276 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Iialbach] Deliateg of the Roman senate. A.D. 408 administration of justice, and of the finances ; and declared his impatience to lead to the gates of Constantinople the united armies of the Romans and of the Goths. The prudence, how- ever, of Stilicho, his aversion to civil war, and his perfect know- ledge of the weakness of the state, may countenance the suspicion that domestic peace, rather than foreign conquest, was the object of his policy ; and that his principal care was to employ the forces of Alaric at a distance from Italy. This design could not long escape the penetration of the Gothic king, who continued to hold a doubtful, and pei'haps a treacherous, correspondence with the rival courts, who protracted, like a dissatisfied mercenary, his languid operations in Thessaly and Epirus, and who soon returned to claim the extravagant reward of his ineffectual services. From his camp near ^mona,^"^ on the confines of Italy, he transmitted, to the emperor of the West, a long account of promises, of expenses, and of demands ; called for immediate satisfaction and clearly intimated the consequences of a refusal. Yet, if his conduct was hostile, his language was decent and dutiful. He humbly professed himself the friend of Stilicho, and the soldier of Honorius ; offered his person and his troops to march, without delay, against the usurper of Gaul ; and solicited, as a permanent retreat for the Gothic nation, the possession of some vacant province of the Western empire. The political and secret transactions of two statesm.en, who laboured to deceive each other and the world, must for ever have been concealed in the impenetrable darkness of the cabinet, if the debates of a popular assembly had not thrown some rays of light on the con-espondence of Alaric and Stilicho. The necessity of finding some artificial support for a government, which, from a principle, not of moderation, but of weakness, was reduced to negotiate with its own subjects, had insensibly revived the authority of the Roman senate ; and the minister of Honorius respectfully consulted the legislative council of the republic. Stilicho assembled the senate in the palace of the Caesars ; represented, in a studied oration, the actual state of affairs ; proposed the demands of the Gothic king, and sub- mitted to their consideration the choice of peace or war. The senators, as if they had been suddenly awakened from a dream iw See Zosimus, 1. v. p. 334, 335 [c. 29]. He interrupts his scanty narrative, to relate the fable of /Emona, and of the ship Argo, which wa^ drawn over from that place to the Hadriatic. Sozomen (1. viii. c. 25, 1. ix. c. 4) and Socrates (1. vii. c, 10) cast a pale and doubtful light ; and Orosius (1. vii., c. 38, p. 571) is abominably partial.
