The Decline and Fall of the Roman Pizza

This evening, hungry for pizza, I dialled my local pizza place hoping to get a delicious slice of cardboard and melted faux cheese. Six times I rang and each time all I got was a busy signal. I began to get rather irate. Indeed one could almost say I was miffed. Fortunately as readers of this blog know well I am not the kind of person who goes off on vituperative and increasingly irrelevant rants simply because of a little personal disappointment. BASTARD SWINE, WHY THE HELL WON'T YOU TAKE MY CALLS! There can be no possible excuse for this slovenliness in pizza service. The entire staff should be bastinadoed. I will not rest until I hear that the owner of the shop has appeared in sackcloth and ashes on his hands and knees before Milan cathedral begging for forgiveness. Oh wait, that was emperor Theodosius and he didn't fail to deliver a pizza so much as massacre most of Thessalonica. The principle, however, is the same. I'm sure Bishop Ambrose would agree with me.

Some people may struggle to find the connection between difficulties receiving a pizza and the first triumphant demonstration of the ecclesiastical authority over the secular but those people are missing the point. The point is I don't have my pizza and most of Thessalonica died. So there.

Actually it was all the fault of the Goths, they had enrolled in the Roman army and found themselves garrisoning Thessalonica which had a reputation for being unruly and a distinct lack of pizza places. Finding nowhere they could get a super supreme without anchovies the quite naturally disgruntled Goths sent a message to the emperor the gist of which went something like this; "Sodding place, population bitching, pay late, no decent pizzas and don't even ask about garlic bread". Theodosius waxed wroth at this missive (or possibly wrothed wax, the chronicles are unclear) and instructed that a lesson be taught and a message sent. The Goths then cheerfully dismantled Thessalonica with deeply unpleasant consequences for the six thousand or so people who forgot to get out of the way.

This was considered a little excessive even when the sullen pizza bereft defiance of the population was taken into account and Theodosius had to say he was sorry before he was allowed back into church. Four years later the Goths met their comeuppance when as part of Theodosius's army they fought in the Battle of Frigidus. Theodosius let the Goths take the strain and most of them were killed while he husbanded his Roman troops for later. Unfortunately for the empire as a whole one of the Goths who escaped was a guy named Alaric. Alaric would lead his people on a rampage across the Roman empire because he simply couldn't believe that an entire empire built by Italians didn't have a single pizza shop worth a damn.

Eventually Alaric died (as people do) and his followers diverted the course of a river and buried him in its bed inside three coffins; the first of lead, the second of silver and the third of gold. After they were done they let the river flow back in its natural course and the resting place of Alaric was lost forever more. According to legend he was buried with a precious slice from the last meat lovers pizza ever to be made from the old recipe. If I knew where he was buried I'd dig the old bastard up and eat it.

As it is I had to make do with takeaway Chinese.