The Historians of Late Antiquity

by David Rohrbacher

  Orosius depicts the capture of the princess Galla Placidia by the Goths during the siege and her betrothal to Ataulf as part of a divine plan, since the Goths and Romans were thereby united in marriage and friendship (7.40.2; Marchetta 1987). Orosius favors the union, which led Ataulf to support the Romans militarily and brought him under the influence of a Christian Roman wife. If Ataulf’s son, provocatively named Theodosius, had survived, as a grandson of Theodosius the Great he would have been the obvious heir to the throne. Olympiodorus also supported this Romano-Gothic union. He describes their marriage, which took place in the home of a powerful Roman citizen and featured bride and groom in Roman dress (fr. 24). Ataulf presented his bride with fifty young men in silk, each somewhat tastelessly bearing a platter of gold and a platter of jewels looted from Rome. There are songs and revelry “by both the Romans and the barbarians among them” (fr. 24).

  Despite the death of the child and then of Ataulf not long after, the optimistic histories of Orosius and Olympiodorus, different in so many ways, both envisioned a more peaceful future with Gothic forces allied with yet subservient to Roman power. Both are eager, therefore, to minimize the sufferings of the sack of Rome. Olympiodorus celebrated the wealth and splendor of Rome only a few years after the sack history for this reason (fr. 41). By the time that Olympiodorus wrote, of course, the Goths were no longer a major threat to the empire. Instead, both Goths and Romans worked together against both other Germanic groups and against the people who had brought them into conflict in the first place, the Huns.

  The Huns

  The sudden appearance of the Huns in the west in the last years of the fourth century struck contemporaries with fear and amazement (Thompson 1996; Maenchen-Helfen 1973; Zuckerman 1994; Gordon 1960). They were responsible for the movement of the Goths into the empire after 376 and probably for the movement of several Germanic peoples across the Rhine in 405. They can thus be fairly held ultimately responsible for the collapse of Roman political authority in the west (Heather 1995). The Huns managed to wreak such enormous havoc in a remarkably small amount of time. After several decades when the Huns only occasionally appeared on Roman territory, a Hunnic empire quickly coalesced in the 420s under the leadership of Rua. Rua’s heirs were his nephews, Bleda and Attila, and Attila ruled alone after murdering his brother in 445 (Thompson 1996: 97). The Hunnic empire won several major and destructive battles against the Romans, but then, upon the death of Attila in 453, faded quickly from history.

  Despite the importance of the Huns to the history of late antiquity, we are woefully deficient in contemporary sources for their activities. Only some unadorned chronicles and the fragments of Priscus allow us to reconstruct Hunnic history in any substantial way. Priscus, who dealt directly with the Huns on his embassy to Attila, is by far the most trustworthy source on their culture. Other historians tend to use the Huns simply as examples of unparalleled ferocity, and attempt to fit them into the historiographic tradition in ways which fatally distort the reliability of their accounts.

  Sozomen’s account of the first appearance of the Huns, which may derive ultimately from that of Eunapius, reveals both the ignorance of westerners of Hunnic origins and the willingness of historians to rely on mythical tales to supplement their knowledge (Thompson 1996: 19–24). The Huns, according to Sozomen, dwelled on the other side of an enormous marsh from the Goths, a body of water so huge that each people thought it marked the end of the earth. When one day the Huns pursued an ox, stung by insects, across the lake, they discovered the beauty of the other side and decided to conquer it (6.37.3–5). Orosius has a different version which nevertheless equally reveals the ignorance of the Romans. He claims that the Huns were for a long time separated from the west by a mountain range, but that a “sudden madness” drove them against the Goths. This rage was clearly connected, for Orosius, with Valens’ persecution of the orthodox and closing of their churches (7.33.10).

  Eunapius’ Hunnic digression does not survive, but the manner in which he treated the subject is revealing (fr. 41). He explains that he has collected accounts from ancient authors and juxtaposed this material with material drawn from oral reports. This oral information he has sifted in accordance with the perceived accuracy of the report. The methodology of classicizing historiography and Eunapius’ historical practices both likely stood in the way of the creation of an accurate account. Probably Eunapius’ oral informants provided him with the “bull crossing the marsh” tale, to which he added stories taken from ancient histories of unknown peoples whom he identified as the ancestors of the Huns.

  Ammianus’ digression on Hunnic culture and customs has long been praised by scholars, albeit in a guarded fashion, for the details he provides of such an unknown people. Unfortunately, his information is far from first hand, and almost none of what he says can be trusted (31.2; King 1987). The historian has taken ideas and passages from ancient ethnographers and combined them in such a way as to make the Huns seem as uncivilized as possible. Ammianus claims that the Huns do not use fire or seasonings on their food, but eat raw meat which they warm under their saddles. They have no buildings, and actually fear roofs and cities. They never dismount from their horses, eating, drinking, urinating, and sleeping on horseback. “No one among them plows or ever touches a plow handle. They are without fixed habitation, without home or law or stable way of life.” These Huns also completely lack morality and religion. In fact, they are barely human, more like beasts or like gargoyles than like men.

  Some of Ammianus’ descriptions of Hunnic society are drawn nearly verbatim from Pompeius Trogus and Livy. Many of the details are anthropologically impossible. In many cases, the details are clearly selected or invented to emphasize the extreme primitivism of the Huns, who are described as being as different as possible from the civilized Romans. While it should not be doubted, of course, that the nomadic Huns lived lives considerably unlike that of the Romans, Ammianus’ account is too stereotyped and too derivative to reliably illuminate those differences.

  The Huns in the time of Priscus lived in settled villages, with buildings and agriculture. Almost three-quarters of a century separate the description of Ammianus from that of Priscus, and it has often been claimed that Hun society underwent tremendous change owing to its proximity to and involvement with the empire. Due to the unreliability of Ammianus’ account, however, the rate of change in Hun society, like so much else about them, must remain unknown (King 1987: 88).

  In the 440s Huns devastated the Balkans, destroying major cities such as Sirmium and Naissus. In 447 a Hunnic army under the leadership of Attila stood before the gates of Constantinople. The Huns regularly demanded from the east Romans money and the return of fugitives who had fled from Hun territory. The Romans, distracted by military operations in the west, adopted a policy of payments which Priscus scorned as tribute. Priscus’ embassy reveals that the Romans considered assassination, as well but, when the attempt to kill Attila failed, the empire was compelled to make even larger payments to the Huns.

  Priscus describes his visit to the territory ruled by the Huns in detail. He portrays Attila as an autocratic leader, with full authority in administering justice and waging war (fr. 11.2). There were palaces and a bath built by Roman artisans. Money was in use (fr. 11.2). Priscus attended a lavish banquet with ceremonial wine-drinking (fr. 13). While most of the guests ate from silver, and wore clothes encrusted with gold and jewels, Attila ate from wooden plates and drank from wooden cups. While Attila’s lieutenant Onegesius was illiterate, he had secretaries and a man captured in war who wrote letters for him (fr. 14). Priscus depicts the multinational nature of the Hun empire, with Germans and other peoples serving in important roles. Hunnic women were not secluded, and Priscus and his company even stayed in a village which was run by a woman.

  On the death of Theodosius II in 450, his successor Marcian refused to continue to pay subsidies to the Huns. Attila turned west toward Gaul, where he announced his intention to attack the Goths as an ally
of the western emperor Valentinian III. Honoria, the sister of Valentinian III, had been forced into an unhappy marriage, and in a rather desperate attempt to escape, had her ring smuggled to Attila along with a marriage proposal. Honoria’s mother Galla Placidia had, one recalls, married a somewhat more tractable barbarian, the Goth Ataulf. Attila marched through Gaul on his way to claim his bride in Italy, but was rebuffed by the combination of an imperial army commanded by Aetius and a Gothic army under Theodoric I at Orleans, and then defeated a few days later. The next year, the Huns crossed the Alps and besieged and destroyed the northern Italian city of Aquileia. Perhaps for lack of supplies, however, Attila refrained from taking Rome and signed a peace treaty with a delegation led by Pope Leo I. Checked in Europe, the Hunnic army returned to the east in 452 to fight Marcian over the cessation of payments, but in 453 Attila died in his sleep. After Attila’s death, quarreling among his sons and revolts by his subjects broke the empire apart. The fleeting and destructive empire of the Huns left much fear and sensationalism in the late antique historians, but little reliable evidence outside of the firstperson account of Priscus.

  Missions

  In the first two centuries of Christianity, Christians had not aggressively proselytized, and the anti-Christian pagan Celsus could gibe that “if all men wanted to be Christians, the Christians would no longer want them.” By the middle of the third century, however, the Christian apologist Origen could respond to Celsus by stating that everyone could now see the eager missionary activities of Christians throughout the world (Frend 1970). The sphere of such activity soon came to include the non-Roman world, and ecclesiastical histories feature the conversions of numerous barbarian peoples. This recognition of barbarians as potential Christians is an innovation of late antique historiography.

  Eusebius had presented a traditional Constantine as warrior king, a conqueror of foreign people. Rufinus was to alter this vision in his descriptions of the conversion of barbarians that form a major part of his work. He is followed very closely by Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret in his details of two representative stories, the conversions of the Ethiopians and of the Iberians.

  Rufinus’ account of the conversion of the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum or “inner India” is the earliest we have (Ruf. 10.9–10; Soc. 1.19; Soz. 2.24; Theod. 1.23; Thélamon 1981: 31–83; Munro-Hay 1988: 196–213). “In the times of Constantine,” Rufinus says that a philosopher, Meropius, with two young students, Frumentius and Edesius, went to explore Ethiopia. Meropius was killed and the boys were brought before the king, who made Edesius his cupbearer and the bright Frumentius the royal archivist. After the death of the king, the queen asked the young men to serve as regents for the prince, who was only an infant. Frumentius encouraged Roman Christian merchants who visited Ethiopia to establish churches, and instructed some of the native Ethiopians in the faith. Frumentius and Edesius returned to Rome when the prince reached maturity, and Frumentius told the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius about his adventures. Athanasius then appointed Frumentius bishop of Aksum and he returned there. Rufinus claims to have learned of these things from Edesius himself in Tyre, where he had become a priest.

  Despite elements of fable in Rufinus’ account, the broad outline of the story seems to be true. Rufinus specifies a particular source for his knowledge, which he rarely does elsewhere in his history and which enhances our estimate of his accuracy. Frumentius, bishop of Aksum, is also the recipient of a letter from Constantius preserved in Athanasius’ works (Apol. 31), and Ethiopian Christians still to this day revere Frumentius, under the name “Feremnatos,” as the founder of their church. Rufinus frames his account to emphasize certain points. By beginning the story with a reference to the work of the apostles from book 3 of Eusebius’ church history, Rufinus demonstrates that the work of evangelization continues in his own day. The historian attributes Frumentius’ decision to promote Christianity simply to God’s will. Although the Christian Roman emperors may have seen the Christianization of foreign powers as a political goal, Rufinus avoids any such implication, presenting the Ethiopians as the objects of conversion rather than as either Roman allies or enemies.

  Rufinus’ account of the conversion of the Iberians follows similar lines (Ruf. 10.11; Soc. 1.20; Soz. 2.7; Theod. 1.24; Thélamon 1981: 85–122; Braund 1994: 246–58). The Iberians, a people dwelling on the shore of the Black Sea in modern-day Georgia, took captive a devout Christian, whose ascetic practices impressed them greatly. She became well known throughout the kingdom by curing the son of the king with an invocation of the name of Christ. The woman later cured the queen as well, and then persuaded the king, who was rescued when lost in the woods by prayer to the Christian God, to accept Christianity. Even more Iberians were converted when a miracle occurred during the construction of a church. After the conversion, the Iberians wrote to the emperor Constantine requesting clergy and an alliance with the Romans. Rufinus tells us that he learned of these events from Bacurius, a noble Iberian who fought in the Roman army.

  Bacurius is certainly a historical figure, a correspondent of Libanius and a soldier at Adrianople according to Ammianus (31.12.16), and so this story should not be dismissed, although certain folktale motifs may be detected. The performance of healing miracles demonstrates again that the apostolic mission of the New Testament continues in Rufinus’ own day. The figures of the pious queen and the king converted after receiving a divine sign may evoke Helena and Constantine, the prototypical Christian ruling family (Thélamon 1970). Rufinus mentions the political consequences of the conversion, which resulted in an Iberian alliance with Rome rather than with Persia, but in his formulation it is the religious choice which leads to the political one, rather than political calculation leading to the religious choice.

  Rufinus’ work was prompted by concerns over Gothic invaders, and contains a preface which refers to Goths as a “pestiferous disease.” The historian nevertheless provides other paradigms of Roman and barbarian relations beyond that of invader and victim. While the Greek ecclesiastical successors of Rufinus reproduce his conversion accounts, they continue to maintain a more traditional view of barbarians as peoples to be subdued by the Roman emperor. Orosius, however, providing a western view later than that of Rufinus, takes his idea to its logical conclusion. Not only does Orosius believe that the conversion of barbarians in other nations is praiseworthy, but he even praises the arrival of barbarians on the territory of the empire, insofar as this leads to their conversion and, perhaps, pacification. At the end of his work, Orosius claims that the churches are packed with Huns and Vandals, and that the mercy of God has resulted in the entrance of so many barbarians into the empire, for “even with our own weakening, so many peoples are receiving a knowledge of the truth which they would certainly not have been able to find except with this opportunity” (7.41.8).

  Barbarians and Romans

  The Roman empire had always faced non-Roman neighbors and had always had to face non-Romans as allies, subjects, adversaries, or even models to be emulated. In the fourth and fifth centuries Romans often found themselves dealing with non-Romans, whether Persian, German, or Hun, on more equal terms than they had in the past. Traditional Greco-Roman thought, which tended to hold other cultures in contempt, was challenged by the power of Sasanian Persia and by the increasing presence and prominence of non-Romans in the empire itself. The writing of history was one way in which late antique intellectuals sought to answer some of the new questions which the change in Romano-barbarian relations had posed. Why had Roman armies begun to lose to non-Romans? What could restore Roman military preeminence? What sort of relationship should or could Romans have with barbarians?

  It is useful to begin with Aurelius Victor, who expresses fairly standard and traditional ideas about the proper relationship between Romans and barbarians at a time when Roman preeminence was relatively unquestioned. Victor, a provincial, several times praises the contribution made to the Roman state by non-Romans (11.12, 39.16). On the other hand, his convention
al views are clear when he explains that the German Magnentius revolted from the empire because of the “fierce and savage mind of the barbarian” (41.25). To Victor, the real tragedy of the civil wars which erupted after the death of Severus Alexander was that the energy of the emperors was diverted away from the subjugation of barbarians abroad (24.9). On the other hand, when Victor decries the surrender by the senate of its prerogatives, which resulted in rule by “soldiers and even barbarians,” his criticism is directed more toward soldiers than barbarians (37.7). The barbarian threat remained an abstract idea in comparison with Victor’s concern over the overthrow of traditional republican governance.

  When reading Eutropius and Festus, it is important to remember that they speak not on their own behalf but as the official voice of the imperial government. Their works can therefore be read as expressions of the opinions toward the barbarians which the emperors would find acceptable for the average Roman official in the period immediately before Adrianople. Both works are straightforward celebrations of military conquest. The desirability of defeating barbarians in war is taken as self-evident, and the focus remains entirely on the Roman state. The need for aggressive warfare is not expressed but rather implied by the prominent and detailed descriptions of past warfare.

  Ammianus has a more complicated conception of the barbarian (Wiedemann 1986; Bonanni 1981; Chauvot 1998: 383–406). His descriptions of the barbarians living across the Rhine or the Danube, on the one hand, are monotonously similar and negative. These barbarians typically display a combination of madness and rage, acting more like wild animals than like men. For example, when the once-arrogant Chnodomar is defeated by Julian, he behaves like a beaten puppy: “like all barbarians, he was humble in defeat and haughty in success” (16.12.61). Similarly bestial are the Sarmatians, “since with barbarians might makes right” (17.12.18). While Ammianus’ contempt for barbarians is manifest, he does not simply put forth a dichotomy of virtuous Romans and animalistic barbarians, for he quite often directs imputations of madness and animality at Romans of all sorts as well (Barnes 1998: 107–11).