that if there was a tumult among the Goths he alone could quell it. The
pretext, or the naked sword, secured him a safe passage through the
trembling ranks of the banqueters. He was received with a shout of joy
by his surviving companions. They mounted their horses and rode out of
the gates of the city; and now, openly declaring war against the Empire,
began to plunder and to burn the rich farmsteads in the neighbourhood of
Marcianople. Lupicinus marched forth to meet them at the ninth milestone
from the city; but his troops, hastily collected, were badly led. The
Goths, in their fury and despair, beat down their enemies. All the
tribunes (commissioned officers) and the larger part of the rank and file
were stretched in death upon the plain. The base Lupicinus, whose cruelty
and avarice had caused the disaster, escaped from this battle-field, but
before long both he and his colleague in guilt, Maximus, fell victims to
the righteous vengeance of the Goths[49].
That day, that fatal day of the banquet at Marcianople, ‘took away,’ says
the Gothic historian, ‘the hunger of the Goths and the security of the
Romans; and the former now began, not as strangers and foreigners, but as
citizens and lords, to issue their orders to the cultivators of the soil,
and to hold all the northern regions [from the Balkans] to the Danube in
their own right.’
[Sidenote: _377-378. Gothic War._]
[Sidenote: _377. Battle of Ad Salices._]
The war thus commenced lasted, with varying success, through the years
377 and 378. The Emperor Valens, during the whole of the former year,
remained at Antioch, but sent two officers of high rank, but of no great
military skill, to conduct the campaign in his stead. On the whole,
however, the fortune of war must have been unfavourable to the Goths (who
evidently fought with more fury than science), since the chief battle of
this year was fought at a place called Ad Salices (the Willows), as far
north as the region now known as the Dobrudscha. Our chief historian[50]
(himself long an officer of rank in the Imperial army) gives a striking
description of the Gothic warriors, encamped in the centre of a rampart
of waggons, and revelling in the abundance of the booty which they had
carried off from the wasted plains of Thrace. All night the two armies
lay encamped near to one another in sleepless suspense. With the dawn
of day the barbarians made an attempt to reach some higher ground, from
whence they might rush down on the enemy; but this manœuvre was checked
by a well-executed counter-movement of the legions. As both armies halted
and gazed at one another with scowling faces, the Romans raised their
martial song (itself borrowed from other barbarians), which was known
as the _barritus_, and which, beginning in a low bass key, rose, as it
were, by steps to a shrill and exultant treble. The barbarians answered
by the old war-songs (discordant in Roman ears, but in which our Saxon
forefathers would probably have found familiar music), wherein they sang
the praises of their glorious ancestors, sprung from the seed of gods,
and dear to Odin.
Then the battle was joined, and the marshy willow-intersected plain
was seen covered with every phase of human agony; but all was din and
confusion, and if any well-concerted plan was formed or executed on
either side, it does not appear in the pages of the historian. The battle
was a drawn one; but apparently the Romans were left in possession of the
field, for their dead were buried, while the bodies of the Goths were
left to be devoured by vultures. Years after, the husbandman, ploughing
in that fatal plain, marvelled at the mighty bones of the barbarians
which his plough-share upturned.
[Sidenote: _Advance of Gratian._]
In this battle good service had been rendered by some troops which
Gratian had sent from Gaul to the assistance of his uncle. The young
Emperor had had his own hard battles to fight with the barbarians who
dwelt on the northern shore of the Lake of Constance, but having subdued
them he marched eastwards in 378 as far as Sirmium on the Save, from
which place he sent a message to Valens that he was ready to co-operate
with him in an attack on the Goths, whose invasion seemed to imperil the
very existence of the eastern portion of the Empire.
[Sidenote: _378. Valens at Hadrianople._]
But Valens, who had by this time quitted Antioch for Constantinople, was
jealous of his young nephew’s fame, and in no humour to add one needless
leaf of laurel to his crown. He had pitched his camp near Hadrianople,
and there received the messengers of Gratian, who earnestly besought
him to wait for their master’s arrival. So Victor advised, a Slavonic
barbarian by birth, but master of the Imperial cavalry, and a careful and
cautious general. So, however, did not advise his other chief general
Sebastian, who was elated by some recent victories that he had won over
the barbarians: and his rash counsels found too sure an echo in the
jealous heart of Valens. It was decided to fight at once and end the
Gothic war by the unaided forces of the East.
[Sidenote: _Negotiations between Fritigern and Valens._]
But Fritigern on his side had allies whose arrival he was expecting.
The Ostrogothic chiefs, Alatheus and Saphrax, were on their march to
join him, and he would fain postpone the battle till they arrived. He
therefore sent a Christian priest on an embassy to Valens, offering to
make peace if he and his followers might be allowed to occupy Thrace as
subjects of the Empire. Nothing came of these negotiations; nothing was
meant to come of them; but time was gained for Alatheus and Saphrax to
accomplish another day’s march towards the army of Fritigern.
[Sidenote: _Battle of Hadrianople, 9 Aug. 378._]
On the 9th August, 378, a day long and fatally memorable in the annals of
the Empire, the legions of Valens moved forth from their entrenched camp
under the walls of Hadrianople, and after a march of eight miles under
the hot sun of August came in sight of the barbarian vanguard, behind
which stretched the circling line of the waggons that guarded the Gothic
host.
Yet another embassy did the artful Fritigern (perhaps not over-confident
of victory) send into the Roman camp. There were discussions as to the
dignity and powers of the messengers: the Goth was willing to send one
of his noblest chiefs if the Roman would do the same as a pledge of his
safety. Richomer, Count of the Domestics, Gratian’s representative,
expressed his willingness to go as a hostage into the barbarian camp,
but scarcely had he reached it when, behold! fresh standards were seen
upon the surrounding hills. The long-waited for troops of Alatheus and
Saphrax had arrived, and not pausing in their headlong career fell like a
thunderbolt on the Roman flank.
The soldiers of the Empire, hot, thirsty, wearied out with hours of
waiting under the blaze of an August sun, and only half understanding
that the negotiations were ended and the battle begun, fought at a
terrible disadvantage, but fought not ill. The infantry on the left wing
seem even to have pushed back their enemies and penetrated to the Gothic
waggons. But they were for some reason not covered as usual by a force
of cavalry, and they were jammed into a too narrow space of ground where
they could not use their spears with effect, yet presented a terribly
easy mark to the Gothic arrows. They fell in dense masses as they had
stood. Then the whole weight of the enemy’s attack was directed against
the centre and right. When the evening began to close in, the utterly
routed Roman soldiers were rushing in disorderly flight from the fatal
field. The night, dark and moonless, may have protected some, but more
met their death rushing blindly over a rugged and unknown country.
[Sidenote: _Fate of Valens._]
Meanwhile, Valens had sought shelter with a little knot of soldiers (the
two regiments of Lancearii and Mattiarii), who still remained unmoved
amidst the surging sea of ruin. When their ranks too were broken, and
when some of his bravest officers had fallen around him, he joined the
common soldiers in their headlong flight. Struck by a Gothic arrow he
fell to the ground, but was carried off by some of the eunuchs and
life-guardsmen who still accompanied him, to a peasant’s cottage hard by.
The Goths, ignorant of his rank, but eager to strip the gaily-clothed
guardsmen, surrounded the cottage and attempted in vain to burst in the
doors. Then mounting to the roof they tried to smoke out the imprisoned
inmates, but succeeding beyond their desires, set fire to the cottage,
and Emperor, eunuchs, and life-guards perished in the flames. Only one
of the body-guard escaped, who climbed out through one of the blazing
windows and fell into the hands of the barbarians. He told them when
it was too late what a prize they had missed in their cruel eagerness,
nothing less than the Emperor of Rome.
Ecclesiastical historians for generations delighted to point the moral
of the story of Valens, that he who had seduced the whole Gothic nation
into the heresy of Arius, and thus caused them to suffer the punishment
of everlasting fire, was himself by those very Goths burned alive on the
terrible 9th of August.
LECTURE IV.
THEODOSIUS.
[Sidenote: _378._]
In the battle of Hadrianople two-thirds of the Roman army fell. The two
Counts, Sebastian and Trajan (the General-in-Chief and his predecessor),
Valerian, the Count of the Imperial Stables, and Aequitius, a relation
of the Emperor and Superintendent of his palace[51], were all stretched
dead upon the field. There too lay thirty-five Tribunes, officers whose
military rank corresponded with that of our Colonels. The historian says,
with perfect truth, that since the day of Cannae no such disaster had
befallen the Roman army. Nor had the Roman State, now in the twelfth
century of its existence, the same power of recovering from its reverses
which it possessed in the sixth century from the building of the City,
when the statue of Victory in the Capitol drooped her wings at the news
of the slaughter on the Apulian plain.
[Sidenote: _Movements of the Goths after the battle of Hadrianople._]
[Sidenote: _378. Siege of Constantinople._]
Yet the Goths, though they had shown that they could win a battle, had
as yet neither discipline nor warlike art sufficient to enable them to
conquer in a campaign. An unsuccessful attack on Hadrianople was followed
by an equal failure before the walls of Constantinople. By a strange
inversion of its future fates, the Imperial capital by the Bosphorus was
defended from these Visigoths (the ancestors of Don John of Austria and
of all the Christian chivalry of Spain) by a body of Saracen soldiers
who had been enlisted under the banners of the Empire. One of these wild
defenders of civilisation, nearly naked but with long and shaggy hair,
dashed forward with a melancholy howl into the Gothic ranks, stabbed an
enemy with his short sword, and then putting his lips to the neck of the
slain foe sucked his life-blood with eager zest. The thought of fighting
against such monsters as this was too terrible for the impressionable
Goths, and they retired disheartened from the walls.
[Sidenote: _Weakness of the Goths as besiegers._]
[Sidenote: _A Roman siege-train._]
[Sidenote: _378-9._]
But, quite independently of any such exceptional causes of panic,
there was a striking weakness in the Gothic attack whenever they came
face to face with a fenced city. When Fritigern marched away from the
treacherous city of Marcianople, crying out, ‘I wage no war on stone
walls,’ he expressed that which was of necessity the maxim of all the
barbarian warriors during the succeeding century. It cannot be said
that at this time the powers of the defence in sieges were necessarily
superior to those of the attack. On the contrary, in the wars between
Persia and Rome it is remarkable how often the same cities were taken
and retaken. But a siege required patience, mechanical skill, and
untiring vigilance, and could not be decided by a mere outburst of
Berserker fury such as sometimes swept the legions before it on the
field of battle. In reading the account of a Roman siege-train given
by Ammianus Marcellinus[52], though I cannot say that I understand all
his explanations (and I believe it would require the combination of an
expert mechanician and an invincible translator of Latin to make sense
of many of them), still it is easy to perceive this much—that a siege
was then, as now, practically a duel of artillery, though in the working
of that artillery the explosive force of gunpowder was not made use of,
and that it was by the engineer, rather than by the warrior, that the
strongest city was taken. There was the _Balista_, for the discharge
of the strong iron-shod wooden arrow; the _Scorpion_, or the _Wild
Ass_[53], which suddenly reared itself high in air and hurled forth its
heavy stone; the _Battering Ram_[54], for butting at all the weakest
places in a wall; the _City-taker_[55], which fastened its triangular
prongs into the wall and tore it to pieces. By these and by the great
moving towers the city was attacked, and by machines as complicated and
as destructive, but of a somewhat different kind, it was defended. For
all this sort of work, as I have said, not only the humbler qualities
of the soldier—patience and vigilance—but also some of the skill of a
trained mechanician, were needed; and these qualities, abundantly present
in many even of the common soldiers among the Italians, the Greeks, and
the Persians, were yet wanting in the untutored brains of the Teutonic
warriors. Therefore the story of the wars between the barbarians and
the Empire is for the most part a story of monotonous uniformity of
ill-success, as far as the sieges undertaken by the former are concerned.
They win battles in the open field; they occupy the great Roman roads,
and cut off communication between the provinces and the capital; they
lay waste the country districts, and sometimes by the famine thus caused
they deprive the citizens of the means of prolonging their resistance.
More often, by the treachery of slaves or fellow-countrymen of their own
inside the walls, they bring about the city’s fall; but scarcely ever do
they take it by fair and open warfare, in a regularly-conducted siege.
And for a considerable part of those seventy years of struggle which I am
briefly describing to you, you must think of the cities as standing up
behind their quadrangular walls, little islands of civilisation and still
unshaken loyalty to the Empire, while over the fields and through the
unwalled villages rages the wide-sweeping flood of barbarian invasion.
[Sidenote: _The Gothic attack grows feebler, 378-379._]
This was essentially the character of the war during the years 378 and
379, though the Roman defence was gradually becoming stronger, and the
attacks of the Goths wilder and more purposeless during the whole of
that period. The despair and the hatred which had banded them together
as one man under the leadership of Fritigern, lost their uniting power.
They roamed southwards into the pleasant lands of Achaia, northwards
to the Save, into and perhaps across the borders of Pannonia; but the
hope of plunder and a child’s love of breaking beautiful things seem to
have been their only motives. There is no longer a trace of that serious
purpose of conquest which does seem to have animated them up to the day
of Hadrianople.
[Sidenote: _The Gothic hostage-boys massacred. 378-9._]
One vile deed of a Roman official must have stirred many Gothic hearts
to fury, yet did not receive its proper meed of vengeance. It will
be remembered that when the Visigothic warriors were ferried across
the Danube in the Imperial cutters, they were compelled to deliver up
the sons of the noblest among them as hostages. These lads had been
distributed through the cities of the East: while their fathers and
their kindred had been suffering the hardships of famine, they had been
growing up to manhood, and it was feared that the news of the victory of
Hadrianople might arouse them to some deed of daring against the Empire.
Julius, Master of the Soldiery[56], to whose care these young hostages
had been especially committed, sent for the various military prefects,
and after binding them to secrecy under solemn oaths, communicated to
them his bloody purpose. The young Goths in each district were invited to
the capital of the province under promise of receiving grants of money
and land from the Emperor. They came full of hope and of good-humour
towards their hosts. As soon as they were all collected in the forum
of each city, the soldiers, who had been previously stationed on the
roofs of the surrounding houses, assailed them with darts and stones.
They were of course utterly unable to strike a blow in return against
their cowardly assailants, and each Asiatic forum soon had its heap of
unresisting slain. A base and treacherous deed, and one which we regret
to find both our two chief historians[57] of this period mentioning with
words of praise for its cowardly contrivers.
[Sidenote: _Gratian associates Theodosius in the Imperial dignity._]
The disorganisation of the Empire after the battle of Hadrianople was
complete, and Gratian wisely concluded that he, a lad of nineteen, was
not able, unaided, to bring it to a close. He looked around him for a
colleague, and recognised with the frankness of his noble nature that
there was no man so suitable for the post as one whom his family had
deeply wronged, the late Duke of Moesia, THEODOSIUS.
[Sidenote: _Origin of Theodosius._]
This man, whose name in various ways has become so famous in the history
both of the Empire and the Church, was born about the year 346 at a place
called Cauca, in the north-western corner of Spain. He belonged by birth
to the class of wealthy Provincials from which many of the officials of
the Empire were chosen, and who constituted in fact, if not in name,
a sort of rural nobility. After he had been clothed with the purple,
flatterers and poets discovered that he was a remote descendant of the
great Emperor Trajan, but this seems to have been only a courtier-like
deduction from the fact that he, like Trajan, was a Spaniard.
[Sidenote: _368-376._]
[Sidenote: _Theodosius the Elder._]
[Sidenote: _376-379._]
His father, Count Theodosius, had been sent to Britain in 368 to repel
an invasion of Picts, Scots, and Attacotti, and making the old town of
Lundinium his base of operations, had attacked the various parties of
freebooters who were roaming about the country, and had succeeded in
spoiling the spoilers, and restoring the greater part of their property
to the plundered provincials. Two years afterwards he had delivered
Raetia (Tyrol and the Grisons) from a similar invasion of the Alamanni,
and had sent many of the invaders to Italy to cultivate as serfs the
meadow lands of the Po. In 373 he conducted a most successful campaign in
Africa against a Mauritanian chieftain, Firmus, who had rebelled against
the Emperor. The rebel committed suicide, and his conqueror, with the
title of _Comes Africae_, administered the government of the province
which he had saved. Then came a sudden check to his prosperous course.
In 376, shortly after the death of Valentinian, he was accused, we know
not on what charge, sentenced to death, and beheaded at Carthage, having
first received the sacrament of baptism. The cause of this strange and
sad termination of an honourable career has never been explained. Some
think that the young Gratian, only just arrived at the helm of affairs,
was jealous of the veteran’s fame, but nothing in the character of
that Emperor justifies so foul a charge. Others believe that his real
offence was having exposed the villainies and peculations of Romanus,
his predecessor in the government of Africa. But it seems to me on the
whole most probable that his death was in some way connected with an
outburst of jealous rage and suspicion on the part of Valens against all
persons whose names began with the letters THEOD, Theodorus, Theodoret,
and so forth, as it had come to the ears of the Emperor that a citizen
of Antioch had been resorting to magical arts to learn the name of his
future successor, and that those letters (which proved fatal to many a
Roman citizen) had been revealed by the oracle as forming the beginning
of the fated name.
On the death of his father, the young Theodosius, then about thirty years
of age, who had done good service to the State as Duke of Moesia, retired
into private life. If, as was probably the case, he was succeeded by the
base and corrupt Maximus, whose avarice drove the Goths to despair, the
unjust death of the elder Theodosius was indeed soon and terribly avenged
on his ungrateful masters.
[Sidenote: _Theodosius Emperor of the East, 19 Jan. 379._]
Now, however, the fortunes of the house of Theodosius emerged from the
cloud, more resplendent than ever. The new Emperor was clothed in the
purple and invested with ‘the rule of the universe’ (ἡ τῶν ὅλων ἀρχή) at
Sirmium, on the 19th of January, 379. The share of the Empire assigned
to his immediate superintendence was of course the East, together with
Macedonia and Dacia. The rest of the Diocese of Illyricum was joined, now
as on many other occasions, to the Western half of the Empire.
[Sidenote: _Guerilla War. 379-380._]
The first duty that Theodosius had to undertake was to restore the
self-confidence and trust in victory of the Roman army, terribly shaken
as these qualities had been by the disastrous rout of Hadrianople. This
he accomplished by waging a successful guerilla war with the Gothic
marauders. Valens had played into the hands of the barbarians by risking
everything on one great pitched battle. Theodosius adopted the very
opposite policy. He outmanœuvred the isolated and straggling bands of the
Goths, defeated them in one skirmish after another that did not deserve
the name of a battle, and thus restored the courage and confidence of the
Imperial troops. By the end of 379 he seems to have succeeded in clearing
the territory south of the Balkan range of the harassing swarms of the
barbarians.
[Sidenote: _Sickness of Theodosius._]
In February, 380, he fell sick at Thessalonica (which was his chief basis
of operations throughout this period), and this sickness, from which he
did not fully recover for some months, was productive of two important
results, (1) his baptism as a Trinitarian Christian, (2) a renewal of the
war against fresh swarms of barbarians.
[Sidenote: _Theodosius adopts the Creed of Nicaea. 380._]
(1) Theodosius appears up to this point of his career not to have
definitely ranged himself on either side of the great Arian controversy,
though he had a hereditary inclination towards the Creed of Nicaea. Like
his father, however, he had postponed baptism in accordance with the
prevalent usage of his day: but now upon a bed of sickness which seemed
likely to be one of death, he delayed no longer, but received the rite at
the hands of Ascholius, the Catholic Bishop of Thessalonica. Before he
was able to resume his post at the head of the legions, he published his
celebrated Edict: ‘To the people of Constantinople.—We desire that all
the nations who are governed by the rule of our Clemency shall practise
that religion which the Apostle Peter himself delivered to the Romans,
and which it is manifest that the pontiff Damasus, and Peter, Bishop of
Alexandria, a man of Apostolic sanctity, do now follow: that according
to the discipline of the Apostles and the teaching of the Evangelists
they believe in the one Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in equal
Majesty, and in the holy Trinity. We order all who follow this law to
assume the name of Catholic Christians, decreeing that all others, being
mad and foolish persons, shall bear the infamy of their heretical dogmas,
and that their Conventicles shall not receive the name of Churches: to be
punished first by Divine vengeance, and afterwards by that exertion of
our power to chastise which we have received from the decree of heaven.’