CHAPTER XII STORY OF ALARIC Pursuit of the Ideal—Alaric, the Friend of Theodosius—Theodosius’ Dream—The Victory at the Birnbaumer Wald—Defection of Alaric—Pictures of the Plundering of Rome—Marcella and Principia—St. Peter’s Treasures—Plans Against Africa—Alaric’s Death and Last Resting-place. When Edmond Rostand, the truest poet of our latter day, wrote his “Princesse Lointaine,” he embodied the most ideal passion of the human heart, the desire of beauty unseen. The Eternal City has again and again inspired a like overmastering longing; it has been called by other names—ambition, revenge, desire of conquest—but the primal sentiment, in the most notable cases at least, reveals itself as an imperative craving to behold and possess the highest. In the saints the aspiration leaps from earth to Heaven, for their eyes are opened to the reality and the shadow; but even among mortals denied the Divine Spark, this hunger for the best takes on something of the sublime and translates itself in actions not to be altogether accounted for by merely human motives. Such a mortal was Alaric, the Visigoth, whose name still sounds to us across the ages with compelling power. Driven by the spirit, earth-bound, yet ever straining at his bonds, fiercely ambitious yet ready to renounce the fruits of conquest when the Voice, unheard of others, bade him renounce, his career remains an unexplained mystery, unless we are willing to reckon with the supernatural to which he rendered such prompt obedience when its commands penetrated the din of clamorous necessity and reached the ear of his soul. His very advent has all the emblems of a portentous allegory. Over the last eastern spur of the Julian Alps the old Roman roadmakers had cut one of their splendid roads to connect the seat of Empire with the North. They worked along the lines of least resistance, thinking only of facilitating the movements of Roman troops, and not at all of possible invaders who might march down to Rome. On the crest of the pass they looked for a commanding spot to serve as the site for a garrison station; the season was early summer and their glance at once fell on an enormous pear tree, a dome of snowy blossoms visible for many a mile around. That decided the question, and they built their military hamlet beside it, and called it “At the Pear Tree,” “Ad Pirum,” a name which was afterwards bestowed on the whole district, which is known to us now as the “Birnbaumer Wald.” To this station came, in the first days of September, 394 A.D., Theodosius the Great, to meet and subdue the “little Graunnarian Emperor,” Eugenius, and his terrible dictator, Arbogast, in the “Battle of the Frigidus,” which turned the course of European history and left the world—as Constantine had hoped to leave it—Christian and not pagan.