JUSTINA
The splendour of Julian’s reign was soon overcast. In the summer of
363, as he was skilfully extricating his troops from a dangerous
position in Persia, he was pierced with a javelin, and he expired,
with dignity and serenity, amongst his saddened supporters. Amid the
noisy intrigue for the succession that followed, the name of Jovian, a
popular and handsome officer of no distinction, obtained the loudest
support, and the mantle of the brilliant young Emperor was conferred
on him. How he secured the retreat of his troops by humiliating
concessions to the Persians, and the Roman soldiers and Roman settlers
sadly evacuated the provinces on which the blood of their fathers had
been freely spent, and the emblem of the cross was borne again at the
head of the legions, need not be told here. Not only is the wife of
Jovian, Charito, no more than a name to us, but Jovian himself died
before he reached the luxury of the capital. His brief enjoyment of
power had been adorned by neither courage nor temperance. Charito sank
back into obscurity, with her infant son, and was years afterwards laid
by the side of her husband in the Church of the Apostles at Byzantium.
The next reign will introduce us to the stronger and more prominent
personality of the Empress Justina and other Empresses of some
interest. The hum of intrigue had arisen again in the camp, and the
struggle of Christian and pagan was resumed. The choice of the army
at length fell once more on an officer whose chief distinction was
that he had a large and handsome person, and had had an energetic
father. Valentinian had been an officer in Julian’s guards, and had one
day, as he attended the Emperor at sacrifice, cuffed the priest for
dropping some of the lustral water on his coat. Julian banished him
for this violent desecration of his cult, but, though the more lively
writers of the time promptly dispatch him to remote and contradictory
regions, even Tillemont doubts if the sentence was carried out. It is
probable that Julian had merely dismissed him from the body-guard, as
we find him in the army at the time of Julian’s death. With two other
officers he was sent by Jovian to secure the allegiance of the troops
in the West. One legion, devoted to the memory of Julian, rebelled,
and Valentinian had to fly for his life. He returned to the East, and
resumed his post in the army, as it trailed some miles in the rear of
the retreating Emperor. And in the middle of February (364) he was
amazed to learn that Jovian had died, after a too liberal supper, and
he himself was called to the throne. He was compelled by the troops
to share the power with his brother Valens, and, leaving the shorn
Eastern provinces under the care of Valens, he went on to Milan to take
possession of the Western throne.
Valeria Severa,[29] the first wife of Valentinian, is one of those
shadowy Empresses whose form can hardly be discerned in the records of
the time. She had borne him a son, the future Emperor Gratian, five
years before, but she does not seem to have secured his affection, and
we shall find her retiring in disgrace as soon as the beautiful Justina
appears at court. Albia Dominica, the wife of Valens, is not more
interesting, but an Empress whom we have dismissed in a former chapter
at once reappears at Constantinople in opposition to her.
Before they separated Valens and Valentinian had fallen ill together,
and, under the pretence that Julian’s friends had attempted to poison
them, they turned with some vindictiveness upon the pagan officials.
The aged and respected Sallust firmly controlled the inquiry, and
no blood was shed; but large numbers of Julian’s officials were
displaced--in many cases quite rightly, as Julian’s zeal for paganism
had had the same evil effect in encouraging hypocrisy as the zeal of
other Emperors for Christianity--and driven into sullen discontent.
Further, Dominica’s father, Petronius, a deformed and repulsive person,
had risen to power with his daughter, and was grinding the faces of the
citizens of the East with the most extortionate demands. A spark soon
fell on this inflammable world. Procopius, a relative of Julian’s, had
published a very hazy claim to the Empire after Julian’s death. He had
hastily withdrawn and disowned it, but Valens sent men to apprehend
him. Ingeniously escaping the soldiers, he fled to Constantinople,
and seems there to have fallen into the hands of abler intriguers.
Two legions were bought for him, and they made him Emperor. There
was no purple mantle to be obtained, so they clothed him in a stagy
tunic bespangled with gold, put purple shoes on his feet and a piece
of purple cloth in his hand, and conducted him, amid the amazed and
derisive spectators, to the Senate and the Palace.
His force grew so quickly that the weak and nervous Emperor of the East
was disposed to yield him the throne, but his older officers urged him
to resist. In the short struggle that followed we meet again the third
wife, and widow, of Constantius. Faustina had been _enceinte_ at the
death of her husband, and she was living at Constantinople, with her
four-year-old daughter, when Procopius made his romantic attempt on the
throne. With some shrewdness he withdrew her from her retirement, and
associated her with him in his claim. The legitimate dynasty seemed to
be wresting the throne from usurpers when the widow and daughter of
the son of Constantine appeared at the head of the troops. Even when
they marched out to meet the forces of Valens, Faustina, in a litter,
accompanied them. But the new hope of Faustina died away as quickly
as it had been born. The soldiers were persuaded to return to their
allegiance, and the power of Procopius swiftly melted away. Faustina
sank again into obscurity, and the adventurous career of Constantia was
postponed for some years.
Dominica returned to her position in the enervated and luxurious court,
and the rest of her life offers little interest. The ecclesiastical
historians describe her as egging her husband to persecute the
Trinitarians, but we must read the charge with discretion. There is
little positive trace of persecution. One day eighty Trinitarian
priests came to plead their cause at the court, and Valens is said
to have ordered them back to their ship. At some distance from port
the vessel was found to be aflame, and the priests were burnt to
death. The orthodox writers declare that the vessel was purposely
fired, at the command of Valens, but it is impossible to adjust the
conflicting statements of the rival schools of theology. Valens was
an ardent Arian, but he upheld the principle of religious toleration,
and confined theologians to the use of theological weapons. The
only occasion on which he is known to have ordered or countenanced
violent persecution was in the suppression of magic. In some obscure
chamber of the capital a group of men resorted to this dark means of
discovering who would be the successor of Valens. Some say that a ring
dangling from a mystic tripod spelt out the name on painted letters;
some that grains of corn were placed on letters of the alphabet,
and, when a cock was admitted to peck them, the order of the letters
which it first attacked was noticed. In either case, the result was
to give the letters Th E O D. It would be a remarkable forecast,
if the story did not belong to a generation after the accession of
Theodosius. However, the attempt became known, and a searching inquiry
and savage persecution followed. The despicable trade of the informer
was encouraged, whole libraries of valuable books were destroyed,
and numbers of innocent philosophers and matrons were included in the
bloody lists of the condemned.
The name of Dominica occurs only in one authentic connexion during the
reign of Valens. The Emperor passed the winter of 372–3 at Cæsarea
in Cappadocia, where he encountered the stern and uncompromising
champion of orthodoxy, St. Basil. Strong no less in his personal
haughtiness--St. Jerome calls it pride--than in his glowing zeal for
his Church, Basil emphatically refused to obey him, and was threatened
with banishment. At once Dominica and her boy fell ill. Besides two
daughters, she had had a son in 366, and this boy fell into a dangerous
illness. It is said that Dominica learned in a dream that the illness
was a divine punishment, but it is not impossible that her waking
intelligence could arrive at that conclusion. Basil was summoned to the
palace once more. Theodoret would have it that the bishop courteously
breathed on the boy, and declared that he would recover if he received
Trinitarian baptism. The earlier ecclesiastical writers, however,
ascribe to him a firmer attitude. He asked Valens if the boy would
receive orthodox baptism, and was told that he would not. “Let him meet
whatever fate God wills then,” said the bishop, quitting the palace.
The boy was baptized by the Arians, and died during the following
night. A power even greater than that of eunuchs, and more imperious
than that of Emperors, was rapidly growing. When, some days later, one
of the favourites of Valens, who had risen from the kitchen, attempted
to intervene in a discussion between the bishop and the Emperor, Basil
curtly told him to confine himself to sauces and not interfere in
Church matters.
Five or six years later Valens perished in the war with the Goths,
and Dominica passed to the fitting obscurity of private life. The
one indication of spirit that is recorded of her is that, when the
victorious Goths pressed on to Constantinople and invested it, she paid
the citizens out of the public treasury to arm themselves against the
barbarians. We turn from her vague and retiring personality to the
more interesting figure of Justina, who had some years before begun to
share the throne of Valentinian.
Valentinian was as fierce and choleric as his brother was timid. A
tall and powerful man, with stern blue eyes, a brilliant complexion,
and light hair, he enlisted and encouraged his native cruelty in the
service of what he regarded as the interest of the State. The pagans
he refused to persecute, and he did much to promote the higher culture
of Rome, which was so closely connected with the pagan beliefs. But,
like his brother, he fell with truculence upon all who could be brought
under a comprehensive charge of magic and divination, and the blood
of Italy flowed very freely. His hard, covetous, and brutal officers
enriched themselves in the work of torture, spoliation, and execution,
and--though the statement recalls rather the savagery of Nero or
Domitian--we are assured by the contemporary Ammianus that he kept
two monstrous bears in cages near his chamber, and fed them on human
victims. The slightest offence might incur sentence of death. “You
had better change his head,” he is said to have ordered, in brutal
playfulness, when some official desired to change to another province.
It is, perhaps, a circumstance of credit to Severa that she failed
to retain the affection of Valentinian, though a less flattering
reason is assigned by some of the authorities. The truth is that,
since Valentinian is described as most chaste and most Christian,
the accession of Justina to his palace has caused the ecclesiastical
historians no little perplexity. The Church was peremptorily opposed
to divorce, and regarded as adultery a second marriage contracted
while the first wife lived. Baronius conveniently removes Severa by
death, but Ammianus informs us that Severa was living long afterwards
at the court of her son,[30] and the Alexandrian Chronicle expressly
says that Gratian recalled his mother to court. Tillemont acknowledges
this, and can only blush for the guilty connivance of the clergy of the
period.
If we could believe the ecclesiastical historian Socrates, Valentinian
avoided the sin of divorce and adultery by promulgating a decree
to the effect that it was lawful to have two wives, and promptly
marrying Justina in addition to Severa. Of such a law, however, we
have no trace, and most writers follow the alternative theory of the
authorities.
Aviana Justina was the widow of the usurper Magnentius, who had so
dramatically stolen the throne of the worthless Constans, and had
been crushed by Constantius in the year 353. She was a woman of great
beauty, the daughter of a high provincial official, a spirited and
ambitious young woman. She would be in her later twenties, at least,
in 368, when she entered the suite of Severa in some capacity. She
was soon associated so intimately with the Empress that they bathed
together, and Severa made the fatal mistake of describing what Socrates
curiously calls her “virginal beauty” to the sensual Valentinian.
Before long it was announced that Severa was divorced, and Justina
occupied her bed. A late authority throws a thin mantle over the action
of Valentinian. Severa, he says, used her Imperial position to compel
a lady of Milan to sell her an estate at a most inadequate price, and
Valentinian was unable to endure her avarice. The vague description we
have of Justina’s dazzling beauty will, perhaps, suffice.
This remarkable conduct on the part of Valentinian and Justina is
put in the year 368.[31] The succeeding years of war and religious
controversy throw no light on the character of Justina, and we need
not describe them. Valentinian died in 375. Some delegates of the
barbarians had come, with deep humility, to implore his clemency for
their invasion of his dominions, and Valentinian burst into one of
his appalling storms of rage. So violent was his fury in addressing
them that he burst a blood-vessel, and left the Western Empire to his
son Gratian. Gratian had married in the previous year. His Empress
was the daughter of Faustina, who had been borne in her mother’s arms
at the head of the troops of Procopius. In crossing the provinces to
meet Gratian, Constantia had had a singular adventure. While she was
dining at an inn, some twenty-six miles from Sirmium, the tribes broke
across the Danube and occupied the village. There was just time for the
Governor of Illyrium to snatch up the thirteen-year-old princess and
make a dash for Sirmium. She married Gratian in 374, and became Empress
of the West in the following year. But Flavia Maxima Constantia has
left only the faint impress of her early adventures on the chronicles
of the time, and the few years of her Imperial life have no interest
for us. The next mention of her is that she died some time before her
husband, who was assassinated in 383. He had married again, but his
widow, Læta, is a mere name in history. Theodosius gave a comfortable
income to Læta and her mother Pissamena, and they were distinguished
for their charity in the later misfortunes of Rome.
When Valentinian had died in a fit of rage at Bregetio, Justina and
her four-year-old boy, Valentinian the younger, were in the town of
Murocincta, a hundred miles away. Justina hastened to the camp, and
it was presently announced that the army had decided to associate the
boy with Gratian in the rule of the West. Gratian, the most temperate
and promising of the Emperors of the period, published his consent. A
refusal to acknowledge the boy, and an attempt to punish the intrigue
by which Justina retained her power, would have involved a civil war,
and the whole of his forces were now needed to stem the flood of
barbarism that surged against the northern frontier of the Empire. The
last days of Rome were fast approaching. From the remote deserts of
Asia a fierce and numerous people, the Huns, had entered Europe, and
were sweeping the Goths and other Teutonic tribes southward. Gratian
appointed an Emperor of the East, whom we shall meet presently, in the
place of Valens, and spent his strength in heroic efforts to defend the
threatened frontier.
Justina returned with the boy-Emperor to Milan. As long as Gratian
lived, Justina was restricted to the life of the palace, but in 383 the
throne was usurped by Maximus, and Gratian was murdered by one of his
emissaries. Gibbon generously traces the general dissatisfaction out
of which this revolt emerged to a deterioration of the character of
Gratian. This deterioration cannot be questioned, but one particular
outcome of it, the active persecution of the pagans, was probably his
most fatal error. Milan was now dominated by the imperious and zealous
St. Ambrose, and the two young Emperors were expressly under his
control. At the suggestion of Ambrose, Gratian abandoned Valentinian’s
policy of toleration. He rejected the title of Pontifex Maximus,
ordered the removal of the statue of Victory from the Roman Senate, and
confiscated the estates of the temples. He even admitted the abusive
epithet “pagans” (or “villagers”), which the more forward Christians
were beginning to use, in his official decrees.[32] This must have
inflamed the general discontent, and the army of Maximus marched
peacefully over Gaul, and occupied the Empire as far as the Alps. The
Emperor of the East, Theodosius, consented that Britain, Gaul, and
Spain should remain under the rule of Maximus, and Justina continued to
rule the curtailed dominions of her son.
It was now discovered that Justina was an Arian. Whether she had
concealed her beliefs during the life of Valentinian, or had been
recently won to the sect, it is impossible to say; but Ambrose now
found that he had a stubborn opponent of his religious ambition. The
trouble culminated in 385, when scenes were witnessed that effectively
impress on us the change that had come over the Roman Empire. Justina
ordered that one of the Christian churches of the city should be put
at the disposal of the Arian clergy. Ambrose sternly refused, and,
when he was summoned to the palace, and a sentence of banishment
was apprehended, the people flocked to the palace and intimidated
the Empress and her counsellors. A little later, the Gothic (Arian)
soldiers were sent to occupy the church, and orders were given that
it should be prepared for the Empress’s devotions. A renewal of the
riot, and the showering of the vilest epithets upon the person of the
Empress, forced her to retire once more. In the following year, 386,
she passed sentence of exile on the bishop, and her spirit was expended
in a final struggle. For the first time in the history of Rome--a true
index of its profound demoralization--the troops were prevented by
the people from carrying out an Imperial decree. Ambrose was guarded
day and night by thousands of his followers. The chief church and the
episcopal house were fortified as if for a siege, and the troops of
“Jezebel” had to stand inactive before a mob of citizens. On the advice
of Theodosius, Justina refrained from any further attempt. Indeed, her
attention was soon violently withdrawn to a very different danger.
The ambition of Maximus had once more outrun its bounds, and he coveted
the remaining provinces of Valentinian. Justina’s conduct betrays
that her ability was inferior to her spirit. Duped by the treacherous
diplomacy of Maximus, she was suddenly informed that the hostile forces
of Maximus were close to Milan, and she fled hastily to the coast.
At Aquileia she and her son took ship for the East. The soldiers of
Maximus followed them on swift galleys, but they rounded the south of
Greece in safety, and landed at Thessalonica. Her task now was to
induce Theodosius to espouse their cause, and it proved to be one of
nearer proportion to her talent.
Her pressing appeals to Theodosius for aid were parried or unheeded
for some time. If we may believe Theodoret, the only reply which she
received was a painful assurance that the heresy she entertained, and
in which she was educating her son, was a sufficient cause of all the
evils that had come upon them. She was directed to await a visit from
Theodosius at Thessalonica, and the visit was much delayed. Historians
usually depict the Emperor as held in suspense by a painful dilemma.
Not only would it be a serious thing for the Empire, surrounded as it
was with peril, to engage the forces of the East and the West in an
exhausting civil war, but Theodosius would, in such a war, be attacking
an orthodox Catholic in the interest of a fanatical Arian and enemy
of the Church; and Theodosius was a most zealous Trinitarian. The
difficulty must have occurred to him, and it would not be fantastical
to assume that there had been some correspondence between the prelates
of the East and the prelates of the West, to ensure that the point did
not escape him.
The pagan Zosimus has a different theory of the delay of Theodosius.
The character of that Emperor was, he says, a singular union of
contradictions. He could blaze with the fury of a Valentinian, or bend
his head meekly for the blessing of a bishop; he could lead the troops
through a campaign with the most signal dexterity, energy, and success,
and then relax into the most ignoble indolence; he could embrace the
rigour of a soldier’s life without the least effort to soften it, and
then resign himself to the most voluptuous day-dreams in his Imperial
palace. Justina, Zosimus says, was so unfortunate as to need his aid
during one of his periods of luxury and “insane pursuit of pleasure.”
He resented the effort to awaken him from it. His deep indebtedness
to Gratian, however, who had conferred the Empire on him, at length
forced him to cross the Greek sea, and visit Justina at Thessalonica.
From the time of that visit his pulse was quickened, and he began
a vigorous preparation for war with Maximus. Justina had with her at
Thessalonica, not only the insipid boy Valentinian, but a pretty young
daughter, Galla, and Theodosius had fallen in love with her. Justina
promptly perceived, and artfully used, her opportunity, and it was
arranged that the pretty princess should be his reward for restoring
the Western Empire to Valentinian and his mother.
[Illustration: AELIA FLACCILLA
HONORIA
ENLARGED FROM COINS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM]
Theodosius, who is incomparably the leading ruler of the fourth
century, had come from the same part of Spain as Trajan, to whom some
of the writers of the time compare him--with no little flattery.
His father, Count Theodosius, had been an able commander and a just
administrator, but had been unjustly disgraced and executed owing
to some obscure jealousy. Later writers, thinking of the magical Th
E O D of Antioch, believed that his name led to his undoing. The
younger Theodosius, a cultivated and skilful officer, retired to his
estates in Spain, from which he was drawn by Gratian, and presently
clothed with the purple. He had, in 376 or 377, married a Spanish
lady, Ælia Flaccilla, who is believed, on slender grounds, to have
been the daughter of the consul Antonius. Their son Arcadius, the
future Emperor, was born during the retirement in Spain. A daughter,
Pulcheria, was born in Spain, while Theodosius was on campaign. Then
Flaccilla found herself transferred from the quiet Spanish estate to
the pomp of Constantinople, and the second son, Honorius, was born in
the purple.
Although Flaccilla is canonized in the Greek Church, it does not
appear that she had a marked individuality. She is one of the crowd
of fourth-century Empresses who live in the chronicles only as
generous benefactors of the Church. Theodosius was the first Emperor
to persecute his pagan subjects on the ground of religion, and his
successive decrees quickly changed the religious aspect of the
East. His modern biographers, Ifland and Güldenpenning (“Der Kaiser
Theodosius”), lay much of the blame for these violent measures on
Flaccilla, but they point out that the coercive legislation begins just
after Theodosius came under the influence of Bishop Acholius during
a severe illness, and that his efforts to crush paganism by violence
relaxed with his advance in age and experience. All that we learn of
Flaccilla is that she was generous to the Church and the poor, and that
she occasionally curbed the fiery and vindictive temper of Theodosius.
She seems to have died in the year 385, and the Greek ritual celebrates
her memory on September 14th.
Theodosius was, therefore, a middle-aged widower--his biographers
put his birth in 346--when, in the autumn of 387, Justina presented
her daughter Galla to him. Dr. Ifland admits that the young girl
probably turned the hesitating scale of his judgment. He returned
to Constantinople, and made energetic preparations for war. A two
months’ campaign in the following summer (388) completely destroyed
the forces of Maximus, and the full Empire of the West was restored to
Valentinian. But Justina had little personal profit by the victory.
Zosimus tells us that she “supplied the deficiencies of her son as
well as a woman can” after the return to Milan, while Sozomen declared
that she died before the return. The point is obscure, but the
evidence suggests, on the whole, that she returned to Milan. It was,
however, to a different Milan from that she had quitted. Theodosius
accompanied them, and the strong, earnest character of Ambrose made a
deep impression on him. Valentinian was “converted” to the true creed,
and the policy of persecution was introduced into the Western world.
Justina must have remained a powerless and embittered spectator of
the ascendancy of Ambrose. So great did it become that the coldest
decisions of the Emperor were reversed by him, and his transgressions
were ignominiously punished. The news came to Milan that the monks and
populace of a small town in Persia had burned the synagogue of the
Jews, and that the prefect had ordered them to rebuild the synagogue
and restore its property. Theodosius confirmed the just sentence, but
Ambrose assailed him so strongly, in letter and sermon, that he was
obliged to give complete immunity to the offenders; and the wave of
violence--the burning of temples and synagogues, and the despoiling
and slaying of unbelievers and heretics of all shades--continued
to roll destructively over the East. The more impressive incident
of Theodosius, the greatest ruler of his time, standing in the
humble attitude of a penitent in the church at Milan is well known.
The people of Thessalonica, stung by the heavy taxation which the
extravagant rule of Theodosius imposed on the East, and the quartering
of barbaric troops on them, took some occasion to riot, and slew the
representatives of the Emperor. In a fit of passion Theodosius turned
his troops upon the defenceless people, whom he had treacherously
invited to the Circus, and a horrible and unexampled massacre was
perpetrated. Ambrose nobly insisted that the Emperor must expiate his
crime like the humblest member of his flock. The world was entering
upon a new era.
How much of these proceedings Justina lived to see it is impossible to
determine. She died some time between 388 and 391; the obscurity of her
death is a sufficient proof of her powerlessness in her last years.
Valentinian, whose weakness was hardly compensated by the propriety
of his conduct and his docility to St. Ambrose, was instructed in the
elements of government by the older Emperor, who remained three years
in Italy, to the lasting grief of its pagan citizens. He visited Rome,
where the majority of the leading citizens still clung to an idealized
version of the old cult, and appealed to the Senate to abandon the
dying gods. No answer was made to his appeal, and he resorted to
the growing practice of coercive legislation. In 391 he returned to
Constantinople.
Galla had married Theodosius soon after the destruction of Maximus.
The Chronicle of Marcellinus puts the marriage in 386; Zosimus, more
plausibly, implies that it took place in 387 or 388. From a curious
statement in the Chronicle of Marcellinus it seems that she was sent
to live in the palace at Constantinople while Theodosius remained in
Italy. The statement is that the elder son of the Emperor, Arcadius, a
boy of thirteen years, drove her out of the palace. Commentators are
loath to believe that so young a prince could do this, but it is not in
the least impossible, and the authority is respectable. We shall see
that Arcadius was a peevish and worthless prince, indolently guided by
eunuchs and servants, and capable of very cruel decisions. Theodosius
had departed from the finer Imperial tradition of appointing a grave
and distinguished scholar as the tutor of his sons, and had committed
them to the care of a Roman deacon, Arsenius, who had a repute for
piety. We can hardly regard the authority of a late Greek writer
(Metaphrastes) as weighty enough to commend the statement that Arcadius
set his servants to take the life of Arsenius for whipping him, but the
unhappy events of the next chapter will show that the only result of
this kind of education was to leave the character unformed, and throw
the stress on external observances.
In 391 Theodosius returned to Constantinople, and Galla entered upon
her brief Imperial career. Whether or no we accept the biased picture
which Zosimus offers us of the Eastern court, it is clear that it
sustained a soft and excessive luxury at the cost of the enfeebled
Empire. Large numbers of eunuchs found employment, and, with the genius
of their class, intrigued for favour in the sleeping quarters, and
in the service of the Empress and the Imperial children. The kitchen
employed a regiment of ministers to the heavy and voluptuous table;
the circus and theatre supported vast numbers of mimes, dancers, and
charioteers. Besides this large army of ministers to the Imperial
pleasure, a second army of idle and avaricious place-seekers beset
the palace, and extorted a generous revenue from the offices which
were created for them in the army and the administration. It is even
said that such offices were openly sold in the public places and in
the palace of Constantinople. Strenuous as Theodosius was in the
field, he was not strong enough to sustain the burden of peace, and he
unconsciously prepared the Empire for the avalanche that was soon to be
cast upon it.
But the drowsy indulgence of Theodosius was soon startled once more
by a call to arms from the West. In the spring of 392 Valentinian was
slain, or in despair slew himself, and a Frankish commander had put
his purple robe upon the shoulders of a Roman rhetorician. The young
Emperor had been so overshadowed by the power of his general that he
had attempted to dismiss him, and had then been found dead with a cord
round his neck. Theodosius again hesitated to exchange the softness
of his palace for the rigours of a campaign. Galla “filled the palace
with her lamentations,” but Theodosius sent away the ambassadors of the
usurper with pleasant words and presents, and continued for nearly two
years to resist the appeals of his young Empress. It was not until the
summer of 394 that he led out his legions for the punishment of the
murderer, as Argobastes was believed to be. Galla did not live to see
her brother avenged. She died in childbirth just as the army was about
to start, and Theodosius is said to have mourned for her one day and
then started for Italy.
The issue does not now concern us. We pass on to a fresh generation,
a new and more interesting group of Empresses and princesses. Suffice
it to say that, partly by valour, partly by accident and treachery,
the forces of Argobastes were destroyed, and the empurpled rhetorician
was slain. The younger son of the Emperor, Honorius, was summoned from
the East, and placed upon the throne of the West. Arcadius remained in
feeble charge of the throne of Constantinople. And within a few months
the powerful Emperor sank into the grave, and the Empire entered upon
the unhappy reigns of Arcadius and Honorius.