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

by Michael Kulikowski

  The story of Saba, as portrayed in his Passion, must detain us a little longer, for its incidental details offer the only glimpse of Gothic social history we possess apart from the archaeological remains of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. Saba, we are told, was a villager somewhere in Gothia, perhaps in the region just to the southeast of the Carpathians. He was a Nicene rather than a homoean Christian, and may have been a cantor or lector in the local church (it is not altogether clear whether the reference to his “singing God’s praises in the church” should be given such a technical meaning). The Passion distinguishes several phases of persecution by the Gothic megistanes – ‘lords’ or ‘chiefs’, perhaps a direct reference to the Gothic king Rothesteus mentioned later in the text, perhaps to his more important followers. In both phases, these megistanes tested the loyalty of the villagers by forcing them to eat sacrificial meat. The first time this happened, the pagans in Saba’s village decided to trick the supervising officials by substituting meat that had not been sacrificed to the pagan gods for meat that had been. For us, this demonstrates the integration of Gothic Christians into village life and the willingness of their fellow villagers to unite against authority from outside the village, however legitimate it was.

  For Greek contemporaries reading the Passion, however, it was Saba’s actions that proved his sanctity: refusing to go along with the deception, he made a conspicuous show of rejecting the meat altogether, and thus provoked his fellow villagers into exiling him from the village. He was allowed back before long, but promptly stirred up further trouble for himself and the other Christians of the village. When a Gothic noble came to the village for a second time to supervise the consumption of the sacrificial meat, the pagan villagers were going to swear, while eating it, that there were no Christians in the village. Once again, Saba revealed himself and refused to play along. But when the villagers swore that Saba was a man of no account, possessing ‘nothing but the clothes he wears’, the Gothic lord did no more than order his expulsion from the gathering, on the grounds that a man with no property could neither help nor harm. That response is strong evidence for the essentially political nature of the persecution in Gothic territory: powerful Gothic converts might be a threat, potentially in league with the emperor; a man like Saba was at worst a conspicuous nuisance.

  Yet in the final phase of the persecution, Saba’s obstinacy reached a pitch that provoked the martyrdom he so clearly craved. Saba was en route to another village to celebrate Easter with a priest named Gouththikas, when a miraculous fall of snow prevented his going forward and turned him back to celebrate the feast in his own village with his fellow Christian, the priest Sansalas. Three days after Easter, Atharidus, the son of the Gothic king Rothesteus, arrived in the village with an entourage, specifically to arrest Sansalas. Saba, found in his company, was likewise arrested, but while Sansalas was held captive to face a higher authority, Saba was tortured on the spot. First driven through thorny thickets, then lashed to the axles of a wagon and flogged through the night, he defied his tormentors in the approved manner of one born to martyrdom. A friendly village servant freed him and fed him, but the tortures continued on the following day, when Sansalas and Saba were ordered by Atharidus’ men to consume meat that had been sacrificed. Saba naturally refused and was finally condemned to die, on 12 April 372. The soldiers chosen to drown him in the river Musaios, perhaps the Buzaǔ, seriously considered him setting him free: they thought him simple-minded for rejoicing at his coming martyrdom and reasoned that Atharidus would never find out if they just let him go. But Saba, insisting that he could see an army of saints waiting beyond the river to welcome him into heaven, urged them to their duty. So ‘they took him down to the water, threw him in and, pressing a beam against his neck, pushed him to the bottom and held him there’. It may have been Sansalas who set down in writing the account of Saba’s martyrdom.[122]

  Other Gothic Martyrs and the Motives for Persecution

  Saba was not the only martyr in this persecution. As St. Jerome put it in his chronicle entry for 369, ‘Aithanaric king of the Goths persecuted Christians, killed many and drove them from their own lands to the lands of the empire’.[123] Quite a few of these martyrs are recorded by name, in several different sources. Of particular significance is the list of martyrs remembered at Cyzicus in Asia Minor, where relics were deposited by Dulcilla, the daughter of an otherwise unknown Gothic queen named Gaatha. Among these martyrs we find the priests Bathouses and Wereka, their unnamed children, the monk Arpulas, eleven named Gothic men, and seven named Gothic women, all killed at the command of the Gothic leader Wiguric.[124] Other names are known from less reliable sources, but the drift of the evidence is clear: while some Gothic leaders favoured Christianity and tried to preserve the memory of their local martyrs, many also supported Athanaric’s persecution.

  We have already seen why Athanaric might rationally have regarded Gothic Christianity as a threat that needed to be stamped out. Yet in the face of this essentially political explanation, it is worth pointing out that some of his followers will have supported him out of genuine conviction. The story of Saba makes that clear: in the first of his several confrontations with Gothic authorities, Saba was exhorted to eat the sacrificial meat in order to save his soul. Unless this is merely a Christian gloss put on the confrontation by an ecclesiastical author, it would seem that some Goths regarded Christianity not just as a threat to the Gothic state, but also to the spiritual health of converts. All the same, it would be hard to deny that political fears were the foremost motive for persecution. The enthusiasm of leaders like Rothesteus and Wiguric shows that well below the level of the iudex Athanaric, it was feared that Christians might form a fifth column more sympathetic to the empire than to pagan Gothic leaders.

  That some members of the Gothic aristocracy had converted only made matters worse, for they were in a position to treat with the Roman empire where a man like Saba was not. Emperors were only too keen to encourage dissension among barbarian neighbours, and Athanaric’s defeat had damaged his authority, however much face he saved by the peaceful compromise that ended the war. As we have seen, the church historian Socrates reports that Valens used the peace to evangelize the Goths. Socrates also reports that the Tervingian chief Fritigern was one of those converted, that his Christianity caused him to go to war with Athanaric, and that some Roman soldiers were sent to aid Fritigern before the two Gothic leaders made peace. The conversion story is corroborated by Fritigern’s probable commemoration in a later Gothic liturgical calendar, though the Gothic civil war is known only from Socrates.[125] Yet it too is plausible. The next time we meet Fritigern – in Ammianus, a more reliable source than Socrates – he is the leader of Tervingi opposed to Athanaric. We cannot know whether Fritigern opposed Athanaric because he was a Christian, or whether he became a Christian because he opposed Athanaric. But it seems quite clear that Athanaric was absolutely right to see the extension of Christianity among Gothic elites as a substantial threat to the political status quo in Gothia. How matters might have turned out in the long run is a moot point. Within four years of Saba’s martyrdom the stability of the whole Gothic world had been shattered by obscure but traumatic events that brought many Tervingi to the banks of the Danube, begging for admission to the empire, in the spring of 376.

  Chapter 6 The Battle of Adrianople

  The battle of adrianople wiped out two-thirds of the whole field army of the Roman East. It was the worst military disaster of the Roman imperial era, and one of the worst in Roman history. That it was inflicted by barbarians made it instantly controversial, as contemporaries struggled to understand the reasons for the loss. For them, little save divine displeasure could explain such a calamity, so debate centred on which god was angry and why. But from the perspective of the modern historian, the trail of events that led to Adrianople is dotted with human error at every step. The Goths who defeated the emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378 were not a horde of unstoppable invaders. They were
, for the most part, the same Goths who had crossed the Danube just two years earlier, in 376, having done so with the full approval of the imperial government. The reception of barbarians into the empire was no unprecedented novelty, but a well-known procedure with centuries of success behind it. Of course, accidents can happen whenever large numbers of people move from one place to another. But the path to Adrianople was no accident. The orderly reception of the Goths broke down through mismanagement and thereafter the imperial government repeatedly exacerbated the problem in a toxic combination of venality and incompetence. And so the crisis marched inexorably onwards to the fatal 9th of August 378.

  A modern narrative history is entirely at the mercy of the ancient sources that happen to survive, which condition both its depth and its detail. For the two years before Adrianople, our access to one particular stream of Gothic history grows tremendously larger. The Goths who entered the empire in 376 are better known to us than are any of their predecessors, or indeed any of their contemporaries who remained outside the empire. The pace and scale of our narrative can therefore change with the present chapter. Up till now, we have been able to look at Gothic history in only two ways: first, in a sort of static, analytical overview, based on the archaeological evidence; and second, in brief flashes of narrative when the Goths impinged heavily enough upon Roman imperial politics for our Graeco-Roman sources to leave a record of events. But beginning in 376, for the first time, we learn enough about both Roman and Gothic activity to write a detailed narrative history, one that permits some insight not just into what happened, but also into why and how it did so.

  Huns, Alans and Goths

  The sources do not reach this level of precision until the Goths arrive at the banks of the Danube in 376, and the train of events that brought them there is known in nothing like the same detail as are the two years that followed it. The basic source is Ammianus Marcellinus, supplemented only very rarely by the fragments of Eunapius or the later sources, like Zosimus, that drew on him. Ammianus gives us a satisfyingly linear account: the Huns, a mysterious and lethal new people, appear as if from nowhere, smash the only somewhat less savage Alans, and drive through the Greuthungian kingdom of Ermanaric, pressing a horde of Gothic refugees forward to the Danube where they clamour for entry into the empire. No one can deny the force of Ammianus’ account, but it has won rather more credence than it deserves from modern scholars. Ammianus always needs careful handling, but here even more so than elsewhere, because the events he describes took place so far from regions in which accurate knowlege was possible. His account is highly schematic and telescopes what was a long, complicated, and dimly understood upheaval into an implausibly straightforward story of cause and effect.

  The Huns of Ammianus appeared from the distant East. For him, they are bipedes bestias, ‘two-legged beasts’: they live on horseback and cannot walk normally as other men do, they scar their children’s faces and drink only mare’s milk, they never cook their food, but rather place raw meat between their thighs and the backs of their horses in order to warm it up.[126] Eunapius once reported something similar, for Zosimus tells us that Huns could not fight on foot because they even slept on horseback.[127] Whereas scholars once took this evidence very seriously, it is now generally agreed that almost every element in Ammianus’ description can be traced to older ethnographic traditions, often stretching back as far as Herodotus, 800 years earlier. Ammianus, we may be fairly certain, had never seen a Hun and nor had most of his readers, who would instead envisage the Huns as the historian intended them to – a patchwork of ethnic stereotypes stitched together to make a composite, but suitably barbarous, whole.

  For all that we must distrust it, Ammianus’ account may simply be retailing the sort of rumours that were all most Romans ever heard of events beyond the frontier.[128] His own lack of certain knowledge must explain why his narrative of the Hunnic onslaught lacks any chronological markers. The Huns appear suddenly, at some unspecified time, and overcome the Alans who dwell between the Don and the Caspian. Unlike the Huns, these Alans had long been known to Graeco-Roman ethnography. They made periodic incursions into Roman territory, but were for the most part a greater threat to Persia than to Rome. As early as the second century, Arrian (c. 86–160), the Hadrianic governor of Cappadocia and famous historian of Alexander, had written a tactical manual, the Order of Battle against the Alans, explaining how a Roman army should be disposed in order to repel the charge of Alanic cavalry. Arrian was a keen observer, but even in his own time, they had been confounded with ethnographic stereotypes in existence since the time of Herodotus, and his sketch of their tactics is not very informative. By the fourth century, Ammianus’ sketch of the Alans does little more than nod towards the conventional Graeco-Roman image of the horse-nomad. Starting from these Huns and Alans, Ammianus narrates a simple chain reaction, one group of barbarians pushing against the next until eventually the massed Tervingi appear on the banks of the Danube.

  The Defeats of Ermanaric and Athanaric

  The Alans, so we are told, joined forces with the Huns after being defeated by them. In the company of their new Hunnic masters, they went on to assault the borders of the Gothic Greuthungi. These Greuthungi were led by the ‘most warlike’ king Ermanaric, whom we met briefly in the last chapter. Ermanaric determined to make a stand against his enemies, but to no avail. In the end, he committed suicide rather than face the coming horrors. A new Greuthungian king, Vithimir, succeeded him, and like his predecessor determined to make a stand on the battlefield. Unlike his predecessor, he lost his life in battle. Thereafter, his little son Videric was made king, but two duces – a generic term which Ammianus uses for subordinate commanders – acted as the new king’s guardians and seem to have taken Greuthungian affairs into their own hands. These duces, named Alatheus and Saphrax, led the Greuthungi of Videric westwards to the Dniester river. There, according to Ammianus, their plight came to the notice of the Tervingi and their iudex Athanaric.[129]

  Athanaric, Valens’ old enemy, advanced with an army to the banks of the Dniester, where he encamped at a safe distance from the Greuthungi. Sending an advance guard to observe and perhaps intercept the Huns, he waited at the Dniester, but was surprised by the Huns’ strategic skill. A party of Huns crossed the Dniester in the night, marched down it to Athanaric’s camp and forced him to withdraw into some unnamed mountains, perhaps the foothills of the Carpathians where he had previously sought refuge from Valens. What appears in Ammianus as a tactical retreat was in fact a massive withdrawal, for nearly 200 kilometres separate the Dniester from the line which Athanaric next determined to hold. This ran from north to south above the Danube, just beside the Carpathian foothills, and probably reconstituted the old Roman limes transalutanus, parallel to the river Olt and the frontier of the high imperial province of Dacia. Despite the efforts he put into throwing up earthworks and other defences, Athanaric’s new measures came too late. Though he repulsed a Hunnic attack somewhere in the region, many of his followers had already deserted him. The populi pars maior, ‘the larger part of his people’, left their stubborn leader to fight his own battles, themselves seeking refuge in the empire. The Greuthungi under Alatheus and Saphrax, for their part, disappear from view until 377, several months after many Tervingi were allowed to cross the Danube into the empire.[130]

  The Chronology of Gothic Defeats

  The foregoing narrative raises more questions than it answers, in large part because it derives exclusively from the last book of Ammianus’ history. His account is heavily telescoped: its stages may be well defined, but its actual chronology is almost totally invisible. Even if Ammianus’ account is substantially correct – and the very linear trajectory he suggests must be suspect – the series of conflicts among Huns, Alans and Goths will have taken much longer than the headlong rush implied by Ammianus. What is more, it is not easy to sustain his simple ‘domino-effect’ theory of causation, with the Huns toppling the Alans onto the Greuthungi onto the Tervingi ont
o the Romans. To be sure, the emergence of the Huns somewhere between the Caspian and the Black Sea probably did spark far-reaching changes in eastern and central Europe. But it is harder to make the case that the Huns were the proximate cause of Gothic collapse, rather than its catalyst. No named Hun appears on the frontiers of the empire until the very end of the 390s, two full decades after the disaster at Adrianople. Even then, it is another three decades before there is evidence for a Hunnic state, or even far-reaching Hunnic hegemony, in the barbarian lands near the empire where the Greuthungi and Tervingi had once held sway.

  These facts suggest that, however much Ammianus may have envisaged Hunnic wolves snapping at the heels of the fleeing Goths, the process was altogether more gradual, not to mention more complex. The time frame of these events is unclear from Ammianus, and wholly beyond reconstruction from other sources, despite the best efforts of scholars. A reasonable guess might place the early confrontations between the Huns and Alans, and then between the Huns, Alans and Greuthungi, as far back as the 350s, but that can be no more than speculation. The only certainty is that the disruptions along the Don river and north of the Sea of Azov had not yet been felt along the lower Danube when Valens made his treaty with Athanaric in 369. As we have seen, the persecution in which Saba was martyred was a response to the campaigns of Valens and Saba’s Passion gives no hint at all of traumatic upheavals to the east. Even though that may be no more than a reflection of the hagiographic genre and its constraints, nothing else in the evidence for Valens’ campaigns shows the slightest awareness of trouble beyond Athanaric’s realm. Thus when all is said and done, our only firm chronological indicator is the arrival of a large number of Tervingi on the banks of the Danube in spring 376.