Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  Embroiled in a losing war, the generals at first chose the stopgap emperor Jovian to lead them, fearing that the split between mainly Christian appointees of Constantius and mainly pagan appointees of Julian might blow the high command apart; now was not the time for theological dispute. Jovian dutifully cobbled together a peace agreement with the Sassanids and pulled the army out of Mesopotamia. The following year he died (whether naturally or not is unclear), and the generals assembled again to choose an emperor. Valentinian, the son of a peasant who had risen to become a general, was selected, a man who, according to Ammianus, ‘hated the well-dressed and educated and wealthy and well-born’.(13) He took as co-emperor his younger brother Valens, giving him responsibility for the defence of the East while he took charge in the West. Both men were firm Christians. Their elevation meant that the pagan revival was dead. Religious compromise was thrown to the winds. Militant Christianity – and the military-bureaucratic complex – resumed its forward march. The old order was sidelined again by the dominant power-nexus of court, army, Church, and the aristocracy of merit.

  For more than ten years, moreover, Valentinian (AD 364–375) and Valens (AD 364–378) suppressed internal opposition and defended the frontiers of the empire. When Valentinian died – in an uncontrollable fit of rage, it is said, while negotiating with some barbarian leaders – he was succeeded by his sons Gratian (AD 375–383) and Valentinian II (AD 375–392). But Gratian was a teenager, Valentinian a child, and they were in fact ciphers for their uncle, Valens: figurehead rulers to secure the House of Valentinian against usurpers in the West. Then, suddenly and cataclysmically, the regime was destroyed in a huge and terrible battle against the Goths at Adrianople on the lower Danube in AD 378.

  Adrianople was the greatest Roman defeat since Cannae. But whereas, in its ascent to global power, Rome had rebounded from Cannae to win final victory against Hannibal, now, in its decline, it would never recover from Adrianople. The haemorrhaging of men that it suffered on that bloody field would be fatal. The Late Roman counter-revolution had put massive strain on the empire’s economic and social foundations. As civil society decayed, tax revenues and reserves of men dwindled, and the military balance swung, slowly but inexorably, away from Rome and in favour of the increasingly well-organized and well-equipped barbarian confederations of Central Europe. The empire, in short, was bleeding to death. Adrianople was the moment when the crisis matured and history turned.

  As the Huns advanced westwards across South Russia, the resistance of the (eastern) Ostrogothic and (western) Visigothic kingdoms collapsed. Large masses of displaced people, led west by the Visigothic chieftains Fritigern and Alavivus, appealed to the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens for admission to the Balkans. Their request was granted: they could settle on abandoned land in frontier Thrace in return for military service. In the late autumn of AD 376 the Goths were ferried across the Danube. Some immediately went east to serve in the Roman army. Others were settled around the city of Adrianople in central Thrace. Most, however, were left in refugee-camps in northern Thrace, without adequate food supplies, and prey to exploitation by corrupt Roman officials. The starving Goths were traded dog-meat in return for selling their families into slavery. The rate was one dog per slave.

  Anger sometimes boiled over. There were armed clashes. As order broke down, the shattered remnants of the Ostrogothic people, led by the chieftains Alatheus and Safrax, crossed the Danube into Roman territory, swelling the numbers of refugees – and Gothic warriors. When the corrupt Roman military commander in Thrace murdered the escort of the two Visigothic leaders as they dined with him during negotiations, revolt exploded across the refugee-camps and beyond. The Gothic settlers at Adrianople and the Goths sold into slavery joined the revolt. So, too, did some of the provincials, including Thracian miners who had recently been rounded up and returned to work by the Roman authorities. The whole of Thrace was soon under the control of the insurgents. Landlords, tax-collectors and corrupt contractors fled. Local villas were plundered for food.

  Valens arrived on the scene with the bulk of the Eastern Roman army in May AD 378. Though reinforcements had been promised from the West, he was confident he could win alone. Leaving their heavy baggage at Adrianople, the Romans advanced the 13 km to the Gothic camp, a great defensive wagon laager. The day was hot. When the Romans arrived, they were tired, thirsty and hungry. The land around the Gothic camp had been scorched, so there was no food to be had. There was then more delay, as abortive negotiations were dragged out by the Goths – deliberately, it seems, for the men defending the laager were awaiting the return of their cavalry, away foraging when news had come of the Roman advance.

  Finally it began. The account in Ammianus is confused, but it seems that Valens ordered a massed assault on the Gothic laager, and as this became bogged down, more and more of his men were fed in, until no reserves were left. Then, with the entire Roman army committed, the Gothic cavalry reached the battlefield and charged into the exposed enemy flanks and rear. Surrounded and slowly compressed into an ever-smaller space, with neither room to manoeuvre nor opening to escape, the emperor Valens and some two-thirds of the Eastern Roman army perished on the battlefield.

  The Goths declined to attack either Adrianople or Constantinople – ‘I am at peace with walls,’ Fritigern is reported saying – and the revolt was contained in Thrace. But the loss of manpower had inflicted irreparable damage. Never again would a Roman citizen army fight a major battle in Europe. Henceforward the defence of the West would depend on the services of barbarian mercenaries. Adrianople had revealed the rotted condition of Roman imperial society: the alienation of its own people; the corruption of its officials; and the sinking numbers, efficiency and morale of its fighting forces. In the chaos and carnage of that baking early summer’s day, the world changed. Soon, the East, with its vastly superior estate, would cut the West adrift, leaving it starved of resources to die a lingering century-long death. But it would be the barbarian war-bands recruited to fill the gaps in the battle-line left by Adrianople that would be the instrument of termination.

  End of Empire: from Theodosius to Romulus Augustulus, AD 379–476

  As the Goths destroyed the Eastern Roman army at Adrianople, the Germans stood poised on the Rhine and upper Danube to invade the West. They, too, were in flight from the Huns; they, too, had nowhere else to go. Gratian, desperate for a reliable colleague to take charge in the East, summoned Theodosius from his Spanish estates (to which he had retired after the execution of his father) and appointed him Augustus at Sirmium in the Balkans in January AD 379. Theodosius ruled in partnership with the House of Valentinian until the deaths of Gratian in AD 383 and Valentinian II in AD 392. He remained stoutly loyal, twice intervening against usurpers in the West, first Maximus in AD 388, then Eugenius in AD 394. Thereafter he ruled as sole emperor over both East and West; the last to do so, for at his death in AD 395 the empire was divided, never to be reunited.

  Theodosius’s greatest challenge was to create a new army. He did so with ruthless efficiency. Draft-dodgers were combed out of offices and farms. Penalties were imposed on officials who tried to fob off recruiting officers with cooks, bakers and shop assistants. The mutilated – men would cut off their own thumbs to disqualify themselves – were forced to serve. Barbarians were enrolled on easy terms: a man might return to his tribe when he chose provided he supplied a substitute. But the units raised were inexperienced and unenthusiastic, and there were not enough of them: the simple fact was that the losses suffered at Adrianople could not be made good by traditional recruitment. The solution was to hire barbarians to fight barbarians – en masse.

  The Roman army had always recruited barbarians on the empire’s frontiers. Some had acquired Roman citizenship and joined the legions. Many more had fought as ‘allies’ (socii), such as the Gallic and German cavalry employed by Caesar. Later, under Augustus and his successors, these ‘friendlies’ had been enrolled in regular auxiliary units, led by Roman officers and
organized, trained and equipped to fight in Roman style. In the crisis of the 3rd century, however, when campaigning was relentless and attrition high, emperors had begun settling barbarians wholesale in frontier areas in return for military service (when they were known as laeti), or hiring the services of barbarian war-bands for the duration of a war (foederati). These emergency measures were manageable: the standing army was still formed of regular Roman soldiers, who formed a large majority of the empire’s fighting men, whereas the barbarians took service only intermittently, when called upon, and as a supplement to the main force. It was this that changed after Adrianople. Such was the empire’s desperate need of men that barbarian federates soon predominated over regular forces; such was the need, moreover, that the terms of service the emperor was compelled to offer amounted to a surrender of political authority.

  Gratian and Theodosius made peace with the Goths. Many of the Visigoths still wished to settle, and they were welcomed along the lower Danube, where they filled much of the long gap left in the Roman frontier-line after Adrianople. Theodosius’s court poet praised his patron for populating a deserted country with former enemies. But the peace of AD 382 left these Goths governed by their own chiefs, subject to their own laws, and performing military service as allied contingents under their own leaders. The Gothic federate settlement of northern Thrace in AD 382 was something new: a state within a state, an armed body of men that lived on Roman territory but remained independent of Roman authority. The mechanism by which the Western Roman Empire would eventually break in pieces had begun to operate.

  There was no alternative. Traditional recruitment could not make good the losses of Adrianople, and the federate system was a successful alternative. Without it, the empire would have succumbed sooner. In AD 386 an Ostrogothic assault on the lower Danube was thrown back by the Roman commander in Thrace – presumably at the head of an army of Visigothic federates. Eight years later, at the Battle of the River Frigidus, it was Theodosius’s Gothic federates who crushed the army of the western usurper Eugenius, reunited the broken empire, and ensured the final victory of the Christian Church over pagan reaction.

  That crisis had been brewing for years. Neither of the western emperors had a strong base. Gratian was young, educated and a sports-lover; he preferred the company of senators and intellectuals to that of military men. His brother, Valentinian II, was still a child. When the Roman army in Britain proclaimed Magnus Maximus emperor, Gratian’s soldiers mutinied and killed him (AD 383). Theodosius rushed to restore stability, granting recognition to the new emperor, while shoring up the power of Valentinian’s regime in the Balkans. At first Maximus kept the peace, and the empire was ruled by a triumvirate of three emperors. But the defence of Britain, the Rhine and the upper Danube were heavy burdens on the western provinces. Maximus is charged in the ancient sources with raising income by arraigning wealthy men on trumped-up capital charges to secure the confiscation of their estates. Elevated by the officers and landowners of the West to provide greater security, Maximus was driven to plunder their property to maintain the army at the necessary level. This contradiction could be resolved only by war. But when Maximus invaded Italy, determined to gain control of rich heartland provinces, Theodosius marched against him. Maximus was defeated, forced to surrender, and then immediately executed.

  Theodosius remained in Italy for three years, leaving the East under the nominal rule of his son, Arcadius, who had been proclaimed Augustus in AD 383. When he departed in AD 391, he left the young Valentinian II in the care of the Frankish field-marshal (magister militum) Arbogast. The arrangement broke down the following year: Arbogast quarrelled with his charge and killed him; he then proclaimed an upper-class intellectual and government official called Eugenius emperor in his place. Theodosius was compelled to march west again, determined to uphold the legitimate political order, restore the dominance of the military-bureaucratic complex, and defend the Church against pagan revival. The struggle for the heart and soul of the empire which had dominated elite politics for a century now reached its bloody climax. There was much at stake at the Battle of the River Frigidus in AD 394.

  The pagan prejudices of the old western aristocracy had taken a battering from the House of Valentinian. Gratian had dropped the imperial title Pontifex Maximus, removed the Altar of Victory from the Senate House, and confiscated the revenues of the Vestals and other pagan priest-hoods in Rome. The petitions of pagan senators were ignored, whereas the outspoken Bishop of Milan, one Ambrose, was a close advisor of the emperor. In the East, Theodosius proved himself an equally resolute defender of both Church and Catholic orthodoxy (as represented by the Nicene Creed). He issued an edict in AD 380 which recommended the Catholic faith to all his subjects and proclaimed those who resisted ‘heretics’. In AD 381 he ordered all churches be handed over to Catholics and banned any other religious meetings. The Council of Constantinople in May AD 381 reaffirmed the Nicene Creed and encouraged purges of nonconformists. In all, Theodosius enacted no less than 18 edicts against heretics during his reign, usually only amounting to bans on meetings and the confiscation of premises, but sometimes, in the case of obscure (and radical) sects, ordering them to be hunted down and exterminated. Then, with the Church united, the target shifted from heretics to pagans. In AD 391 the emperor issued an edict from Milan banning all sacrifices and closing all temples. The following year, from Constantinople, a supplementary edict extended the ban to private ritual in the home, the penalty for violation being the confiscation of the property where the offence occurred. The Theodosian religious reform therefore threatened a major shift of wealth and power from one section of the Late Roman elite to another. It represented a further squeeze by the military-bureaucratic complex of generals, administrators and bishops linked with the court on landowners, hereditary estates and the old political establishment associated with the pagan priesthoods. This was the context for the revolt of Arbogast and Eugenius.

  Eugenius restored the Altar of Victory to the Senate House. Arbogast threatened to stable his horses in churches and conscript the clergy into the army. The usurpers drew on three decades of accumulated bitterness against the House of Valentinian. Under them, the pagan aristocracy was roused for a final battle in defence of the ancient gods of Rome. The enemy was the semi-barbarian Christian ‘new men’ of Theodosius’s Eastern Empire. It was a measure of the age, however – of the withered power of Rome – that the leading champion of classical paganism was a Frankish general, and that the battle-line of Roman Christianity would be filled by federate Goths.

  Arbogast knew his business. He chose a strong defensive position at the narrow entrance to an Alpine pass beside the River Frigidus, blocking the route of Theodosius’s army into Italy. He built a wooden fort with palisade and towers on high ground, and deployed his army in front of this, its flanks secure, its front protected by secondary earthworks. Theodosius was compelled to launch a frontal assault. Some 20,000 Gothic warriors mounted a series of attacks through the day, but all were beaten back, and by the end some 10,000 of them had fallen. The westerners celebrated. The eastern generals urged retreat. But Theodosius persisted – spending the night, it is said, in fitful sleep and prayer – and the following day the attack was renewed. The westerners were caught off-guard and weakened by defections (of Christians from the pagan ranks?), but the battle again raged for hours all along the line. Victory came when the Alpine Bora – a gusting cyclonic wind – whipped dust into the faces of the western troops, who, physically and mentally exhausted, broke and ran. The rout turned into massacre, the wooden fort on the hilltop was burnt, and the western leaders perished, Eugenius by decapitation, Arbogast by suicide. The Christian God appeared to have answered his faithful son’s prayers: Theodosius and his Church controlled the entire Roman world.

  A few months later, Theodosius was dead. The empire was immediately divided – in the event, for the last time – between his two sons, the 18-year-old Arcadius (AD 395–408), who already ruled in the Ea
st, and the 11-year-old Honorius (AD 395–423) in the West. Neither emperor, even later when grown to manhood, was fit to govern; instead, the East was ruled by a succession of civilian ministers, the West by a succession of generals, sometimes of barbarian or part-barbarian origin. The dying Theodosius had made Stilicho, the son of a Vandal father and Roman mother who had commanded the eastern army at the Frigidus, guardian of both his sons. But the succession settlement was doomed from the outset: by the end of the 4th century AD, the Eastern and Western Empires had become separate entities, a split symbolized by the East’s immediate rejection of Stilicho’s regency.

  East and West had always been different. The former was highly urbanized and prosperous, with a mainly Greek-speaking elite, and a history of civilization stretching back thousands of years. The latter was composed mainly of former barbarian lands where towns, classical civilization and the Latin language had arrived only with the Romans themselves. The foundation of Constantinople as a new imperial capital – complete with a government infrastructure to rival that of Rome – had merely widened an already existing political, socio-economic and cultural gulf. Crucially, on a crude estimate, while the East yielded about two-thirds of the empire’s total tax revenue, it required only about one-third of the imperial army for its defence. Except for the Syrian front facing the Sassanids, and the lower Danube front facing the Goths, both heavily defended, the Eastern Roman Empire was relatively secure against attack. The West’s Rhine and upper Danube frontier, on the other hand, ran right across continental Europe. The East, therefore, subsidized the defence of the West. Between the two regions lay the Balkans: a mountainous area with poor communications, restless imperial subjects, only superficial Romanization, and endless fighting due to barbarian incursions across the Danube and successive civil wars. The Balkans, then, was a barrier: and on the other side of the barrier were two very different worlds. When the eastern aristocracy rejected the authority of Stilicho and vested power in the hands of local politicians, it was protecting itself against the demands liable to be placed upon it by a western-based regent intent on the defence of the Rhine, the upper Danube and Italy. Not only was Stilicho denied the revenues of the eastern cities; his access to traditional army recruiting-grounds in the Balkans was contested by Constantinople.