restored the empire to something of its earlier power. Except
during the last four months of his life, when he was sole Emperor,
his direct authority was confined to the East; but he exerted a
potent influence upon the affairs of the whole empire, both
temporal and spiritual. He warred steadily against paganism and
heresy. He took the side of Trinitarian orthodoxy against Arianism,
which had previously triumphed in the East, and restored religious
unity to the empire by making the Athanasian doctrine the faith of
Constantinople, as it was that of the West. This policy was
ratified by the second ecumenical council, called by Theodosius,
at Constantinople in 381, when the orthodoxy first promulgated by
the Council of Nicæa in 325 was substantially reaffirmed. It was
also largely through the influence of Theodosius, who was the
friend of Ambrose, archbishop of Milan, that the Roman senate, by a
great majority, voted (388) to abolish the worship of Jupiter and
to adopt the worship of Christ, thus making Christianity the state
religion. In the debate which preceded this transition the
eloquence of Symmachus, on the pagan side, was overmatched by the
arguments of Ambrose, aided by the powerful support of Theodosius
in person.
In his further dealings with the Visigoths, Theodosius, following a
precedent already established, enlisted in the Roman service a
separate Gothic army of forty thousand soldiers; but this policy,
as the event proved, was fatal to the permanency of his hitherto
successful control of these alien elements, for they soon gathered
strength to take the mastery into their own hands. Theodosius died
in 395, after publishing a decree for partition of the empire
between his two sons, Honorius to rule in the West, and Arcadius in
the East. He meant, not to establish two independent jurisdictions,
but that there should be one commonwealth, whose two rulers should
be colleagues and coadjutors in its defence. This new disposition
of the empire was followed by dissensions and intrigues against
which the weak sons of Theodosius were helpless in the hands of
able and unscrupulous self-seekers, the result of which was the
final separation of the empire into two distinct governments and
the weakening of the powers of resistance of both against those
ever-increasing encroachments of the barbarians which eventually
caused the fall of both empires.
One of the few men in history who have won the title of great, the
emperor Theodosius I, who had by his policy, at once friendly and firm,
pacified the Goths, who had confirmed the triumph of Athanasian over
Arian Christianity, who had stamped out the last flames of refractory
paganism represented by the tyrant Eugenius, died on the 17th of
January, A.D. 395. His wishes were that his younger son, Honorius, then
a boy of ten years, should reign in the West, where he had already
installed him, and that his eldest son, Arcadius, whom he had left as
regent in Constantinople when he set out against Eugenius, should
continue to reign in the East.
But he was not willing to leave his youthful heirs--Arcadius was only
eighteen--without a protector, and the most natural protector was one
bound to them by ties of relationship. Accordingly on his deathbed he
commended them to the care of the Vandal Stilicho, whom he had raised
for his military and other talents to the rank of commander-in-chief,
and, deeming him worthy of an alliance with his own family, had united
to his favorite niece Serena. We can hardly doubt that it was in this
capacity, as the husband of his niece and a trusted friend, not as a
general, that Stilicho received Theodosius' dying wishes; it was as an
elder member of the same family that the husband of their cousin could
claim to exert an influence over Arcadius and Honorius, of whom,
however, the latter, it would appear, was more especially committed to
his care, not only as the younger, but because Stilicho, being _magister
militum_ of the armies of Italy, would come more directly into contact
with him than with his brother.
Arcadius, with whom we are especially concerned, was about eighteen at
the time of his father's death. He was of short stature, of dark
complexion, thin and inactive, and the dulness of his wit was betrayed
by his speech and by his eyes, which always seemed as if they were about
to close in sleep. His smallness of intellect and his weakness of
character made it inevitable that he should come under the influence,
good or bad, of commanding personalities, with which he might be brought
in contact. Such a potent personality was the prætorian prefect Rufinus,
a native of Aquitaine, who in almost every respect presented a contrast
to his sovereign. He was tall and manly, and the restless movements of
his keen eyes and the readiness of his speech signified his intellectual
powers. He was a strong, worldly man, ambitious of power, and
sufficiently unprincipled; avaricious, too, like most ministers of the
age.
He had made many enemies by acts which were perhaps somewhat more than
usually unscrupulous, but we cannot justly assume that in the overthrow
of certain rivals he was entirely guilty and they entirely innocent, as
is sometimes represented. It is almost certain that he formed the scheme
and cherished the hope of becoming joint emperor with Arcadius.
This ambition of Rufinus placed him at once in an attitude of opposition
to Stilicho, who was himself not above the suspicion of entertaining
similar schemes, not, however, in the interest of his own person, but
for his son Eucherius. The position of the Vandal, who was connected by
marriage with the imperial family, gave him an advantage over Rufinus,
which was strengthened by the generally known fact that Theodosius had
given him his last instructions. Stilicho, moreover, was popular with
the army, and for the present the great bulk of the forces of the empire
was at his disposal; for the regiments united to suppress Eugenius had
not yet been sent back to their various stations. Thus a struggle was
imminent between the ambitious minister who had the ear of Arcadius, and
the strong general who held the command and enjoyed the favor of the
army.
Before the end of the year this struggle began and concluded in an
extremely curious way; but we must first relate how a certain scheme of
Rufinus had been checkmated by an obscurer but wilier rival nearer at
hand.
It was the cherished project of Rufinus to unite Arcadius with his only
daughter; once the Emperor's father-in-law, he might hope to become
speedily an emperor himself. But he imprudently made a journey to
Antioch, in order to execute vengeance personally on the Count of the
East, who had offended him; and during his absence from Byzantium an
adversary stole a march on him. This adversary was the eunuch Eutropius,
the lord chamberlain, a bald old man, who with oriental craftiness had
won his way up from the meanest services and employments. Determining
that the future Empress should be bound to himself and not to Rufinus,
he chose Eudoxia, a girl of singular beauty, the daughter of a
distinguished Frank, but herself of Roman education.
Her father, Bauto, was dead, and she lived in the house of the widow and
sons of one of the victims of Rufinus. Eutropius showed a picture of the
Frank maiden to the Emperor and engaged his affections for her; the
nuptials were arranged by the time Rufinus returned to Constantinople,
and were speedily celebrated (April 27, 395). This was a blow to
Rufinus, but he was still the most powerful man in the East.
The event which at length brought him into contact with Stilicho was the
rising of the Visigoths, who had been settled by Theodosius in Moesia
and Thrace, and were bound in return for their lands to serve in the
army as _foederati_. They had accompanied the Emperor to Italy against
Eugenius, and had returned to their habitations sooner than the rest of
the army.
The causes of discontent which led to their revolt are not quite clear;
but it seems that Arcadius refused to give them certain grants of money
which had been allowed them by his father, and, as has been suggested,
they probably expected that favor would wane and influence decrease now
that the "friend of Goths" was dead, and consequently determined to make
themselves heard and felt. To this must be added that their most
influential chieftain, Alaric, called Baltha ("the Bold"), desired to be
made a commander-in-chief, _magister militum_, and was offended that he
had been passed over.
However this may be, the historical essence of the matter is that an
immense body of restless, uncivilized Germans could not abide
permanently in the centre of Roman provinces in a semi-dependent,
ill-defined relation to the Roman government; the West Goths had not yet
found their permanent home. Under the leadership of Alaric they raised
the ensign of revolt, and spread desolation in the fields and homesteads
of Macedonia, Moesia, and Thrace, even advancing close to the walls of
Constantinople. They carefully spared certain estates outside the city,
belonging to the prefect Rufinus, but this policy does not seem to have
been adopted with the same motive that caused Archidamus to spare the
lands of Pericles. Alaric may have wished not to render Rufinus
suspected, but to conciliate his friendship and obtain thereby more
favorable terms. Rufinus actually went to Alaric's camp, dressed as a
Goth, but the interview led to nothing.
It was impossible to take the field against the Goths, because there
were no forces available, as the eastern armies were still with Stilicho
in the West. Arcadius therefore was obliged to summon Stilicho to send
or bring them back immediately, to protect his throne. This summons gave
that general the desired opportunity to interfere in the politics of
Constantinople; and having with energetic celerity arranged matters on
the Gallic frontier, he marched overland through Illyricum and
confronted Alaric in Thessaly, whither the Goth had traced his
devastating path from the Propontis.
It appears that Stilicho's behavior is quite as open to the charges of
ambition and artfulness as the behavior of Rufinus, for I do not
perceive how we can strictly justify his detention of the forces, which
ought to have been sent back to defend the provinces of Arcadius at the
very beginning of the year. Stilicho's march to Thessaly can scarcely
have taken place before October, and it is hard to interpret this long
delay in sending back the troops, over which he had no rightful
authority, if it were not dictated by a wish to implicate the government
of New Rome in difficulties and render his own intervention necessary.
We are told, too, that he selected the best soldiers from the eastern
regiments and enrolled them in the western corps. If we adopted the
Cassian maxim, _Cui bono fuerit_, we should be inclined to accuse
Stilicho of having been privy to the revolt of Alaric; such a
supposition would at least be far more plausible than the calumny which
was circulated charging Rufinus with having stirred up the Visigoths.
For such a supposition, too, we might find support in the circumstance
that the estates of Rufinus were spared by the soldiers of Alaric; it
would be intelligible that Stilicho suggested the plan in order to bring
odium upon Rufinus. To such a conjecture, finally, certain other
circumstances, soon to be related, point: but it remains nothing more
than a suspicion.
It seems that before Stilicho arrived Alaric had experienced a defeat at
the hands of garrison soldiers in Thessaly; at all events he shut
himself up in a fortified camp and declined to engage with the Roman
general. In the mean time Rufinus induced Arcadius to send a peremptory
order to Stilicho to despatch the eastern troops to Constantinople and
depart himself whence he had come; the Emperor resented, or pretended to
resent, the presence of his cousin as an officious interference.
Stilicho yielded so readily that his willingness seems almost
suspicious; but we shall probably never know whether he was responsible
for the events that followed. He consigned the eastern soldiers to the
command of a Gothic captain, Gainas, and himself departed to Salona,
allowing Alaric to proceed on his wasting way into the lands of Hellas.
Gainas and his soldiers marched by the Via Egnatia to Constantinople,
and it was arranged that, according to a usual custom, the Emperor and
his court should come forth from the city to meet the army in the Campus
Martius, which extended on the west side of the city near the Golden
Gate. We cannot trust the statement of a hostile writer that Rufinus
actually expected to be created augustus on this occasion, and appeared
at the Emperor's side prouder and more sumptuously arrayed than ever; we
only know that he accompanied Arcadius to meet the army.
It is said that, when the Emperor had saluted the troops, Rufinus
advanced and displayed a studied affability and solicitude to please
toward even individual soldiers. They closed in round him as he smiled
and talked, anxious to secure their good-will for his elevation to the
throne, but just as he felt himself very nigh to supreme success, the
swords of the nearest were drawn, and his body, pierced with wounds,
fell to the ground. His head, carried through the streets, was mocked by
the people, and his right hand, severed from the trunk, was presented at
the doors of houses with the request: "Give to the insatiable!"
We can hardly suppose that the lynching of Rufinus was the fatal
inspiration of a moment, but whether it was proposed or approved of by
Stilicho, or was a plan hatched among the soldiers on their way to
Constantinople, is uncertain. One might even conjecture that the whole
affair was the result of a prearrangement between Stilicho and the party
in Byzantium, which was adverse to Rufinus and led by the eunuch
Eutropius; but there is no evidence. Our knowledge of this scene
unfortunately depends on a partial and untrustworthy writer, who,
moreover, wrote in verse--the poet Claudian.
He enjoyed the patronage of Stilicho, and his poems _Against Rufinus_,
_Against Eutropius_, and _On the Gothic War_ are a glorification of his
patron's splendid virtues. Stilicho and Rufinus he paints as two
opposite forces, the force of good and the force of evil, like the
principles of the Manichæans.
Rufinus is the terrible Pytho, the scourge of the world; Stilicho is the
radiant Apollo, the deliverer of mankind. Rufinus is a power of
darkness, whose tartarean wickedness surpasses even the wickedness of
the Furies of hell; Stilicho is an angel of light. In the works of a
poet whose leading idea was so extravagant, we can hardly expect to find
much fair historical truth; it is, as a rule, only accidental references
and allusions that we can accept, unless other authorities confirm his
statements. Yet even modern writers, who know well how cautiously
Claudian must be used, have been unconsciously prejudiced in favor of
Stilicho and against Rufinus.
We must return to the movements of Alaric, who had entered the regions
of classical Greece, for which he showed scant respect. The commander of
the garrison at Thermopylæ, and the proconsul of Achaia, offered no
resistance, and the West Goths entered Boeotia, where Thebes alone
escaped their devastation. They occupied the Piræus, but Athens itself
was spared, and Alaric was entertained as a guest in the city of Athene.
But the great temple of the mystic goddesses Demeter and Persephone, at
Eleusis, was burned down by the irreverent barbarians; Megara, the next
place on their southward route, fell; then Corinth, Argos, and Sparta.
But when they reached Elis they were confronted by an unexpected
opponent. Stilicho had returned from Italy, by way of Salona, which he
reached by sea, to stay the hand of the invader. He blockaded him in the
plain of Pholoe, but for some reason, not easily comprehensible, he
did not press his advantage, and set free the hordes of the Visigothic
land pirates to resume their career of devastation. He went back to
Italy, and Alaric returned, plundering as he went, to Illyricum and
Thrace, where he made terms with the government of New Rome, and
received the desired title of _magister militum per Illyricum_. No one
will suppose that Stilicho went all the way from Italy to the
Peloponnesus, and then, although he had Alaric practically at his mercy,
retreated, leaving matters just as they were, without some excellent
reason.
If he had genuinely wished to deliver the distressed countries and
assist the emperor Arcadius, he would not have acted in this ineffectual
manner. And it is difficult to see that his conduct is explained by
assuming that he was not willing, by a complete extermination of the
Goths, to enable Arcadius to dispense with his help in future. In that
case, what did he gain by going to the Peloponnesus at all? Or we might
ask, if he wished Arcadius to summon his assistance from year to year,
is it likely that he would have adopted the method of rendering no
assistance whatever? But, above all, the question occurs, what pleasure
would it have been to the general to look forward to being called upon
again and again to take the field against the Visigoths?
It seems evident that Stilicho and Alaric made at Pholoe some secret
and definite arrangement, which conditioned Stilicho's departure, and
that this arrangement was conducive to the interests of Stilicho, who
was in the position of advantage, and at the same time not contrary to
the interests of Alaric, for otherwise Stilicho could not have been sure
that the agreement would be carried out. What this secret compact was
can only be a matter of conjecture; but I would suggest that Stilicho
had already formed the plan of creating his son Eucherius emperor, and
that he designed the Balkan peninsula to be the dominion over which
Eucherius should hold sway. His conduct becomes perfectly explicable if
we assume that by a secret agreement he secured Alaric's assistance for
the execution of this scheme, which the preponderance of Gothic power in
Illyricum and Thrace would facilitate.
It was not only the European parts of Arcadius' dominions that were
ravaged in 395, by the fire and sword of barbarians. In the same year
hordes of trans-Caucasian Huns poured through the Caspian gates, and,
rushing southward through the provinces of Mesopotamia, carried
desolation into Syria. St. Jerome was in Palestine at this time, and in
two of his letters we have the account of an eye-witness: "As I was
searching for an abode worthy of such a lady (Fabiola, his friend),
behold, suddenly messengers rush hither and thither, and the whole East
trembles with the news that from the far Mæotis, from the land of the
ice-bound Don and the savage Massagetæ, where the strong works of
Alexander on the Caucasian cliffs keep back the wild nations, swarms of
Huns had burst forth, and, flying hither and thither, were scattering
slaughter and terror everywhere. The Roman army was at that time, absent
in consequence of the civil wars in Italy.... May Jesus protect the
Roman world in future from such beasts! They were everywhere, when they
were least expected, and their speed outstripped the rumor of their
approach; they spared neither religion nor dignity nor age; they showed
no pity to the cry of infancy.
"Babes, who had not yet begun to live, were forced to die; and, ignorant
of the evil that was upon them, as they were held in the hands and
threatened by the swords of the enemy, there was a smile upon their
lips. There was a consistent and universal report that Jerusalem was the
goal of the foes, and that on account of their insatiable lust for gold
they were hastening to this city. The walls, neglected by the
carelessness of peace, were repaired. Antioch was enduring a blockade.
Tyre, fain to break off from the dry land, sought its ancient island.
Then we too were constrained to provide ships, to stay on the sea-shore,
to take precautions against the arrival of the enemy, and, though the
winds were wild, to fear a shipwreck less than the barbarians--making
provision not for our own safety so much as for the chastity of our
virgins." In another letter, speaking of these "wolves of the north," he
says: "How many monasteries were captured? The waters of how many rivers
were stained with human gore? Antioch was besieged and the other cities,
past which the Halys, the Cydnus, the Orontes, the Euphrates flow. Herds
of captives were dragged away; Arabia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt,
were led captive by fear."
The Huns, however, were not the only depredators at whose hands the
provinces of Asia Minor and Syria suffered. There were other enemies
within, whose ravages were constant, while the expedition of the Huns
from without occurred only once. These enemies were the freebooters who
dwelt in the Isaurian mountains, wild and untamed in their secure
fastnesses. Ammianus Marcellinus describes picturesquely the habits of
these sturdy robbers. They used to descend from the difficult mountain
slopes like a whirlwind to places on the sea-shore, where in hidden ways
and glens they lurked till the fall of night, and in the light of the
crescent moon watched until the mariners riding at anchor slept; then
they boarded the vessels, killed and plundered the crews. Thus the coast
of Isauria was like a deadly shore of Sciron; it was avoided by sailors,
who made a practice of putting in at the safer ports of Cyprus.
The Isaurians did not always confine their land expeditions to the
surrounding provinces of Cilicia and Pamphylia; they penetrated, in A.D.
403, northward to Cappadocia and Pontus, or southward to Syria and
Palestine; and the whole range of the Taurus, as far as the confines of
Syria, seems to have been their spacious habitation. An officer named
Arbacazius was intrusted by Arcadius with an office similar in object to
that which, four and a half centuries ago, had been assigned to
Pompeius; but, though he quelled the spirits of the freebooters for a
moment, Arbacazius did not succeed in eradicating the lawless element,
in the same way as Pompeius had succeeded in exterminating the piracy
which in his day infested the same regions. In the years 404 and 405
Cappadocia was overrun by the robber bands.
Meanwhile, after the death of Rufinus, the weak emperor Arcadius passed
under the influence of the eunuch Eutropius, who, in unscrupulous greed
of money, resembled Rufinus and many other officials of the time, and,
like Rufinus, has been painted far blacker than he really was. All the
evil things that were said by his enemies of Rufinus were said of
Eutropius by his enemies; but in reading of the enormities of the latter
we must make great allowance for the general prejudice existing against
a person with Eutropius' physical disqualifications.
Eutropius naturally looked on the prætorian prefects, the most powerful
men in the administration next to the Emperor, with jealousy and
suspicion, as dangerous rivals. It was his interest to reduce their
power and to raise the dignity of his own office to an equality with
theirs. To his influence, then, we are probably justified in ascribing
two innovations which were made by Arcadius. The administration of the
_cursus publicus_, or office of postmaster-general, was transferred from
the prætorian prefects to the master of offices, and the same
transferrence was made in regard to the manufactories of arms. On the
other hand, the grand chamberlain, _præpositus sacri cubiculi_, was made
an _illustris_, equal in rank to the prætorian prefects. Both these
innovations were afterward altered.