Though still under twenty years of age and only a commander of auxiliaries, he asks for the title of _Magister Militum_, with the dignity which accompanied that highest of military posts. The Emperor refuses it. One of the Ministers thereupon begins to plot with Alaric, and suggests to him that he might gather other auxiliary troops under his command, and make things uncomfortable for his superiors. Alaric rebels, marches through the Balkan Peninsula into Thessaly and Greece, and down into the Peloponesus; the regulars march against him (according to some accounts) and beat him back into Albania. There ends his first adventure. It is exactly like that of a hundred other Roman generals in the past, and so are his further adventures. He remains in Albania at the head of his forces, and makes peace with the Government—still enjoying a regular commission from the Emperor. He next tries a new adventure to serve his ambition in Italy, but his army is broken to pieces at Pollentia by the armies in Italy—under a general, by the way, as barbaric in mere descent as was Alaric, but, like Alaric, wholly Roman in training and ideas. The whole thing is a civil war between various branches of the Roman service, and is motived, like all the Roman civil wars for hundreds of years before, by the ambitions of generals. Alaric does not lose his commission even after his second adventure; he begins to intrigue between the Western and Eastern heads of the Roman Empire. The great invasion under Radagasius interrupts this civil war. That invasion was for Alaric, of course, as for any other Roman officer, an invasion of barbaric enemies. That these enemies should be called by this or that barbaric name is quite indifferent to him. They come from outside the Empire and are therefore, in his eyes, cattle. He helps to destroy them, and destroyed they are—promptly and thoroughly. When the brief invasion was over, Alaric had the opportunity to renew the civil wars within the Empire, and asked for certain arrears of pay that were due to him. Stilicho, the great rival general (himself, by the way, a Vandal in descent), admitted Alaric’s right to arrears of pay, but just at that moment there occurred an obscure palace intrigue which was based, like all the real movements of the time, on differences of religion, not of race. Stilicho, suspected of attempting to restore paganism, is killed. In the general confusion certain of the families of the auxiliaries garrisoned in Italy are massacred by the non-military population. As Alaric is a general in partial rebellion against the Imperial authority, these auxiliaries join him.