The Historians of Late Antiquity (2 page)

Constantine died in 337 and was succeeded by three sons, Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius II. The brothers divided the empire among themselves, but soon came into conflict. Constantine II was killed while invading Constans’ territory in 340, and Constans was killed by a usurper, Magnentius, in 350. As Constantius headed west to avenge his brother, he appointed his nephew Gallus as Caesar in the east in 351. Magnentius was defeated in 353, and shortly thereafter Gallus was recalled to the imperial court and put to death, perhaps as punishment for the violence he had provoked during food shortages at Antioch. Continuing incursions along the Persian frontier demanded Constantius’ presence in the east, and the emperor therefore appointed his other nephew, Julian, as Caesar in 355 and sent him to Gaul. After successfully restoring order to the province, which had suffered during the usurpation of Magnentius when Constantius had encouraged barbarian attacks, Julian was raised to the rank of Augustus by his troops. Constantius’ refusal to accept this promotion meant war, but before the eastern and western armies could seriously clash Constantius died of a fever in November 361 and Julian became sole ruler of the empire.

Julian had been secretly a pagan for years, and his sudden rise to power allowed him to reveal his religious beliefs and to attempt to reverse the legal and social benefits which Christianity had accumulated under the rule of Constantine and his sons. His religious policies generally fell short of full persecution but were calculated to remove privileges from the church and to impose certain burdens
upon Christians. Christians reacted with fear and fury, pagans with joy and triumph. In 363 Julian mounted a full-scale invasion of Persia which proved to be a miserable failure, and the emperor was killed during the retreat.

After Julian’s death, military leaders in an emergency meeting selected a Christian, Jovian, as the new emperor. Jovian died after less than eight months in office, and was replaced in February 364 by Valentinian I, who ruled the western half of the empire and appointed his brother, Valens, to rule the eastern half. Procopius, one of Julian’s relatives, attempted to restore the Constantinian dynasty but was quickly crushed by Valens in 365. When Valentinian was ill in 367, he prepared for his succession by naming his 8-year-old son Gratian as Augustus. As soon as Valentinian died in a fit of anger while receiving a barbarian embassy in 375, his ministers quickly named his second son, the 4-year-old Valentinian II, as Augustus. This move, which may have been designed to ensure the loyalty of the western armies, was grudgingly accepted by Gratian, and the child remained under the protection of his mother, Justina, in northern Italy.

Valentinian I had spent his reign fighting along the Rhine, and his generals were kept busy by disturbances in Britain and Africa. Valens fought the Goths inconclusively in the 360s and fended off plots and suspected plots against him by a series of harsh trials which sparked complaints of judicial excesses. The brothers favored the military and were as a consequence not trusted by senators and other civilians. Both continued the policy of religious toleration toward paganism which Jovian had pronounced after the death of Julian.

After attacks by the Huns in 376, a tribe of Goths petitioned Valens for permission to settle inside the empire. After the request was granted, the migration went disastrously wrong, and Roman confusion and corruption led the Goths to rise in revolt. The attempt by Valens to put down the revolt in a battle on 9 August 378 near Adrianople led to his death and the destruction of the eastern army. The Goths had free rein throughout the Balkans for several years until a peace was made under the leadership of Gratian’s new partner as Augustus, the Spaniard Theodosius I. The settlement has been frequently seen as a turning point in imperial history, since for the first time barbarians were settled inside the empire as allied troops who would retain their political sovereignty.

In August 383, the general Magnus Maximus was proclaimed emperor in Britain, and Gratian was murdered by his troops. Italy,
Pannonia, and Africa remained loyal to Valentinian II, who was now 13 and still under the thumb of his mother Justina. In 387 Maximus invaded Italy, and Theodosius in response moved west and defeated the usurper in 388, having left the east in the control of his older son Arcadius. Theodosius returned to Constantinople in 391 after sending Valentinian II to Gaul with the Frankish general Arbogast. Conflict between Arbogast and Valentinian II led to the emperor’s suspicious death, officially a suicide, in 392. Arbogast then raised Eugenius, an obscure schoolteacher, to the throne. Theodosius returned to the west and defeated Arbogast and Eugenius at the Frigidus river in September 394, but died a few months later. He left two sons, the 17-year-old Arcadius in the east and the 10-year-old Honorius in the west. The empire, which had briefly been unified under the sole rule of Theodosius I, would never be so again.

At the death of Theodosius I, the western army was under the control of the general Stilicho, who acted as regent for the child Honorius. Stilicho’s claim that Theodosius, on his deathbed, had also granted him regency over the eastern emperor Arcadius may or may not have been true, but it poisoned relations between the two halves of the empire during Stilicho’s lifetime. The Gothic leader Alaric played off this mistrust by being alternately allied with and inimical toward the west. In addition to Gothic attacks, which culminated in Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, the west suffered from a major German invasion in 405 under the leadership of Radagaisus and a further breach of the Rhine in 406–7. After Stilicho’s assassination in 408, the west saw a succession of usurpations in Britain and Gaul. After the death of Alaric in 411, Honorius’ general Constantius put down the usurpers, and Spain and Gaul were pacified through a combination of military reconquest and the hiring of barbarian peoples as federate armies. Britain, however, was never reconquered, and was lost to imperial control forever. Honorius’ sister Galla Placidia married Constantius in 421 and the two had a son, Valentinian III. Constantius died at the end of the year and Galla Placidia withdrew to Constantinople with her son after a quarrel with Honorius. When Honorius died without an heir in 423, the eastern government supported the claims of his nephew, the baby Valentinian III, and sent an army to kill John, the official who had been proclaimed Augustus. Valentinian III was named Augustus at Rome on 23 October 423.

Power in the east after Theodosius’ death remained in civilian control, with the brief ascendancy of the praetorian prefect Rufinus
followed by the domination of the eunuch Eutropius. The rebellion of the Gothic federate Gainas in 399 resulted in the execution of Eutropius but Gainas and the Goths were put down and civilian government continued under the prefectures of Aurelian and Anthemius. On Arcadius’ death in May 408 his 6-year-old son Theodosius II was named Augustus. Theodosius II was brought up by his pious and forceful sister Pulcheria, who was influential in policy matters. After the emperor’s marriage in 421 to Aelia Eudocia, the empress, too, became a powerful force at court. The palace eunuch Chrysaphius succeeded in disgracing Eudocia and her friend Cyrus of Panopolis after 441 and maintained a powerful role in government until his execution after Theodosius’ death in 450.

Barbarian attacks troubled the empire throughout the fifth century. In 441 Theodosius II dispatched an army to aid Valentinian III in an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge Gaiseric and his Vandals from Africa. Rua and then his successor as king of the Huns, Attila, took advantage of these difficulties by demanding tribute from the eastern emperor and by devastating the Balkans and Thrace when payment was deemed insufficient. After the death of Theodosius the new eastern emperor, Marcian, refused to continue to pay subsidies to the Hunnic empire. Attila turned his attention to the west, where the sister of Valentinian III, Honoria, unhappy with the marriage that had been arranged for her, offered herself in marriage to Attila. Attila came with his army to collect his bride, but the Huns were checked in Gaul in 451 by Aetius, the chief general and power behind the throne of Valentinian. A Hunnic invasion of Italy in 452 was unsuccessful, and after the death of Attila in 453 the Hunnic empire swiftly disintegrated.

The position of Marcian, the military officer who succeeded Theodosius II to the throne, was legitimated by his marriage to the previous emperor’s sister Pulcheria. Marcian was succeeded after his death in 457 by Leo. Both emperors seem to have reached the throne through the influence of the general Aspar, but Leo came to favor another general, Zeno, and eventually had Aspar assassinated in 471. His reign was most notable for a disastrous attempt to drive the Vandals from Africa and for conflict with the Goths under their leader, Theodoric Strabo. At Leo’s death in 474, the eastern empire was insolvent and threatened by Gothic power in the Balkans.

Valentinian III was assassinated in 455, having ruled for thirty years. After several short-lived emperors took the throne, the German general Ricimer supported as emperor Majorian (457–61) and, after executing Majorian, Libius Severus (461–5). The nominee
of the eastern emperor Leo, the general Anthemius, next held office (467–72). The Roman army in this period ceased controlling Africa, Spain, and most of Gaul, and when the German officer Odoacer came to power in Italy, he neglected to appoint a western emperor and instead sought confirmation of his own power directly from the eastern emperor Zeno. When Zeno refused this recognition, Odoacer ruled with the title
rex
, or king, which was also used by the other German kings on what had once been Roman territory.

The Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries: religious history

Christianity was despised by pagan and Jew alike in the first centuries after the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Although technically illegal, most emperors sought to minimize prosecutions or persecutions which could lead to false accusations or general unrest. Christians continued to win converts gradually throughout the third century, and their growing numbers provoked two great persecutions, under the emperor Decius (250–1) and Valerian (257–60). Christians across the empire were forced to sacrifice to the gods or be martyred, and the persecution inspired many heroic acts of resistance as well as many more prudent acts of flight or surrender. Valerian’s defeat and capture by the Persian king was considered divine vengeance by Christians, and his successor Gallienus restored property to the church and instituted a policy of religious toleration which would last for forty years.

Diocletian was a firm believer in the traditional gods, and considered Jupiter and Hercules, represented by himself and his colleague Maximian on earth, to be protectors of the empire. In February 303 the emperor published an edict intended to destroy the corporate life of Christianity, demanding that churches be destroyed, sacred books be burned, and that Christians lose their offices and legal rights. In the summer the emperor further commanded that Christian bishops be arrested and forced to sacrifice. The persecution was broadened still further under the leadership of the Caesar Galerius, who in 304 demanded that all Christians sacrifice or face death. After the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian in 305, their successors continued to pursue anti-Christian measures.

After years of persecution, however, the dying Galerius had a change of heart, and in 311 published his famous “Edict of Toleration,” which returned Christianity to the neutral position it
had held before 303. The edict was not accepted by all of the rulers of the Roman state. But in October 312, as the emperor Constantine marched on Rome against Maxentius, he saw in the sky a cross of light with the message, “In this conquer.” The emperor credited the Christian God with his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. In an alliance with the emperor Licinius, Constantine promulgated the Edict of Milan, which proclaimed freedom of religion throughout the empire. The degree to which Constantine understood the Christian religion at that time is uncertain, but his benefactions to the church were significant, including the exemption of clergy from duties and the showering of wealth upon churches in the west. In only a decade, Christianity had been transformed from an object of persecution to the favored religion of the Roman state.

The granting of privileges to the Christians made the definition of Christianity a much more significant source of strife. The fourth and fifth centuries were wracked with doctrinal disputes fueled by various mixtures of ideological, political, and economic motives. In order to consider these disputes fairly it is essential to avoid retroactively imposing later notions of orthodoxy upon earlier thinkers. It was out of the doctrinal controversies that the implications of various theological positions eventually came to be understood, and orthodoxy came to be constructed.

The relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son was a frequent subject of debate in the fourth century. On the one hand, common sense and the Greek philosophical tradition would suggest that the Father was in some way greater than or existed prior to the Son. To emphasize too strongly the singularity of God ran the risk of not thoroughly disassociating Christianity from Judaism, which was an attractive alternative to Christianity in the cities of the east. Also, an emphasis on the human and therefore subordinate aspect of Jesus was necessary to underscore the pain that Jesus suffered on the cross. A fully divine Jesus would not seem to have undergone much of a sacrifice on behalf of mankind. On the other hand, there were strong reasons for emphasizing the essential unity of Jesus and the Father. A too-human Jesus might be assimilated with the many pagan stories of demigods and heroes. The greatness of God’s sacrifice could only be emphasized by underlining Jesus’ divinity. Without a Son whose power was fully divine, how could human sins be forgiven?

Arius was a priest of Alexandria who came into conflict with his bishop, Alexander, over the nature of the relationship between the
Father and the Son. Because, on the one hand, we do not know exactly what Arius taught, and on the other, we can be certain that he did not teach all of the many different things which he was accused of inspiring, the often-used term “Arianism” is not very useful for describing a theological position. It was, instead, used to smear theological opponents, few of whom would have been likely to describe themselves with the word. In some cases, the historian can substitute the more neutral term “homoiousian” and its counterpart “homoousian.” The first term, which includes the letter “i,” refers to the belief that the Father and Son are of “like” substance, and can refer to a number of theological positions which deny what would eventually become the orthodox belief that the Father and Son are of the “same” substance.