Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (24 page)

Back in 391, when
Theodosius left the West after the suppression of Maximus, he had put
Valentinian Ⅱ in nominal charge of affairs. He could hardly have done otherwise when the pretext for attacking Maximus had been to restore Valentinian to his rightful throne. But Theodosius had no intention of ceding power to the youth, and the choice of a regent was made easier by the death of Valentinian’s powerful mother
Justina sometime during the campaign to restore her son’s throne. In the end, Theodosius sent Valentinian to Gaul in the care of the general
Arbogast, a trusted and long-serving officer. Unfortunately, Arbogast proved incapable of handling his new charge, with tragic results for all concerned. It is difficult not to pity Valentinian, raised to the purple as an infant in a moment of panic, thereafter dominated by his half-brother
Gratian and his mother
Justina and disregarded by every other reigning augustus. In 391, left as western emperor by Theodosius, he imagined that the time had at last come for him to rule on his own behalf. Arbogast soon disabused him of that notion, and the young emperor’s frustration mounted. When Valentinian attempted to cashier Arbogast, the general tore up the imperial order before his very eyes – he took orders from Theodosius, not from a teenage puppet. Overcome by despair, Valentinian hanged himself. It was the best revenge he could possibly have taken. Rumours of murder were inevitable – indeed are recorded in our sources – and Theodosius could never turn a blind eye, however pleased he may have been by the extinction of the Valentinianic dynasty
.
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Knowing that he could not be restored to favour, the hitherto loyal Arbogast chose preemptive rebellion. He proclaimed a pagan grammarian and minor bureaucrat named Eugenius (r. 392–394) emperor and cast about for allies, finding them amongst
the aristocracy of Rome itself. Rome still housed some of the richest and most influential men in the entire empire, many of whom hated Theodosius for his increasingly aggressive Christianity. One of them,
Nicomachus Flavianus, made common cause with Arbogast, presiding
with him over the usurpation and lending to it the legitimacy that his prestige automatically conferred
.

Theodosius, as he had to, prepared for a second western campaign against a usurper. He left his adolescent son
Arcadius behind in Constantinople in the hands of the praetorian prefect
Rufinus and marched west again in 394, taking with him his younger son
Honorius, now likewise raised to the rank of augustus. Flavianus and Arbogast fortified the Julian Alps between Italy and Illyricum and met Theodosius in battle at the river
Frigidus on 5 September 394. The fighting was furious and Arbogast was a much better general than Theodosius. But on the second day of the battle, in what Christian writers understandably viewed as a miracle, a hard wind blew straight into the ranks of the western army, stopping their spears and arrows from reaching the Theodosian units and hampering the ability of the western troops to defend themselves. With the wind at his back, Theodosius was victorious, but the battle was more than usually bloody and Theodosius’ barbarian auxiliaries suffered tremendous losses after they were placed in the front ranks to absorb the worst of the damage
.
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Flavianus and Arbogast committed suicide in the face of their total
defeat.
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Theodosius took up residence
in Milan. Like Constantius thirty years before him, he had to give serious thought to how he was going to govern the empire. As events had now twice demonstrated, he could not do it alone, and nor would a mere puppet like Valentinian suffice. He needed a colleague on whom he could rely, but his sons were too young and may already have begun to display the pervasive weakness that would characterize their later reigns. We cannot know what Theodosius would have decided, for he had only three months to live. Still a young man by the standards of the Roman elite, he died of congestive heart failure on 17 January 395
. The young augustus Honorius was at his side in Milan, and the regency devolved immediately upon
Stilicho. In the East, where
Arcadius theoretically reigned, power was in the hands of Stilicho’s bitter enemy, the praetorian prefect
Rufinus. Stilicho, however, had at his command the field armies of both eastern and
western empires, and their partial demobilization triggered the crisis that would soon envelop much of the empire.

Stilicho himself is a sympathetic figure, but one badly compromised by hostile accounts both ancient and modern. He had the misfortune to command the western empire in the face of severe external threats and do so for an emperor incapable of inspiring confidence even as a puppet and figurehead. No one could have countered every challenge that Stilicho faced, and his enemies sought explanations for his periodic failures: latching on to the fact of his Vandal descent on one side, they argued that Stilicho demonstrated the inevitable treachery of the barbarian. Modern scholars have followed suit, imagining that ‘Germanic’ blood gave Stilicho more in common with barbarian enemies than with the empire he served, a foolish canard whose time should long since have passed. As we can see both in his actions and in the testimony of Claudian, he was only ever a Roman commander, of proven competence on the battlefield, and the most trusted of
Theodosius’ military subordinates. More than that, he was by marriage a member of the imperial family, the spouse of Theodosius’ niece and adopted daughter
Serena, whose son
Eucherius was acknowledged by Theodosius as his grandson. Even before Theodosius’ death, Stilicho had been made the legitimate guardian of Honorius, and by marrying Stilicho’s daughter
Maria, the young emperor became his son-in-law in 398. In other words, Stilicho’s many years of conflict with the eastern court should not be understood in terms of his Vandal blood, or more general barbarian ambitions to dominate Roman interests, but rather as the political intrigue that attends any royal minority and which, in the present instance, broke out the moment Theodosius was dead
.

In 395, Stilicho sent some of the auxiliary units that had served at the Frigidus back to the East. At the head of one of these units was Alaric, who had presumably been brought into the ranks of the imperial army shortly after the Balkan rebellion of 391.
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In 395, we are told by Zosimus, Alaric grew angry at not having been given a proper command, instead remaining in charge of just those barbarians he had led on the
campaign against Eugenius.
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This anger is quite plausible. Particularly given that barbarian auxiliaries had borne the brunt of the fighting at the
Frigidus, Alaric may well have felt he deserved a promotion for having won Theodosius his victory. Regardless, while
en route
through the Balkans, Alaric rose in revolt. At first, he was joined only by the troops he already commanded, but his following soon burgeoned.
We should probably envisage Alaric’s followers growing in the same way as did those of Fritigern between 376 and 378, an initial core being joined by a varied group of the dissatisfied and dispossessed who saw in the rebellion a chance to better their condition. In the Balkans of the early 390s, the Gothic settlers of 382 and their descendants may have had especially good reasons for dissatisfaction and may therefore have supplied the largest number of new recruits as Alaric’s following grew, but we lack evidence to that effect. Certainly nothing supports the common assumption that Alaric gathered behind him all the Goths of the 382 treaty, or even a majority of them
.

Besides, his earliest goals were more personal and more limited. He wanted a proper command and, in 395, he marched on
Constantinople to
demand it. We are told that
Rufinus bribed
Alaric to withdraw from the city by giving him leave to sack provinces elsewhere in the Balkans, but Claudian, our source for this, was always ready to slander Stilicho’s enemies, Rufinus very much among them.
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More plausibly, as it nearly always did, Constantinople simply looked like too dangerous a target
, so that Alaric turned instead to the softer options of
Macedonia and
Thessaly. Rufinus, for his part, could hardly mount an effective defence, still less go on the offensive, lacking as he did the eastern field army, which remained in Italy under
Stilicho’s command. Before 395 was out, however, Stilicho had marched across the Alps and into the Balkans to deal with Alaric
.

From the moment of Theodosius’ death, Stilicho always claimed guardianship of both
Arcadius and
Honorius, on the grounds that this had been the deathbed wish of
Theodosius himself. Contemporaries could not have verified that claim any more than we can. Making
good on it would have meant displacing the powerful eastern officials who already controlled Arcadius, and they, of course, rejected Stilicho’s position entirely.
But by marching his army into the Balkans to deal with Alaric, Stilicho could also apply crippling pressure to the regime of Rufinus. Or so one might have thought, save for the puzzling results of the actual expedition: before the end of 395, Stilicho had returned the eastern army to Constantinople under the immediate command of the Gothic general
Gainas, and had himself retired from the campaign against Alaric without having brought him to battle.
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Claudian would have it that Stilicho, a loyal servant to both emperors, was only acting in response to Arcadius’ request for the return of the troops, but that cannot be the whole story and may be entirely false.
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Instead, we may suspect that, when Claudian insists on Stilicho’s firm discipline and skill in leading two armies that had recently fought one another at the bloodbath of the
Frigidus, he is covering up the fact that Stilicho had found it impossible to control both eastern and western field armies on a single campaign
.
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Unable to trust the eastern troops in a pitched battle against Alaric, and knowing that the eastern frontier needed its field army, Stilicho sent them back to Constantinople under the command of the general
Gainas. When the army was mustered for inspection there in November 395, Rufinus was seized and torn to pieces by the soldiers. The regency in Constantinople was taken over by the eunuch
Eutropius, Arcadius’ trusted grand chamberlain, who had himself been plotting against Rufinus for some time. Eutropius’ interests and those of
Stilicho coincided only briefly, and when the eunuch proved no more deferential to Stilicho’s claimed regency over the East than Rufinus had been, he became the new target of Claudian’s poisonous invective
. By then, Stilicho had beaten a tactical retreat to Italy
. Alaric did not as yet pose any threat to the western empire, and leaving him at large could only help undermine Eutropius in Constantinople
.

Stilicho spent most of 396 in Gaul, repairing the frontier that had been weakened during the civil war between Eugenius and Theodosius.
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Alaric, meanwhile, advanced into
Greece via the pass at
Thermopylae
and remained in the peninsula until 397, raiding as far south as the
Peloponnese, in an action recorded in
Eunapius’
Lives of the Sophists
.
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In 397, while Eutropius’ eastern regime was still enfeebled by competition over the regency and faced the added burden of
Hunnic raids across the Armenian frontier, Stilicho again felt ready to intervene in the Alaric affair. In early April, he led a naval expedition to Greece, making landfall in the south and forcing the Gothic leader to retreat up into the mountainous province of
Epirus, though failing to bring him to submission
.
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Eutropius took this invasion very badly. He viewed it, with good reason, as a deliberate attempt to undermine him in the same way that Rufinus had been destroyed. Having decided that, of the two potential threats, Alaric was far preferable to Stilicho, Eutropius persuaded the compliant Arcadius to declare Stilicho a public enemy –
hostis publicus
. At the same time, Eutropius entered into negotiations with Alaric, granting him some sort of official position in the eastern military hierarchy.
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This clever manoeuvre outflanked Stilicho, for now Alaric, not he, was the legally constituted authority in the region and he had no reason to think that the local
curiales
and landowners in the Balkans were more likely to listen to him than to Alaric. Having been left little choice, Stilicho withdrew once again back to Italy
.

We do not know for certain what position Alaric actually received. Claudian provides our evidence and he is chiefly concerned to demonstrate the multiple ways in which Eutropius had betrayed the empire. Thus according to Claudian, Alaric was given charge of all Illyricum, commanding the services of imperial factories he had once looted and sitting in lawful judgement over cities his men had so recently plundered.
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Once we cut through the rampant hyperbole, it seems likely that Alaric was given a military command that allowed him to legally request the services of the civilian government in Greece. The post of
magister militum per Illyricum
, which is generally conjectured by scholars and was certainly vacant in 397, fits the evidence well. Yet what happened to Alaric and his followers after 397 is much less clear:
Zosimus’ account leaves out an entire decade’s worth of material when he switches sources from Eunapius to
Olympiodorus. It is possible that between 397 and 401, Alaric’s followers were billeted on the cities of
the southern Balkans and supplied by civilian administrators in the same way as any other unit of the imperial army would have been. On the other hand, some scholars argue that Alaric’s followers returned to the land as farmers, perhaps even the land they had been assigned in the peace of 382. Any conclusion will depend on whether one believes that Alaric led a Gothic army or that he had mobilized the treaty-Goths of 382, not on the evidence which is largely absent. Regardless, we hear nothing of Alaric or his followers for nearly four years between 397 and 401.