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

by Michael Kulikowski

  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 general Gainas, 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 p
ublicus. 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 named Aurelian 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 besiege Milan, 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 i
nterest. 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.