The problem before the advisers of Honorius was not an easy one. To solve it with certainty enormous sacrifices were necessary, but to solve it meant the salvation of the world. It was therefore determined to abandon the Rhine and the Danube, for already Alaric was within those lines. It was determined--and this was the decisive thing--to abandon the Alps, to make, that is to say, Cisalpine Gaul, or as we say the Lombard Plain, the battlefield, and to hold Italy proper along the line of the Apennines. I have examined and explained this strategy at length elsewhere;[2] here it is only necessary to say that its amazing success justified a policy so realistic. The theory of the commanders of Honorius was that the Apennines were by nature impregnable save at one place, the narrow pass between them and the Adriatic, which they had long designed Ravenna to hold. Their intention to hold this line was determined not only by this theory, but by this, too, that they were something more than uncertain of the attitude of the Eastern Empire. Their strategy meant the abandonment of the richest province south of the Alps, the richest and the most ancient; but if the military theory which regarded the Apennines as impassable were right it meant the certain and immediate salvation of the soul of the West and the eventual salvation of the whole. Honorius and his ministers had not long to wait. Having looted the provinces of Europe within the dominion of the Eastern Emperor, Alaric “tempted by the power, the beauty and the wealth of Italy ... secretly aspired to plant the Gothic standard on the walls of Rome, and to enrich his army with the accumulated spoils of an hundred triumphs.” In November, 401, Alaric entered Venetia by the Julian Alps and passed by Aquileia without taking it, intent on the spoil of the South. As he came on Honorius retired from Milan to Ravenna; the gates of Italy were barred. Then came Stilicho over the Cisalpine Plain, met Alaric, who had crossed the Po, at Pollentia, and defeated him and, following his retreat, broke him at Asta so that he compelled him to recross the Alps. In 403 Alaric again entered Venetia. Stilicho met him at Verona and once more hurled him back. The barred gates of Italy had scarce been questioned. It was not Alaric, after all, but another Barbarian, Radagaisus, who was first to demand an entrance. In 405 he traversed the same Alpine passes as Alaric had used, passed Aquileia, crossed the Po and shunning the Via Emilia, which led through the pass Ravenna barred, adventured over the Apennines which the Roman generals had conceived as impassable by a Barbarian army. They were right. When Radagaisus saw the South he was starving. Stilicho found him at Fiesole and cut him to pieces. But the remnant of his army escaped as Alaric had done, it was not annihilated; it returned through Cisalpine Gaul and fell upon Gaul proper. Then in 408 Stilicho was murdered in Ravenna by order of the Emperor.