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Updated: May 23, 2025
Not even the deserted grandeur of S. Paolo beyond the walls of Rome can equal it. Its bare round campanile gazes at the sky, which here vaults only sea and plain a perfect dome, star-spangled like the roof of Galla Placidia's tomb. Ravenna lies low to west, the pine-wood stretches away in long monotony to east.
In Galla Placidia's tomb these storied vaults spring above the sarcophagi of empresses and emperors, each lying in the place where he was laid more than twelve centuries ago. The light which struggles through the narrow windows serves to harmonise the brilliant hues and make a gorgeous gloom.
In this act we may certainly see the example of S. Romuald. But about 1096 there joined himself to them Pietro degli Onesti called Il Peccatore, and perhaps because he was of the Onesti he built there a new and a larger church, it is said in fulfilment of a vow made, as was Galla Placidia's, in a storm at sea.
Ataulf took his fair prize to the city of Narbonne in southern France, and made her his Queen. But when Constantius, a disappointed Roman lover of Placidia's, instigated Honorius to send an army against him and his Goths, he withdrew into Spain, and established his court with its rude splendor in the ancient city of Barcelona.
Theodosius II., however, was succeeded upon the Eastern throne by his sister Pulcheria who shared her government with the virile and bold soldier Marcian. But upon Placidia's death, on the other hand, the government of the West fell into the hands of her weak and sensual son Valentinian III. Placidia's greatest failure, indeed, was in the training and education of her children.
Two appalling catastrophes mark her reign, the Vandal invasion of the province of Africa and the ever growing cloud of Huns upon the north-eastern frontiers. Placidia's two chief ministers were Boniface and Aetius, either of whom, according to Procopius, "had the other not been his contemporary, might truly have been called the last of the Romans."
"Will they charge duty on tobacco?" she inquired blandly, as she watched the Customs examination of our things. "I've such a lot of cigars in my boxes." There was an Old-Man-of-the-Sea-like tenacity in Placidia's smiling impuissance. She did not know one syllable of French. A new-born babe could not have revealed itself more utterly incompetent.
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