Sack of Rome

For the first time in nearly eight hundred years a foreign army was loose inside the walls of Rome, and the ancient world took it as a sign that an age was ending. The city fell not by storm but by treachery, the Salarian Gate opened at night from within. Alaric, an Arian Christian, ordered the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul kept as sanctuaries, and much of the population that reached them survived. The blow was moral more than strategic, since the emperor Honorius sat safe at Ravenna and the Western Empire staggered on for another lifetime. Alaric himself died within months, in the south of Italy, his planned crossing to Africa never made.

The sack's afterlife mattered more than its three days: pagans blamed the disaster on Rome's abandonment of the old gods, and Augustine answered them with the City of God, reframing the fall as irrelevant to an eternal city not built of stone. The event became the hinge on which later writers hung the whole idea of the fall of Rome, even though the Western Empire did not formally end until 476. Modern historians read the ancient accounts, Christian and pagan alike, as arguments rather than reports, each side using the catastrophe to prosecute a case it already held. The gate itself, the Porta Salaria, survived until 1921, when it was demolished to ease traffic.