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

by Michael Kulikowski

  Jordanes tells an elaborate story about Alaric’s funeral rites: the course of the river Busentus was diverted, Roman captives were marched onto the river bed where they dug a grave for the dead leader. Then, when Alaric had been placed in it with many treasures from the sack of Rome, the river was let back into its normal channel and the diggers were killed so that they could never reveal the site where Alaric had been laid to rest.[254] It is a beguiling story, and one generally retailed as fact. But it is out of place in its early fifth-century setting and it is unmistakeably influenced by the elaborate funerary customs common among the princely elite of the Hunnic period and later. Perhaps Jordanes invented the story, perhaps it had long since begun to circulate to explain why no one knew where Alaric lay buried. Perhaps it is even true.

  Jordanes also reports the black mourning that descended upon Alaric’s following after his death. That, at least, one can well imagine: along with Alaric died any connection to the imperial government, still the only power that could truly guarantee the Goths’ secure existence. Alaric’s successor, Athaulf, realized that very fact and spent his brief reign trying hard to restore a satisfactory relationship with Ravenna. Athaulf, as we have seen, was Alaric’s brother-in-law. He was probably a powerful Gothic noble in his own right, and certainly the deadly enemy of the Gothic general Sarus who had scuppered the last set of peace talks between Alaric and Honorius. In 411, Athaulf marched the Goths into Gaul, first joining briefly in the usurpation of a Gallic nobleman and in the process managing to attack and kill Sarus, then bringing down the usurper and returning Gaul to the allegiance of Honorius’ government in Ravenna. Yet this signal aid bought no goodwill from Honorius. There were many reasons for that, but chief among them was the intransigence of Honorius’ new commander-in-chief, Constantius. A soldier of great skill, he was also a politician of genius, and had emerged victorious from the court intrigues that followed the death of Stilicho: Olympius, who had engineered Stilicho’s murder, was beaten to death with clubs at the instigation of Constantius, and every other potential enemy at court was done away with just as decisively. Constantius then took charge of the whole government of the western empire, and did so, like Stilicho, from the post of magister utriusque militiae – ‘master of both services’, the highest military command. He did not, in other words, use a position in the civilian hierarchy, for instance the praetorian prefecture or the mastership of offices, to dominate the government – an early sign of the major divergences between eastern and western empires that would grow more pronounced as the fifth century progressed.

  Another cause of this divergence, though, was the fact of the Goths themselves. When Alaric’s followers finally found a permanent home and permanent security for themselves, it was inside one of the western provinces, where they were from then on a complicating factor in the politics of the western empire. It was, however, a long time before that permanent settlement arrived, because for many years Constantius would brook absolutely no compromise. Until the Goths were prepared to humble themselves and genuinely subordinate their own plans and wishes to the needs of imperial government, Constantius was not interested in accommodation. By 413, moreover, his hands were free to act. In that year, Constantius suppressed the last of the usurpations that had plagued the western provinces from Gaul to North Africa ever since 406. He therefore determined to come to grips with Athaulf, who had been eking out a desultory existence in southern Gaul for a couple of years. The Gothic king, ignored and rejected by Constantius and Honorius despite his best efforts to make himself indispensable to them, decided to once again try the manoeuvre that had worked briefly for Alaric: he again made Priscus Attalus emperor. Attalus, who had traveled in the Gothic train ever since his deposition in 410, accepted the dubious honour despite the disastrous precedent of his first proclamation during Alaric’s second siege of Rome. Perhaps he had genuinely grown to like his position within Gothic society – certainly he was baptised by a homoean Gothic priest named Sigesarius.[255] In 415, he even pronounced the epithalamium – the nuptial poem – at an unprecedented wedding.

  In the southern Gallic city of Narbonne, Athaulf married Galla Placidia, the sister of Honorius and a hostage of the Goths since the sack of Rome. It is hard to know what prompted this match, and what political effects it was meant to have, but it is clear that Placidia profited by it in the long-term: for the rest of her life, she possessed a loyal troop of Goths which served as her bodyguard and helped make her a political force in her own right. At the time, though, the wedding only exacerbated the tension between Athaulf and Constantius, who blockaded the southern coast of Gaul and starved the Goths out of the province and into Spain. There, Placidia bore a son by her new husband and named him Theodosius – the name of her own imperial father and a clear sign of dynastic ambitions, given that Honorius remained without heir. But the infant died in Barcelona, and with him yet another dream of reconciliation between Honorius and the Goths. Athaulf soon followed his child to the grave, felled by the dagger of an assassin while he inspected his horses in their stables. The Gothic noble who profitted by this murder was himself killed after only seven days, and the new Gothic king Wallia made peace with Constantius in return for food.

  He restored Placidia and Priscus Attalus to the imperial government. The widowed Placidia returned to Italy, where she was married to Constantius, whom she hated. Yet surrounded by an enormous fortune and protected by Goths loyal to her and the memory of her first husband, she went on to become the mother of an emperor: Valentinian Ⅲ, born in 419 to her and Constantius, ruled the disintegrating western empire for thirty years (425–455). Attalus, humiliated, led in triumph, and physically mutilated, was exiled to the island of Lipari where he lived out his days in moderate comfort, no doubt regretting the cruel fate that had seen him lose the imperial purple not once but twice, while the useless Honorius reigned blissfully on. As for Wallia’s Goths, once properly fed and housed, they went into action as a Roman army, clearing the Iberian peninsula of barbarians – the same Vandals, Alans and Sueves who had crossed the Rhine in 405/406 and then settled in Spain after traversing the Pyrenees in 409. In 418, Constantius called off this hugely successful campaign and settled Wallia’s Goths in Gaul, in the province of Aquitania Secunda and a few of the cities on its fringes. Wallia did not live to see this settlement take place, but under his successor Theoderic (r. 418–451), a distant relative of Alaric by marriage, the Goths became more or less loyal subjects of the Roman emperor in Italy.

  The settlement in Gaul begins a new phase in the history of the Goths, and of Gothic relations with the Roman empire. No longer one of many barbarian groups hovering on the fringes of empire, the Aquitanian Goths instead became the first barbarian kingdom inside the empire. In 418, their settlement may not have been viewed as permanent; certainly no one imagined that part of the western empire was being given away to a Gothic king and his followers. But that is precisely what happened over time. As the fifth century progressed, Theoderic I and his successor Theoderic Ⅱ acted not as imperial officials, but as autonomous rulers within the larger Roman empire. In time, the Gothic settlement became a Gothic kingdom. The precedent set by Alaric also had a long future ahead of it. Alaric’s own career was a failure – it is hard for us to judge it as anything else, and it is quite clear from the sources that he regarded it in the same way. But his career had demonstrated the power it was possible to exercise if one possessed a military following with no ties to the structures of imperial government save personal loyalty to an individual leader. As the fifth century wore on, more and more commanders in the western empire – not just barbarian kings, but Roman generals of every sort – turned to the strategy which Alaric had pioneered and used extra-governmental pressure to win political advantage for themselves inside the government. This new dynamic of imperial politics helped bring on the collapse of the western Roman empire in the 460s and 470s, but that is an altogether different story than the one we have been trying to tell in this book.

>   Our own story comes to a close with Alaric precisely because his career is both an end and a beginning in the history of the Roman empire’s dealings with the Goths. Alaric was the child of a Balkan settlement that had been made necessary not just by the Gothic success at Adrianople, but by the imperial rivalries between the houses of Valentinian and Theodosius. In that sense, it follows in the footsteps of Gothic history throughout the fourth century – conditioned by, and in some sense conditional on, the actions of Roman emperors both beyond and within the imperial frontiers. As we have seen, the Goths themselves were created by the pressures of life on the Roman frontier, and the whole of their social and military history, from its beginnings in the third century until the Gothic wars of Valens in the 360s, developed in the shadow of Rome. Adrianople, and still more the lifetime of Alaric, changed all that. No longer products and victims of Roman history, the Goths – and the many other barbarian settlers who followed in their footsteps – now made Rome’s history themselves.

  Glossary of Ancient Sources

  Ambrose

  see Biographical Glossary

  Ammianus Marcellinus

  from a well-connected family in Syria, perhaps Antioch, he joined the elite military corps of protectores as a young man, but retired after the death of the emperor Julian, going on to write a history of Rome which he completed around the year 390. This Res Gestae, which ran from A.D. 96 to 378 and is extant from 353, is our single most important source for fourth-century history and our most detailed treatment of the Adrianople campaign.

  Arrian

  c. 86–160, governor of Cappadocia under Hadrian, author of a famous history of Alexander the Great, and also the Order of Battle against the Alans (c. 135).

  Aurelius Victor

  governor of Pannonia Ⅱ (361) and prefect of Rome (389), author of a short epitome of Roman imperial history, the Caesars, running from Augustus to Constantius Ⅱ and completed in about 360, which is particularly important for the history of the later third and parts of the fourth century.

  Basil of Caesarea

  c. 330–379, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia and the most important Greek theologian of the later fourth century. His letters provide important information about the Gothic martyr Saba, as well as general statements about the conditions in Thrace in the chaotic years that preceded Adrianople.

  Cassiodorus

  c. 490–c. 585, official at the court of several Ostrogothic kings of Italy, most importantly Theodoric, before abandoning the Gothic cause around 537 and retiring to Constantinople. Author of many surviving works, but also of a now lost Gothic history in twelve books which Jordanes used, though to what extent is controversial.

  Claudian

  born Claudius Claudianus in Alexandria in Egypt, Claudian made his career as a poet in the Latin West; his earliest poems date from the early 390s and after mid-395 he was the chief spokesman for Stilicho. His poems provide much of our information on Alaric and court politics from 395 to 404.

  Dexippus

  third-century Athenian historian who wrote a universal history in twelve books and an account of the third-century Gothic invasions from 238 to c. 275 called the Scythica. Though both survive only in fragments, they were used by Zosimus in his New History.

  Epitome de Caesaribus

  a later fourth-century account of Roman history which preserves some fragments of information not in Aurelius Victor or Eutropius.

  Eunapius of Sardis

  author of a classicizing history of his own times written in the aftermath of Adrianople which survives only in fragments but which formed a major source for Zosimus’ New History. Eunapius also wrote a volume of Lives of the Sophists, some of which sheds light on Alaric’s invasion of Greece.

  Eutropius

  imperial administrator and author of a Breviary or abridgement of Roman history from its beginnings until the death of Jovian, which he dedicated to Valens and which preserves some otherwise unknown information on the third and fourth centuries.

  Gregory Thaumaturgus

  c. 213–c. 270, bishop of Neocaesarea in Pontus, his canonical letter is the most vivid and important testimony to the effects of Gothic raids in Asia Minor during the 250s.

  Gregory of Nyssa

  c. 330–395, bishop of Nyssa, younger brother of Basil of Caesarea, and like him an important theologian. Two of his sermons record the depredations of Goths in Asia Minor in the aftermath of the battle of Adrianople.

  Herodotus

  fifth century B.C., author of a large history, completed before 425 B.C., and centred on the wars between Greece and Persia. This work provided a model for much later Greek history and invented the stereotype of the Scythian that was so prevalent in third- and fourth-century accounts of the Goths.

  Historia Augusta

  late fourth-century collection of imperial biographies from Hadrian to Carus and Carinus, based on generally good sources for the second century, but descending into almost total fiction by the end of the third. Nonetheless, the Historia Augusta preserves a few details of Gothic history derived from better sources like Dexippus and otherwise lost.

  Jerome

  Christian priest and polemicist, c. 345–420, author of many works, including a Chronicle that translated into Latin and continued the chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea; Jerome’s Chronicle provides some information about Gothic history not known – or at least not dated – in other sources.

  Jordanes

  sixth-century historian from Constantinople who wrote both a Roman and a Gothic history (the Romana and the Getica), the latter at some point after 550. Jordanes made some use of Cassiodorus’ Gothic history – how much is controversial – but he added a great deal to it and thoroughly endorsed the destruction of the Gothic kingdom of the Ostrogoths by Justinian.

  Julian

  see Biographical Glossary

  Lactantius

  c. 240–c. 320, a Latin rhetorician at Nicomedia, among whose many works is a polemic On the Deaths of the Persecutors which provides accurate details of imperial history in the third and fourth centuries, including the death of Decius in a Gothic war.

  Olympiodorus of Thebes

  Greek historian, before 380–after 425. Wrote a detailed history of the years 407 to 425 which, though now preserved only in fragments, was a major source for Sozomen, Philostorgius and Zosimus, and thereby central to our understanding of Alaric’s actions in Italy just before the sack of Rome.

  Orosius

  Christian priest from Spain who wrote a polemical History against the Pagans in seven books which continued down to 417 and argued, against pagans who saw Adrianople and the sack of Rome as divine anger for the imperial conversion to Christianity, that Rome had been much worse before the conversion.

  Panegyrici Latini

  collection of speeches in honour of emperors compiled in late fourth-century Gaul and including eleven panegyrics from the late third to the fourth century, many of which attest otherwise unknown imperial campaigns against barbarians beyond the frontiers.

  Paulinus

  deacon of the church of Milan and author in c. 422 of the Life of Bishop Ambrose of Milan, which helps establishes the sequence of events in 397.

  Philostorgius

  c. 368–c. 440, author of a now fragmentary Greek church history written from a homoean point of view, drawing on the (also now fragmentary) history of Olympiodorus and preserving otherwise unknown information on Ulfila.

  Socrates

  fifth-century lawyer and author of the earliest of several Greek church histories extant from the fifth century, continuing the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius. Socrates provides a great deal of unique information on the fourth and earlier fifth century, particularly on the eastern provinces.

  Sozomen

  fifth-century lawyer and church historian whose church history offers a parallel, and rather different, perspective to that of Socrates, with considerably greater interest in secular history, and much more evidence for western affair
s, most of it drawn from the now fragmentary history of Olympiodorus.

  Synesius

  philosopher, and later bishop of Ptolemais, resident in Constantinople in the later 390s, where he wrote two treatises, De regno and De providentia, which are key to understanding the political manoeuvres at the eastern court surrounding the revolts of Alaric, Tribigild and Gainas.

  Tacitus

  senator and historian, c. 56–c. 118, author of histories of the early Roman empire and of the Germania, an ethnographic account of Germany and its gentes which provided early modern humanists with their most important material for inventing a Germanic, non-Roman history.

  Themistius