alaric, but an Italian hermit denounced on him the wrath
of heaven. This might have awoke the superstitious terrors of the
Gothic soldiers if Alaric had not assured t