In AD 410, the Roman world suffered a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions when a foreign army led by the Visigoth king Alaric sacked Rome and carried off the city’s most valuable treasures. Alaric played a significant role in the dismemberment of the western Roman Empire, but he died before he could leave the Italian peninsula. His followers buried him in a secret tomb laden with the plunder of Rome that may have included the sacred Temple treasures of the Jews. This gripping account traces the life and death of Alaric and explores the modern quest to discover his grave, covering such noted treasure hunters as the Nazi Heinrich Himmler. Despite the fact that some believe in the likelihood that the grave has now finally been found, no excavation has taken place due to political machinations. This is a fascinating approach to the epic story of the cataclysmic fall of Rome and its widespread effect.
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Daniel Costa lives in Toronto.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A glimpse of Dark Ages history seen from an unusual perspective,
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This review is from: The Lost Gold of Rome: The Hunt for Alaric's Treasure (Hardcover)
History lovers feel rarely spoiled by the chance of reading an apparently easy, sheer elegant, and equally tantalizing historical book. Through its slow raise to grandeur, world dominance, and hectic fall into decay, Rome has been a favorite subject in this respect. Recently, we were fortunate to have Tom Holland's "Rubicon" describing with such gusto the collapse of the Roman republic and the foundation of the Empire. Daniel Costa's "The Lost Gold of Rome" is artfully revealing the other side of the coin, the last stage of decadence of the Roman Empire, and the chaos that followed its downfall, which had brought with it the end of the ancient world.In the former case, the historical narrative is set in motion by unfolding the deadly twist of ambitions of the destroyers of the republic; for the latter, Daniel Costa subtly chooses to track the shadowy fate of Rome's treasures, robbed by the first wave of city's invading barbarians. Reading the book, it soon became obvious that Daniel Costa wanted to depict, behind that moving target of a treasure hunt, a vivid historical fresco of the epoch, and to illustrate the wild tapestry of human mentalities of those dark times, wowed into violence, superstition, greed and irrationality, indistinctly carrying a few seeds of a forthcoming world. The clear architecture of the book, its fine balancing between elements of historical analysis and insertion of significant details, does succeed in bringing together, in a cinematic fashion using a casual style, traces of legend, mystery, and facts related to the story of the Roman treasure pillaged by the Visigoth king. Some open speculations sustain a certain sense of suspense in the quest for the lost riches of Rome. But we may also suspect that the author had intended to touch a more disquieting question, beyond the crust of the subject exposed. How would compare with, or how different from that bygone era our world seems to be? And so the splendid metaphor used by Barbara Tuchman, "a distant mirror", comes to mind. Daniel Costa's excellent book is inscribing on a similar line of thought.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
This could have been a far, far better book,
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This review is from: The Lost Gold of Rome: The Hunt for Alaric's Treasure (Hardcover)
Historical treasure-hunting expeditions, especially the search for long-lost archaeological sites, are guaranteed to fascinate. (Look at the Indiana Jones movies.) One of those is the unknown fate of the real Ark of the Covenant, the Great Menorah, and the other treasures liberated from the Second Temple in Jerusalem by Titus and brought back to Rome in A.D. 71. But the Temple artifacts are only part of what disappeared from Rome during a period of only a few days in August 410 when Alaric's Goths cleaned out the city. Alaric himself died rather suddenly not long afterward, near the town of Cosenza, down the peninsula in Calabria, and was buried secretly -- supposedly under a river bed. Costa's prose is somewhat awkward and his narrative outline is a bit confusing, but he seems to be making the case that some of the most historic treasures taken from Rome became part of Alaric's grave goods, which seems pretty unlikely. Taking booty was a business to the Goths, not unlike the Vikings a few centuries later, and while the king's burial required a lavish potlatch of tribal wealth, there's still a limit to what would be given up forever. (The fact that the burial was done in secret is accounted for by the fact that the migrating Goths knew they would be moving on and were not expecting to return; they did not want the grave of their leader to be disturbed.) As with so many books of this sort, the meat of the story would have made a good pamphlet or journal article. To stretch it out to marketable book-length, Costa pads unmercifully, going into detail about the decline of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the takeover in the West by the Germanic tribes, later depredations upon St. Peter's by Muslim raiders with the consequent scattering of holy relics, and fond recollections of the history of Cosenza itself. (Most of these accounts come from standard secondary works written by Heather, Wallace-Hadrill, Hitti, Wolfram, and others.) Then he spends a little time on earlier searches for Alaric's tomb down the centuries, including especially the cursory inquiry into the matter by Himmler. Finally, he recounts a number of more recent rumors and stories, such as the discovery by Allied (or Axis) officers during World War II, the secret removal of the putative treasure during the late years of the last century, and (apparently) a recent search for the site sponsored by an Italian newspaper. Costa himself seems not have attempted a search himself, so this isn't really a first-hand account, either. One has to say, the author's biases in this book show through very clearly. The chapter summarizing the Gothic culture makes frequent use of terms like "barbarian" and "savage" and makes a point of describing their sacrificial practices. The following chapters on early imperial Rome describe Constantine's "heroic" support of Christianity and accept unquestioningly his supposed divine dream, following up with a detailed account of the churches he built and endowed, and whose riches Alaric later "stole." (The treasures from the Temple, however, apparently belonged to Rome by right of conquest.) All in all, the idea for the book is an interesting one but it's execution is badly flawed.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Delightful Romp Through History,
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This review is from: The Lost Gold of Rome: The Hunt for Alaric's Treasure (Hardcover)
Daniel Costa brings to life the last days of Imperial Rome, as well as the chaotic sweep of European history in the first millenium after Christ. The book chronicles the sacking of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410, A.D., the first breach of the city's walls in some 800 years.The book's subtitle, "The Hunt for Alaric's Treasure," reveals the book's theme as Costa examines the various efforts over the centuries to find Alaric's gravesite in the belief that, consistent with Gothic tradition, a vast fortune would have been buried with him. Costa also reviews the scant evidence on where the gravesite and buried treasure are likely to be. Costa's book is lively and well-written. He weaves into a comprehensible pattern the rise and fall of the innumerable kingships that ultimately led to the creation of the European nation-states we know today. He also tells of the rise of Islam and its impact on European society of the time, a story not unlike the struggle going on today between jihadists and Western civilization. This is a book worth reading by anyone who wants to know whence we came and ponder the lessons to be derived therefrom.
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