look closer

A dove feeds at the emperor's wrist. The idle hand below it wears the seal of the western empire.

The court had lived at Ravenna since 402, for the excellent reason that armies could not get at it: a city in a lagoon, reached by causeways, fed by sea. The emperor Honorius had reigned, there and at Milan before it, since the age of ten, first under the regency of his father's best general, Stilicho, and then, after he had Stilicho beheaded on a treason rumor in 408, under no one in particular. Among the things the emperor kept at Ravenna was poultry. Procopius records that his favorite was a very large rooster, and that the bird answered to the name Roma. The man outside the walls of the actual Rome was Alaric, king of the Goths, a general trained inside the Roman army who had spent two years trying to extort not the empire's ruin but a place in it: land for his people, a command for himself, pay for his men. After Stilicho's execution, Roman garrisons massacred the families of the Gothic soldiers serving Rome, and 30,000 of those soldiers marched over to Alaric. He blockaded Rome into famine in 408 and was bought off with gold, silver, silk, and 3,000 pounds of pepper. He set up a puppet emperor in 409 and dropped him. On 24 August 410 somebody opened the Salarian Gate from inside, and the Goths spent three days in the city. They were Christians, of a stripe the bishops disapproved of, and they left the churches standing and packed with refugees. It was the first time a foreign army had held Rome in 800 years. The story Procopius tells is this. At Ravenna, the keeper of the birds came to Honorius and told him Rome had perished. The emperor cried out that it could not be; it had just eaten from his hand. The keeper explained the mistake: the city, at Alaric's hands. And Honorius, relieved, said he had thought the man meant the bird. Procopius wrote that down more than a century later, at another emperor's court, and flags it himself as a story people told. It survived anyway, because everyone who heard it recognized the reign. Jerome, in Bethlehem, took the same news differently and wrote that the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken. Waterhouse, in 1883, painted the anecdote as a full court ceremony: churchmen bent double with their petitions, a herald holding up the standard, and the entire attention of the ruler of the western world resting on the pigeons and guinea fowl working the carpet for grain. The Art Gallery of South Australia bought the canvas the year it was painted. In the picture, the only men standing straight are the ones with nothing to ask.