Chapter 8
In the decades that followed Theodosius’ treaty of 382, there is a great deal of evidence for Goths in and around the empire, but remarkably little for those Goths who actually concluded their peace with Theodosius. Indeed, it is very possible that the larger number of these “treaty-Goths” settled down to a life on the land in the Balkan provinces and were never heard from again. Apart from them, however, we still find Ulfila’s Goths, the so-called Gothi minores, in the Roman province of Scythia. Elsewhere, a Gothic population seems to have lived in Asia Minor, where a serious rebellion broke out in the year 399 under a commander named Tribigild, who probably made use of Goths who had survived the massacres and police actions of 378–379. Beyond the frontier, many Gothic residents remained, even though the upheavals that had led to the Danube crossing seem to have continued. We do not yet have any evidence for Huns in the immediate vicinity of the Roman frontier – indeed, we first meet a Danubian Hun in 400, when a chieftain named Uldin had some dealings with the government in Constantinople.
Instead of direct Hunnic involvement along the Danube, we see during the 380s and 390s a continuation of the political realignments that had started in 376. Although the details of these changes are almost totally invisible to us until the disintegration of the Hunnic empire in the 450s, several different Gothic groups emerge at that point from the shadow of Hunnic hegemony. This suggests that in the decades between 376 and the mid fifth century, many Gothic leaders – men like the megistanes whom we met in thePassion of St. Saba – retained the authority they had possessed before 376, while others arose to take the place of those who had departed for the empire. Most Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov sites west of the Prut river continue without disruption in the last quarter of the fourth and the first quarter of the fifth century, and it is not until after 410 that we begin to see real changes to the material culture of the region.[197] Thus the literary and the archaeological evidence – limited as they are – both suggest that, despite the convulsions of the 370s, a substantial Gothic population survived beyond the old ripa Gothica. Indeed, after the events of 376, we have very limited evidence for further Gothic crossings into the empire: only two are on record in the Greek and Roman sources.
The first of them might cause some surprise to readers of the last two chapters, concerning as it does the old Tervingian iudex Athanaric. It would appear that, by 380, Athanaric’s attempt at going it alone had failed. Deserted even by those who had earlier preferred him to Alavivus and Fritigern, he finally had to make his peace with the empire. The fact that Valens was dead no doubt made the inherent humiliation of this reversal easier to bear, and Theodosius did his best to make the transition painless. The emperor welcomed Athanaric to Constantinople on 14 January 381 with great honours and gave him a lavish state funeral when he died of natural causes soon afterwards.[198] In the midst of a still ongoing Balkan war, the peaceful reception of a noble Goth like Athanaric must have had significant propaganda value for Theodosius, even if the old man had arrived with virtually no following and had no practical influence on the Goths already inside the empire. In fact, it was Athanaric’s very harmlessness that made him ideal for Theodosius’ needs, and more dangerous Gothic outsiders were not made welcome in the same way. We discover this in the case of our second documented Danube crossing, in 386, when Theodosius celebrated a triumph over some Greuthungi whose request for admission to the empire he accepted, before having them treacherously slaughtered as they made their way across the frontier.[199] This episode illustrates both how central the maintenance of peace in the Balkans had become to Theodosian policy, and also how fluid the political life of the barbaricum remained if, as late as 386, a group of Greuthungi without any known connection to the Gothic settlers of 382, felt that settlement inside the empire was preferable to life beyond its frontiers.
Gothic Officers in the Roman Army
The treaty of 382 marked the beginning of a new phase in the relationships between Goths and empire in more than one way: beginning in the 380s, we find a remarkable number of Goths, aristocrats ‘who were paramount in reputation and nobility’ as Eunapius puts it, pursuing careers as officers in the imperial army.[200] There was, to be sure, nothing particularly noteworthy about Goths serving in the Roman military. Whether as the result of treaty terms or simply as mercenaries recruited ad hoc, they had done so for many years. On the other hand, the rank of the Goths we now start to find in imperial service is striking. In the middle years of the fourth century, Frankish and Alamannic princes regularly commanded elite regiments of the imperial army, but Gothic officers were more or less totally unknown. The Danube crossing and the subsequent Balkan wars seem to have changed all that.
The fighting and the very fact of physical settlement in the empire disrupted the social hierarchies that had existed amongst Gothic elites back home in the barbaricum. Many Gothic noblemen will have quite suddenly found themselves lacking the resources and power that they had enjoyed before 376, and so they turned to Roman careers as the best alternative available. Among attested Gothic officers, we have already met Modares, one of the generals who helped pacify the Balkans for Theodosius in 381 and 382 and also the recipient of a very complimentary letter from bishop Gregory of Nazianzus.[201] Other such generals include Fravitta and Eriulf. The rivalry between these two Gothic nobles stretched back to before their entering imperial service and was only resolved when Fravitta killed Eriulf at a drunken banquet hosted by Theodosius himself.[202] Thereafter, Fravitta had a distinguished career in the eastern army, marrying a Roman bride and actually putting down a mutiny led by another Gothic general, Gainas. That mutiny, as we shall see, brought down several eastern governments and left thousands of Goths dead in rioting which Gainas himself did not long survive. All of these men illustrate the sudden influx of skillful and important Gothic leaders into the Roman imperial hierarchy, and their rapid assimilation into roles which their Frankish and Alamannic peers had played for many decades already. But a far more significant figure than any of these generals was Alaric, whose career climaxed with the notorious sack of Rome.
The Importance of Alaric
Alaric is one of the most important figures in the whole history of the later Roman empire. His career was entirely unprecedented. Like the many Gothic generals just named, Alaric had no power base outside the empire, no kingdom from which he could manage his relationship with the emperor and into which he could retreat if his position became unsustainable. Yet unlike them, Alaric did not follow the well-established path up the career ladder of the army, becoming part of the imperial elite by the only route open to a barbarian. He became a Roman general, but never held a regular military command. He may have been a Gothic king, but he never found a kingdom. In other circumstances, he might have been a splendid anomaly, like Attila the Hun a generation later, a man whose historical impact was so completely the product of his singular personality as to defy parallel or sequel. Instead, Alaric’s career was a watershed in the history of the empire, inadvertently forging an entirely new model for a barbarian leader inside the imperial frontiers: Alaric proved that it was possible to dwell inside the empire and play a commanding role in imperial politics, without being absorbed into the structures of imperial government. Unlike anyone before him, Alaric was able to maintain a body of supporters inside the empire whose only connection to the empire came through him. That power-base permitted him to act in ways that no one inside the imperial hierarchy could.
In the process of pursuing his own personal interests, Alaric also re-created the Goths, and what it meant to be a Goth. Although, as we have just seen, there were any number of other Gothic leaders in the army, and large Gothic populations both inside and on the fringes of the empire, Alaric and his followers soon became ‘the Goths’ as far as contemporaries were concerned. In fact, Alaric’s following came to be identified as the direct successor of those Goths who had crossed the Danube in 376; in some sense, they were thought to be the same Goths.[203] Strictly speaking, this identification is simply incorrect: the Gothic groups who had crossed the Danube no longer existed, and the followers of Alaric who sacked Rome were made up not just of Balkan Goths but those from many other places as well. Yet over time the identification of Alaric’s followers as ‘the Goths’ took on a reality all its own. Fifteen years of his leadership gave Alaric’s following a sense of community that survived his own death. First under his brother-in-lawAthaulf, then under a series of other leaders, Alaric’s Goths remained together inside the empire, going on to settle in Gaul. There, in the province of Aquitaine, they put down roots and created the first autonomous barbarian kingdom inside the frontiers of the Roman empire.
The Usurpation of Magnus Maximus and Problems in the Balkans
Alaric came to prominence in 395, but we know that he was already active a few years earlier, in the aftermath of Theodosius’ first campaign against a western usurper. Theodosius, as we saw in the last chapter, became emperor in 379, possibly without the approval of Gratian. He was given control of the Balkans in order to end the Gothic wars, but he received only limited western assistance in this task. Gratian’s main concern was to confine the Gothic problem to the eastern Balkans and away from Pannonia, while he devoted himself to the Rhine frontier. Back in the West, however, Gratian soon made himself very unpopular with the regular army, supposedly because he showed excessive favouritism to his Alanic bodyguard. In 383, he faced a mutiny in Gaul, led by a general of Spanish origin named Magnus Maximus. Maximus (r. 383–388) overthrew and killed Gratian, taking control of the western regions of Gaul, Spain and Britain, while leaving the twelve-year-old Valentinian Ⅱ in precarious control of Italy and Africa.
Preoccupied with settling affairs in the eastern provinces, which were still deeply disturbed by the years of uncertainty that had followed Adrianople, Theodosius could not have spared the resources for a campaign against Maximus, even had he wanted to. But it is hard to imagine his having felt much desire to avenge a colleague with whom he had been on such bad terms. In fact, relations had been deteriorating since the early part of 383, half a year before Gratian’s death. At that point, Theodosius had raised his own five-year-old son Arcadius to the rank of augustus, a promotion that Gratian’s western court refused to recognize.[204] At least initially, therefore, Theodosius may actually have welcomed the murder of Gratian as a chance to entrench his own dynastic control. Certainly he made no move against Maximus. Things only changed in 387 when Maximus invaded the territory of the young Valentinian Ⅱ. He and his mother Justina fled to Theodosius. Exiled in Thessalonica, they beseeched Theodosius’ aid in restoring a legitimate augustus to the throne from which he had been evicted. Theodosius owed his position to a member of the Valentinianic dynasty and he could hardly refuse this request, however uncongenial. With no great enthusiasm, he mustered an army and marched west in 388. Maximus’ revolt was crushed thanks to the superior skills of Theodosius’ generals, and Theodosius himself remained in Italy until the summer of 391, graciously accepting the excuses and regrets of the many western aristocrats who had collaborated with Maximus.
While Theodosius was away, there was trouble in the Balkans. Units of the army stationed there had been offered money by Maximus to raise a disturbance at Theodosius’ rear.[205] We do not know where fighting started, and it is very unclear whether we should think in terms of a major revolt, a long-lasting rebellion of auxiliary troops, or simply wide-scale banditry. Since the depredations of a fractious auxiliary troop and the bands of brigands that haunted many imperial provinces throughout Roman history could look identical even to contemporaries, our own inability to separate the phenomena should come as no surprise. All the same, the scale of the Balkan problem is revealed by the fact that a high-ranking general named Botheric was stationed in Thessalonica in 390. Botheric’s murder in a riot led to one of the most famous episodes in Theodosius’ career: when the emperor ordered that thousands of citizens be massacred in the circus of Thessalonica as punishment, he was forced to abase himself and do public penance by bishop Ambrose of Milan, who would not admit Theodosius to communion until he had done so.[206] The rioting in Thessalonica probably had nothing to do with the general trouble in the Balkans – it is said to have followed the imprisonment of a popular charioteer – but Botheric’s presence there is a sure indication of trouble, because Thessalonica never had a military establishment save in emergencies.
An Important Source: The Poet Claudian
We do not know how many – if indeed any – of these rebellious units were drawn from the Gothic settlers of 382. Our sources are unusually opaque. The narrative in Zosimus’ New History is filled with narrative incident, but little historical detail. The poems of Claudian, meanwhile, bathe genuine incidents in a wash of poetic embellishment. Claudian, whose earliest surviving works date to the early 390s, is often our fullest historical witness to events of that decade, which brings with it a number of problems. Claudian – as we call the man born Claudius Claudianus – was a young Egyptian from Alexandria, a Greek speaker by origin, who made his career in the Latin West as a court poet, rising to the rank of tribunus et notarius and earning a statue in the forum of Trajan in Rome.[207] He is widely regarded as the last great Latin poet of antiquity, and he has left us work in several poetic genres, all equally accomplished. Most of his career, from what we can tell, was spent in the service of the general Stilicho, a close confidant of Theodosius, the husband of the emperor’s niece, and regent for his younger son Honorius from the time of Theodosius’ death in 395. Stilicho was undoubtedly the most powerful man in the western empire, and spent much of his career attempting to assert the same level of control over the East. In Claudian, he had a mouthpiece and a panegyrist of genius, who magnified events great and small and transformed poems on every subject into opportunities to praise his patron. Between his panegyric on the third consulate of Honorius, delivered on 1 January 396 and fulsome in its defence of Stilicho’s conduct a year earlier, until his own death soon after 404, Claudian is often our only extant source. What is more, his is the only evidence not contaminated by the hindsight of the sack of Rome in 410. Although poetry is not history, and teasing out narrative reference from the poetic context in which it is embedded is not always easy, we learn a great deal from Claudian. Indeed it is one of his poems that gives us our first introduction to Alaric.
Alaric’s Early Career
When Theodosius finally returned to the East in 391, he supposedly came close to being killed by Gothic rebels, among whom, we may surmise, was Alaric. Claudian tells us that Theodosius was confronted by Alaric at the river Hebrus, the modern Maritsa.[208] If this episode actually took place, late summer 391 is the only point in Theodosius’ career that can accommodate it. We do not know what position, if any, Alaric held in 391. Although it is still often claimed that Alaric ruled the Goths because he belonged to the royal dynasty of the Balthi, the only source for this is Jordanes – and Jordanes at his most transparently fictitious, inventing a ‘Visigothic’ dynasty to match the Amal family of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric.[209] Jordanes’ testimony on this point can be taken seriously only by those whose theoretical superstructure requires an aristocratic Traditionskern to transmit Gothic ethnicity. All the contemporary evidence shows that Alaric was a new man and in 391 he was not yet a significant figure, just one of the many bandits and rebels who made the Balkans a festering wound in the body politic. Rather than getting bogged down in Balkan guerrilla warfare, for which he had shown not the slightest aptitude, Theodosius left matters to the general Promotus. When Promotus was killed in an ambush, Stilicho was sent to repair the situation, the first command in which he is firmly attested.[210] Details are lacking, but it seems that he pinned down the rebels and forced them to negotiate peace with the emperor.[211] There is, at any rate, no sign of continuing Balkan disturbances when Theodosius was again forced to march west against a usurper, this time in 394.
The Usurpation of Eugenius
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.[212] 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 sonHonorius, 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.[213] Flavianus and Arbogast committed suicide in the face of their total defeat.[214]
Stilicho
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.
Alaric’s Revolt
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.[215] 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.[216] 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.[217] 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.
Stilicho and Rufinus
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 generalGainas, and had himself retired from the campaign against Alaric without having brought him to battle.[218]
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.[219] 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.[220] 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.
Alaric and Eutropius
Stilicho spent most of 396 in Gaul, repairing the frontier that had been weakened during the civil war between Eugenius and Theodosius.[221] 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.[222] 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.[223] 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.[224] 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.[225] 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.
The problem of Alaric thus fell into temporary abeyance. This was just as well for Stilicho who now had more pressing concerns. Eutropius suborned the comes Africae Gildo, a north African aristocrat who had been given his sweeping imperial command by Theodosius twelve years earlier.[226] Gildo transferred his allegiance from the western to the eastern government and cut off shipments of African grain to the city of Rome. Rome’s urban population was prone to rioting at the best of times, and a food shortage would have guaranteed disaster and might easily have led to the collapse of Stilicho’ regime. Until Gildo was suppressed, Stilicho would have no time for the East. At Constantinople, in the meantime, the eastern court dissolved into an orgy of political intrigue. Eutropius was unpopular both because he was a eunuch and because of his role in the religious controversy to which eastern cities were always prone. Despite his success in personally leading a campaign against the Huns in Armenia and Asia Minor – and the consequent award of the consulate for 399 – his enemies were on the lookout for any opportunity to bring him down. In the end, a nasty revolt in Asia Minor destroyed not just Eutropius’ regime, but that of his successor Aurelian as well, while also poisoning forever Alaric’s good relations with the eastern empire.[227]
Gainas, Tribigild and the Eastern Court
We have already briefly met the Gothic leaders Gainas and Tribigild, the one a commander in the army that Theodosius had taken to fight Eugenius, the other in charge of troops at Nacoleia in Asia Minor. Tribigild, perhaps having decided to imitate Alaric and win a promotion for himself, raised a rebellion in spring 399 and defeated the first imperial army sent to fight him. Gainas, sent to suppress the rebellion, decided that Tribigild was too powerful to defeat. He recommended that the imperial court enter into negotiations, which he undertook to manage. Tribigild’s chief condition for renewed allegiance was the deposition of Eutropius. As the eunuch already had powerful enemies in the palace, the empress Eudoxia chief among them, Arcadius was finally persuaded to abandon a chamberlain whom he sincerely trusted. Eutropius was cast out of office along with his supporters in August 399, enjoying a short exile in Cyprus before being executed on spurious treason charges.[228] An experienced eastern bureaucrat namedAurelian became praetorian prefect and replaced Eutropius as the chief minister of Arcadius.
That, however, did not satisfy Gainas, who now bargained on his own account, rather than as an intermediary with Tribigild. In April 400, Gainas marched his army to Chalcedon, on the Asian side of the Bosporus opposite Constantinople. He demanded what Alaric had received three years before – a senior military command – and also the consulate. Several other senior generals had held the consulate and Gainas clearly felt his own services had earned similar recognition. He also demanded the deposition of Aurelian. Two of the three requests were granted – Aurelian was deposed and Gainas was designated consul for the following year. However, the new praetorian prefect Caesarius was just as hostile to Gainas as Eutropius and Aurelian had been, and the Goths were unpopular with the people of Constantinople as well. In July, Gainas decided that it would be safer to move his troops away from the city and into Thrace. But mobilization provoked riots, and thousands of Goths, mostly civilians, were massacred inside the city by the urban mob, many burned alive in the church where they had taken shelter. Gainas was forced to flee after being defeated in battle by the general Fravitta, and did not return alive from his attempt to get across the Danube. Tribigild too was suppressed, and the longevity and stability of Caesarius’ regime put paid to any hope Alaric might have had of renewing cordial relations with the eastern court. Caesarius’ government in Constantinople lasted for fully three years, and by the time he was eventually replaced in 404, Alaric had left the eastern empire behind.
Alaric in Italy
Late in 401, Alaric and his followers set out for Italy, arriving there on the 18th of November.[229] How many of them there were is beyond us. Some scholars maintain that Alaric took with him to Italy most of the Gothic settlers of 382, but there is nothing in the sources to suggest that. Even his motives are a blank, although it seems clear that he no longer regarded the eastern empire as a reliable negotiating partner, and the death of Gainas at the end of 400 may have made Alaric’s own position worryingly anomalous. Crossing the Julian Alps, Alaric hovered on the frontier of Italy, threatening Stilicho with invasion and hoping to extract concessions that are not, at least at this point, specified in our sources. In the spring of 402, Alaric invaded and Stilicho brought him to battle twice in northern Italy, first at Pollentia in April on Easter Sunday, then at Verona a couple of months later. Alaric had been able to cross the Alps while Stilicho was detained in Raetia, and he won a victory over a small Roman army before going on to besiegeMilan, a grand city which was frequently an imperial residence. Stilicho marched to the relief of the city, then drove Alaric to Pollentia. The battle of Pollentia was a modest but real success for Stilicho: he seized many prisoners, including Alaric’s wife and children, and took possession of all the treasure that Alaric had amassed in half a decade’s plundering. Stilicho granted Alaric a truce, in which he was meant to withdraw from Italy for good; perhaps Stilicho wanted to preserve a chastened Alaric as a potentially useful tool, perhaps he simply regarded Alaric as too powerful to destroy.
But very soon, Stilicho claimed that Alaric had violated the terms of the truce and brought him to battle again, this time at Verona, in July or August of 402.[230] This fight was no more conclusive than Pollentia had been and even Claudian admits that Alaric was able to consider attacking Gaul or Raetia in its immediate aftermath. If some of Alaric’s support melted away in the absence of a decisive success, he was nonetheless able to avoid further confrontations and retreated into the Balkans again.[231] From 402 to late 404 or early 405, Alaric occupied the northwestern Balkans, perhaps the province of Pannonia Ⅱ, shunted by Stilicho into the de facto no-man’s land between East and West. In this corner of Illyricum, Alaric could not aggravate the state of almost continuous cold war between the eastern and western courts, or at least not until one side or the other decided to deploy him in its own interest. This time it was Stilicho who took the initiative. He decided to grant Alaric the same sort of office that Eutropius had granted him half a decade earlier. Probably in 405, Alaric’s followers again returned to Epirus, their leader once again bearing the codicils of office appointing him magister militum, but now supplied by the western rather than the eastern empire.[232] Eastern propaganda chose to see this move as Stilicho’s preparation for a full-scale invasion of Illyricum, an interpretation modern scholars have been too willing to accept. In fact, Stilicho’s move represented nothing new. Granting Alaric his new title was no more than the reassertion of a hegemony that Stilicho had always claimed to possess, and it involved taking no action whatsoever – Alaric was already in Illyricum, and he might just as well be put to some use as an irritant to the eastern court. Even had Stilicho actually planned to take action himself in Illyricum, and there is not the slightest evidence that he did, events in Italy and Gaul rapidly made such plans unfeasible.
Crisis in the Western Empire
Late in 405, a Gothic king named Radagaisus, hitherto completely unknown to history, crossed the Alps from central Europe, marched through the province of Raetia, and invaded Italy. More than a year passed before he was finally subdued. To make matters worse, on the last day of either 405 or 406 a large band of Vandals, Alans and Suevi crossed the Rhine near Mainz and spread devastation in the northern provinces of Gaul.[233] That invasion provoked a string of usurpations in Britain, the third of which, led by a common soldier named Constantine (r. 407–411), spread across the Channel and soon removed Gaul, Britain and Spain from the control of Honorius’ government in Italy. For obvious reasons, Stilicho had to deal with the threat to Italy before he could attend to a Gallic usurpation. In August 406, he chased Radagaisus down near Florence and won a crushing victory that left thousands of the Gothic king’s followers enslaved – so many that the bottom fell out of the market for able-bodied slaves.[234] With Radagaisus dead, Stilicho could turn to other matters, particularly suppressing the Gallic usurpation of Constantine, for which purpose Alaric might prove very useful. Unfortunately for Stilicho, Alaric had now lost patience.
There is no question that Alaric had recouped whatever losses of manpower he had suffered at Pollentia and Verona, and, after three years as a legitimate commander in Illyricum, he may well have begun to rebuild his financial position as well. But Illyricum and Greece had been plundered repeatedly since the early 390s and it is hard to see how they could have yielded revenues on a large enough scale to replace the spoils that Stilicho captured at Pollentia. Having already been resident in the eastern empire for so long, Alaric seems to have decided its potential as a target was limited. The West offered richer pickings. Thus in 407, he marched on Italy again, taking up position in Noricum – modern Austria – and demanding 4,000 pounds of gold if he was to spare Italy from another full-scale invasion. Stilicho, whose first attempts to deal with the Gallic usurper Constantine had not succeeded, decided to turn Alaric loose on him instead. He therefore convinced Honorius and the Roman senate to part with the sum demanded.[235]Stilicho’s plan was sensible and based on a realistic assessment of the dangers inherent in the present situation, but it weakened his own position fatally. The senators who had to pay for this massive subvention understandably resented it, and their sympathisers at court began to play upon the suspicions of the emperor. Like Valentinian Ⅱ before him, Honorius had ambitions to rule in his own right and, again like Valentinian, he was a dreadful judge of character, totally incapable of recognizing where his own best interests lay. Unlike his late predecessor, however, Honorius possessed a certain low cunning. Rather than confront Stilicho prematurely, he allowed enemies at court to undermine the general’s position. Matters were only exacerbated by Stilicho’s insistence that Honorius marry his younger daughter Thermantia when the emperor’s first wife Maria, Stilicho’s elder daughter, died.[236]
The breaking point came through purest chance – Arcadius died in May 408 and both Honorius and Stilicho determined to go to Constantinople to assert western control there. Honorius already mistrusted Stilicho’s motives. He now allowed the magister officiorum Olympius to persuade him that Stilicho was planning to seize the throne for himself and his own son Eucherius, thereby displacing the Theodosian dynasty. Given that the well-timed death of a puppet emperor had secured the position of that same dynasty only fifteen years before, one can see why Honorius might have believed insinuations along such lines. At any rate, he acquiesced in an organized coup against Stilicho. At Ticinum, modern Pavia, regiments destined for the Gallic war mutinied, lynching several officers. Stilicho was blamed, and Olympius had him declared a public enemy by Honorius. Loyal to the Theodosian dynasty to his last breath, Stilicho refused to attack the emperor who had betrayed him, even given the vast resources at his disposal. Instead, he allowed himself to be removed from the sanctuary of the church in Ravenna in which he had sought refuge and went quietly to his execution on 22 August 408. His supporters were purged in cities around Italy; his young son was hunted down and executed; and the wives and children of his barbarian auxiliaries were massacred by the thousand.[237]
The First Siege of Rome
The death of Stilicho meant that the full force of Alaric’s anger was unleashed on Italy. Olympius refused to honour the promises which Alaric had been given. Thousands of barbarian soldiers, their wives and children dead, deserted and joined him in Noricum.[238] He gave Honorius one last chance, demanding a sum of gold – how much is not specified – and an exchange of hostages, perhaps hoping for the return of such civilian dependents of his new followers as still survived.[239] When this overture was rebuffed, Alaric marched straight down the Italian peninsula to Rome. During the winter of 408/409 he besieged the city – the first of three sieges – and blockaded the river route up the Tiber from Portus, thereby threatening the Romans with starvation. Panic gripped the city, and scapegoats were sought.[240] Stilicho’s widow Serena was strangled by order of the senate, posthumous vengeance on the man they blamed for Alaric’s continued existence.[241] While the senate dithered, Alaric’s following grew as barbarian slaves, some of them the survivors of Radagaisus’ Gothic army, fled to join him from all over Italy. Finally, the Romans gave in and begged for a truce. In exchange for Alaric’s letting food into the city, the senate promised to send an embassy to Ravenna and convince the emperor to make peace with him. Alaric agreed. For him, Rome was a bargaining counter, not an end in itself, and if he could get more out of allowing the Romans to eat than he could from keeping them starved, then so much the better. The senate’s embassy departed early in 409 and achieved what it had set out to do. Olympius conferred high office on the Roman envoys, and Alaric was invited to meet with representatives of the emperor.
Negotiations took place at Rimini in 409, while a Gothic army camped outside the city walls. The imperial legation was led by the praetorian prefect of Italy, Jovius, a former ally of Stilicho and rival of Olympius, and perhaps an old acquaintance of Alaric. Relying on the strength of his position, Alaric set his demands quite high. He demanded money and grain, but also the highest generalship, the magisterium utriusque militiae, or command of both services, which Stilicho had held before him. Jovius, it would seem, favoured this arrangement, but either the emperor or Olympius balked at giving another barbarian the codicils of office. They conceded as much grain and money as Alaric might want but no position in the imperial hierarchy.[242] Outraged by the refusal, Alaric turned away from Rimini and began the march down the via Flaminia towards Rome, intending to renew the siege. Olympius’ hold on Honorius soon collapsed, and Olympius himself fled to Dalmatia, but this brought Alaric no comfort.[243] Having himself lost face through his failure to manage the negotiations smoothly, Jovius now joined the side of the intransigents, supposedly swearing himself and his cronies to never again attempt peace with Alaric.
The Second Siege and the Usurpation of Priscus Attalus
Alaric thus lost all potential support at the court of Honorius. As a result, when he calmed down at some place on the road between Rimini and Rome, and offered up much less stringent demands (a moderate amount of grain and a couple of unimportant provinces like Noricum in which to dwell), these were twice rejected and he found himself forced to consider stronger measures.[244] Renewing the siege of Rome was an obvious tactic, but it had not got him what he wanted last time and there was no reason to think it would now. Something more drastic was needed. Alaric had been involved in imperial affairs long enough to realize that usurpers concentrated the imperial mind wonderfully. He therefore decided to set up an emperor of his own, one who would both meet his demands and perhaps also force Honorius to take a more reasonable stance in negotiations. In December 409, therefore, he declared the Roman nobleman Priscus Attalus emperor. Attalus was one of the senate’s leading lights. He had held office already under Theodosius, and had been prominent in embassies to the imperial court earlier in the reign of Honorius. During Alaric’s first siege of Rome, he had been one of the three senatorial ambassadors who went to Ravenna and arranged for the parley at Rimini. Appointedcomes sacrarum largitionum – head of the emperor’s treasury – and then prefect of the city of Rome, he was meant to keep the senate and the Roman population firmly on the side of Ravenna despite the threat posed by Alaric. He was still serving as urban prefect when Alaric offered to make him emperor.
Alaric may have intended this manoeuvre to serve only his own interests, but the new augustus had real imperial pretensions as well. Having seen how little the court at Ravenna valued the safety of Rome and the wishes of the Roman senate, Attalus appears to have turned decisively against Honorius. All our extant sources derive at one or more remove from the now fragmentary account of Olympiodorus, an eastern ambassador to the West in the 420s and the most careful and thorough Roman historian since Ammianus.[245] Though it is often hard to recover Olympiodorus’ insights from the sources like Zosimus that used him, it would seem that Attalus presumed to speak for the Romans of Rome, preparing a restoration of imperial majesty with a thoroughly Roman flavour. Attalus bestowed top military commands on Alaric and his brother-in-law Athaulf, but the rest of his nascent regime was plucked from the upper echelons of Roman senatorial society. His self-confidence was ill placed, however, and he seems either not to have realized, or to have willfully ignored, how much his position depended on Alaric. Very soon after his proclamation, Attalus began refusing to take Alaric’s advice. He did not act quickly enough to secure Africa and its grain supply and then his first attempt at seizing control of the province failed when his general Constans was defeated and killed by the pro-Honorian comes Africae Heraclian. Yet having failed, he still refused to allow Alaric to send a small force of 500 Goths – all Alaric believed it would take – to conquer Africa and with it Rome’s grain supply. Instead, Attalus marched on Ravenna and, with Alaric at his side, opened negotiations from Rimini. When Honorius offered some sort of collegiate rule as a compromise – an astonishing concession for a legitimate emperor to make and proof of the weakness of his position – Attalus proved stupidly intransigent, insisting that Honorius should be deposed and go into exile on an island.[246]
We cannot know why Attalus was so adamant. Perhaps he mistrusted the good faith of the Ravenna government, and genuinely believed that Rome’s interests could not be safe while Honorius occupied the throne. Perhaps it was misplaced arrogance, the unsheathed contempt of a Roman aristocrat for the upstart dynasty of Theodosius and the present, supine incumbent. Or perhaps, with Alaric at his back, it just seemed foolish not to push for the highest prize of all, sole rule over the western empire. Suddenly, though, his grand plans collapsed. Nearly 4,000 eastern soldiers arrived at Ravenna by ship. These had been requested so long before – while Stilicho was still in power – that no one could possibly have expected their arrival. Ravenna, surrounded by marshes and thus difficult to assault, could now be actively defended as well. Honorius thus had no more need to negotiate at all. Alaric by now clearly regretted his choice of puppet, Attalus having proved neither competent nor pliable. Indeed, for us as for Alaric, it is hard to decide whether Honorius or Attalus was less suited to the task of ruling an empire. Honorius at least possessed the one sole merit of legitimacy, and so early in 410, Alaric deposed Attalus, perhaps as a result of secret negotiations with Ravenna, perhaps as a precondition for opening them.[247]
The Third Siege and the Sack of Rome
This produced results. Alaric led his forces to within sixty stades – just under 13 kilometres – of Ravenna, at a location whose name has been lost in the corrupt textual tradition. He hoped to bring two years’ worth of fruitless half measures to some permanent conclusion. As we saw in our prologue, the position of his men was deteriorating, and continued delays could only make matters worse. All might have gone well, but for yet another chance complication. While Alaric prepared to negotiate in good faith, he was attacked by the Gothic general Sarus, a man who had been in imperial service since the days of Stilicho. We do not know why Sarus intervened at precisely this moment. One source tells us that he regarded the prospect of Alaric’s coming to terms with Honorius as a danger to his own position.[248] It thus does not look as if he was acting on the instructions of Ravenna, though he might have been. As became clear in the years that followed, Sarus bore a grudge against Alaric’s brother-in-law Athaulf, and he may have detested Alaric as well. Regardless of Sarus’ reasons, Alaric interpreted the attack as evidence of Honorius’ bad faith. Dropping all further effort to negotiate, he turned from Ravenna and marched back on Rome for the third and last time.
This time Rome was not going to be a prop to negotiation. Time and time again that had failed and Alaric’s patience was at an end. Alaric put the eternal city to the sack and we have already seen what that meant. For three days, Alaric’s Goths sacked the city, stripping it of the wealth of centuries. We may be sure that his followers enjoyed themselves. But for Alaric the sack of Rome was an admission of defeat, a catastrophic failure. Everything he had hoped for, had fought for over the course of a decade and a half, went up in flames with the capital of the ancient world. Imperial office, a legitimate place for himself and his followers inside the empire, these were now forever out of reach. He might seize what he wanted, as he had seized Rome, but he would never be given it by right. The sack of Rome solved nothing and when the looting was over Alaric’s men still had nowhere to live and fewer future prospects than ever before. Alaric had shown a new way forward, in his career of intermittent honours and recognition, and those who followed the same road in later decades would realize the potential of the tactics he had pioneered as a simultaneous insider and outsider to the empire. But Alaric’s own road soon came to an end. The sack of Rome ended on the 27th of August 410. Within a couple of months, he was dead.