They had been refused, at least for the time, the payment of their
usual subsidy. He had been refused the command of the Roman armies.
Any excuse was sufficient. The fruit was ripe for plucking. The
wrongs of centuries were to be avenged. Other tribes crost the
Danube on the ice, and joined the Goths; and the mighty host swept
down through Greece, passing Thermopylae unopposed, ransoming Athens
(where Alaric enjoyed a Greek bath and a public banquet, and tried to
behave for a day like a Roman gentleman); sacking Corinth, Argos,
Sparta, and all the cities and villages far and wide, and carrying
off plunder inestimable, and troops of captive women.

Stilicho threw himself into the Peloponnese at Corinth to cut off the
Goths, and after heavy fighting, Alaric, who seems to have been a
really great general, out-manoeuvred him, crost the Gulf of Corinth
at Rhium, with all his plunder and captives, and got safe away into
northern Greece.

There Arcadius, the terrified Emperor of the East, punished him for
having devastated Greece, by appointing him Master-General of the
very country which he had ravaged. The end was coming very near.
The Goths lifted him on the shield, and proclaimed him King of the
West Goths; and there he staid, somewhere about the head of the
Adriatic, poised like an eagle in mid-air, watching Rome on one side,
and Byzant on the other, uncertain on which quarry he should swoop.

He made up his mind for Rome. He would be the man to do the deed at
last. There was a saga in which he trusted. Claudian gives it in an
hexameter,