page_title: Honorius (emperor)
section_title: Sack of Rome
hierarchical_section_title: Honorius (emperor) / Sack of Rome
context_page_description: Flavius Honorius was Roman Emperor from 393 to 423. He was the younger son of emperor Theodosius I and his first wife Aelia Flaccilla, and brother of Arcadius, who ruled the eastern half of the empire from 395, when their father died, until his death in 408. In 410, during Honorius's reign over the western Roman Empire, Rome was sacked for the first time in almost 800 years.
  Even by the standards of the rapidly declining Western Empire, Honorius's reign was precarious and chaotic. His reign was supported by his principal general, Stilicho, who was successively Honorius's guardian and his father-in-law. Stilicho's generalship helped preserve some level of stability, but with his execution in 408, the western Roman Empire moved closer to collapse.
context_section_description: The most notable event of his reign was the assault and Sack of Rome on 24 August 410 by the Visigoths under Alaric.
  The city had been under Visigothic siege since shortly after Stilicho's deposition and execution in the summer of 408. Lacking a strong general to control the by-now mostly Germanic Roman army, Honorius could do little to attack Alaric's forces directly, and apparently adopted the only strategy he could in the situation: wait passively for the Visigoths to grow weary and spend the time marshalling what forces he could. Unfortunately, this course of action appeared to be the product of Honorius' indecisive character and he suffered much criticism for it both from contemporaries and later historians.
  Whether this plan could have worked is perhaps debatable. In any case, it was overtaken by events. Stricken by starvation, somebody opened Rome's defenses to Alaric and the Goths poured in. The city had not been under the control of a foreign force since an invasion of Gauls some eight centuries before. The sack itself was notably mild as sacks go. For example, churches and religious statuary went unharmed. The psychological blow to the contemporary Roman world was considerably more painful. The shock of this event reverberated from Britain to Jerusalem, and inspired Augustine to write his magnum opus, The City of God.
  The year 410 also saw Honorius reply to a British plea for assistance against local barbarian incursions, called the Rescript of Honorius. Preoccupied with the Visigoths, Honorius lacked any military capability to assist the distant province. According to the sixth century Byzantine scholar Zosimus, "Honorius wrote letters to the cities in Britain, bidding them to guard themselves."  This sentence is located randomly in the middle of a discussion of southern Italy; no further mention of Britain is made, which has led some modern academics to suggest that the rescript does not apply to Britain, but to Bruttium in Italy.
caption: The Favorites of the Emperor Honorius, by John William Waterhouse, 1883
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