The First Trumpet of Revelation
Revelation 8:7
7 The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.
Emperor Theodosius’ death left the Roman Empire in the hands of his young and ineffectual sons, and its territory was divided between Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West. Gothic king Alaric I sensed this weakness and saw an opportunity. Upon learning of Theodosius’ death, Alaric quickly mobilized his soldiers, revolted against the Romans, and marched toward the Eastern capital of Constantinople. The Goths were blocked from reaching the city by the Eastern Roman army, so the invaders turned their attention to less well-defended cities in Greece. Over the next two years, Alaric and his men sacked the harbor city of Piraeus in the port of Athens and plundered Corinth, Megara, Argos, and Sparta.[i] The Gothic conquest of Roman Greece was not the end of Alaric’s ambitions. Emboldened by his successes against Arcadius, the barbarian king’s ambition pulled his eyes towards Rome.
Honorius was only eight years old when he became co-emperor with his father and brother in 393 AD. After Theodosius’ death, he was the sole ruler on the Western throne under the regency of the general Stilicho. In the spring of 402 AD, Alaric invaded Italy and faced off against Stilicho in two battles.[ii] The first encounter was at Pollentia in northwestern Italy. Alaric’s army was decisively defeated by the Romans, who recovered most of the treasure the Goths had amassed during their plundering of Greece and captured Alaric’s wife and children. Stilicho offered truce terms to Alaric, which he declined. The second battle was fought in Verona in June. Again, Alaric was defeated, and again, Stilicho offered a truce. This time, however, Alaric wisely accepted and withdrew his forces from the Italian peninsula.[iii]
In 406, the Western Empire was facing a soldiers’ revolt in Britain and an invasion in Gaul from the combined militaries of the Vandals, Suevi, and Alans. Alaric saw this as another opportunity and prepared to invade Italy again the following year. The other crises strained Rome’s military capacity, and Stilicho was forced to pay Alaric four thousand pounds of gold to leave.[iv]
Meanwhile, in the imperial court, a minister named Olympius persuaded Honorius that Stilicho was secretly conspiring to overthrow him. The young, submissive emperor arrested the general and ordered his execution. After the assassination, Olympius went on a purge, killing Stilicho’s family and any of the officials believed to have been loyal to him. Even the wives and children of Stilicho’s foederati—the foreign auxiliary forces under Rome’s control—did not escape the massacre. Infuriated by this betrayal, the foederati defected en masse to Alaric.[v] Olympius’ miscalculation left Rome without a standing army to defend the Italian peninsula for the remainder of its empire.[vi]
Once the foederati changed their allegiance to the Goths, an emboldened Alaric invaded Italy again. The empire’s capital had moved to Ravenna by this time, but Rome remained its greatest prize. In September 408, the Goths laid siege to the former capital to starve its residents into surrendering. The desperate Romans paid Alaric five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, and several thousand silks and animal hides in exchange for peace.[vii] Honorius also promised to appoint Alaric as the head of the Roman army, but when the emperor reneged on this appointment, the Gothic king laid siege to Rome again in 409.[viii]
When Alaric lifted this siege, he appointed a figurehead emperor in Rome and began discussions with Honorius in Ravenna. With talks ongoing, Sarus, an ally of the emperor, attacked Alaric and his men. Alaric viewed this attack as having been ordered by Honorius and immediately ended the negotiations. After this final betrayal, Alaric turned back to Rome.
Historians do not know how Alaric entered the city through its Salarian Gate, but the likeliest answer is that he was simply let in by the Gothic slaves who resided there.[ix] Upon breaching the city on August 24, 410, the Goths sacked Rome for three days—the first time Rome had been pillaged in eight hundred years.[x]
In his poem The Gothic War, the contemporary Roman writer Claudian described Alaric’s 402-403 AD Gothic invasion as being “like a storm of hail or a pestilence.”[xi] The eighteenth and nineteenth century theologians did not miss this analogy written by a poet alive during the first of Alaric’s invasions. Charles Daubuz,[xii] W. Boyd Carpenter,[xiii] and Joseph Benson[xiv] all referred to Claudian’s poem in their commentaries on John’s Revelation—each seeing the fulfillment of the first trumpet’s blood-filled hailstorm in Alaric.
Migration of the Visigoths from Dacia to Illyricum, eventually settling in Spain in 418 AD.
“The Third Part”
John’s descriptions of five of the first six trumpets include the phrase “the third part.” Edward Bishop Elliott dedicated an entire section of Horae Apocalypticae to the question of what this phrase might represent. His analysis examined several possibilities, eventually settling on a peculiar interpretation of the division of the Roman Empire.
In 395 AD, the Roman Empire was divided between East and West for the final time. However, that would be only two parts, not three. The empire was also subdivided into four Praetorian Prefectures—Gaul and Italy in the Western Empire, Oriens in the East, and Illyricum, which bridged the border between the Eastern and Western Empires. However, this would similarly be an empire split into four parts, not three.
The Goths controlled much of Illyricum at the time of the final imperial division. Alaric and his soldiers launched their attacks on Greece and Italy from Illyricum, and when they needed a respite from campaigning, the Goths withdrew to safety there. Elliott views “the third part” as a tripartite split of Roman territory between the Western Empire, Eastern Empire, and Goth-controlled Illyricum.[xv]
Final division of the Roman Empire after the death of Theodosius I, 395 AD.
The four Praetorian Prefectures of the Roman Empire under Theodosius I, 395 AD.
The problem with Elliott’s reading is that the empire was split into two or four parts. Throughout the life of Rome’s empire, there were numerous incursions on territory, bloody revolts, and frontier battles which would have been similar to the Goths’ control over Illyricum. In addition, the Gothic control over the prefecture was not permanent and did not even last through the trumpet prophecies. Elliott’s hypothesis on the fulfillment of “the third part” appears to have been forced.
While his rationale was flawed, Elliott correctly identified the fulfillment of the phrase. “The third part” represented the Roman Empire for a different reason: its population. Most estimates place the population of the empire in 14 AD between forty-five and fifty-four million.[xvi], [xvii] Averaging those two figures produces an empire with 49.5 million inhabitants. Modern historians place Rome’s population peak somewhere between fifty-nine and seventy-six million inhabitants in 164 AD.[xviii] Taking the middle of that range produces a population of 67.5 million. These data points suggest the Roman population near the end of the first century was approximately sixty million. The Dutch government’s HYDE Project 3.1 estimated the world population in 100 AD to be 195 million.[xix] However, Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones proposed a global population of 170 million in 1 AD and 190 million in 200 AD, which indicates about 180 million people were alive at the end of the first century—three times the Roman population when Revelation was written.[xx]
World and Roman Empire population estimates, 1 AD-400 AD.[xxi], [xxii],[xxiii], [xxiv], [xxv], [xxvi]
When Revelation was written in 95 AD (dashed vertical line), the Roman Empire’s population
was roughly 60 million, or one-third of Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones’
global population estimate of 180 million.
[i] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2023. Alaric. September 14. Accessed October 18, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alaric.
[ii] Kulikowski, Michael. 2019. The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy, 122. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
[iii] Kulikowski, Michael. 2019. The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy, 135. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
[iv] Burns, Thomas. 1994. Barbarians within the Gates of Rome: A Study of Roman Military Policy and the Barbarians CA. 375-425 A.D., 215. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
[v] Burns, Thomas. 1994. Barbarians within the Gates of Rome: A Study of Roman Military Policy and the Barbarians CA. 375-425 A.D., 224-225. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
[vi] Macgeorge, Penny. 2002. Late Roman Warlords, 171. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
[vii] Norwich, John Julius. 1988. Byzantium: The Early Centuries, 134. London: Viking.
[viii] Lee, A. D. 2013. From Rome to Byzantium AD 363 to 565: The Transformation of Ancient Rome. 113. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
[ix] Hodgkin, Thomas. 1911. “Alaric.” In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Vol. 1 (11th ed.), edited by Hugh Chisholm, 470-472. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[x] James, Edward. 2014. Europe’s Barbarians, AD 200-600, 57. London and New York: Routledge.
[xi] Claudian. 1922. “The Gothic War.” In Claudian, translated by Maurice Platnauer, 139. London and New York: William Heinemann and G.P. Putnam and Sons.
[xii] Daubuz, Charles. 1730. “Vision II. Part III. Trumpet I. Explained.” In A Perpetual Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, 278-281. London: Charles Daubuz.
[xiii] Carpenter, W. Boyd. n.d. “Revelation VIII.” In A Bible Commentary for English Readers, Vol. VIII, by Ellicott, Charles John (ed.), 569-574. London: Cassell and Company.
[xiv] Benson, Joseph. 1847. “Revelation Chapter VIII.” In The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: With Critical, Explanatory, and Practical Notes, 734-739. New York: Lane & Tippett.
[xv] Elliott, Edward Bishop. 1862. “The Third Part.” In Horae Apocalypticae, Vol. III, by Edward Bishop Elliott, 358-365. London: Seeley, Burnside, and Seeley.
[xvi] Beloch, Karl Julius. 1886. Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt, 507. Léipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
[xvii] Frier, Bruce W. 2000. “Demography.” In The Cambridge Ancient History XI: The High Empire, A.D. 70-192, edited by Alan K. Bowman, Peter Garnsey and Dominic Rathbone, 827-854. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[xviii] Scheidel, Walter. 2007. “Demography.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, edited by W. Scheidel, I. Morris and R. Saller, 38-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[xix] Goldewijk, Kees Klein, Arthur Beusen, Gerard van Drecht, and Martine de Vos. 2011. “The HYDE 3.1 spatially explicit database of human induced land use change over the past 12,000 years.” In Global Ecology and Biogeography, 20(1) 73-86.
[xx] McEvedy, Colin, and Richard Jones. 1978. Atlas of World Population History. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
[xxi] United States Census Bureau. 2022. Historical Estimates of World Population. December 5. Accessed November 7, 2023. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html.
[xxii] McEvedy, Colin, and Richard Jones. 1978. Atlas of World Population History. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
[xxiii] Harper, Kyle. 2017. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[xxiv] Russell, J. C. 1958. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 48, Part III. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
[xxv] Frier, Bruce W. 2000. “Demography.” In The Cambridge Ancient History XI: The High Empire, A.D. 70-192, edited by Alan K. Bowman, Peter Garnsey and Dominic Rathbone, 827-854. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[xxvi] Goldewijk, Kees Klein, Arthur Beusen, Gerard van Drecht, and Martine de Vos. 2011. “The HYDE 3.1 spatially explicit database of human induced land use change over the past 12,000 years.” In Global Ecology and Biogeography, 20(1) 73-86.
