II

THE DIVINE EMPEROR

IN 363, the court orator, Themistius, had delivered a panegyric, or hymn of praise, in honour of Jovian, the emperor whose campaign against the Persians was to end in such humiliation. Despite the disastrous reality of Jovian’s reign, the traditions of the panegyric required the adulation of the emperor as if he was divine. ‘The emperor is the living law, divine law descended from on high, incarnation in time of the Eternal Good, emanation of its nature, Providence on earth, in constant contemplation of God, chosen to be his present reflection, in brief, true son of Zeus, raised up by Zeus, and sharing with Zeus his array of titles’, as Themistius had put it.¹ Themistius proved to be a remarkable survivor, especially as he was a pagan in an increasingly Christianised empire. Eighteen years later he was still on hand in Theodosius’ court to offer a new panegyric, which again stressed the divine imagery that surrounded the emperor. ‘Mark well, exalted emperor, that neither beauty nor stature, neither speed nor prowess make a good ruler, if he does not bear in his soul some form of being like God.’ Themistius then referred back to the poet Homer, who ‘had taught us how a being walking on the earth and clothed in flesh can be thought to have the form of him who is enthroned above the highest vault of heaven and above everything that exists’. Theodosius was that ‘being’ and Themistius went on to argue that the fact that Theodosius had not usurped the imperial throne but had waited for it to be granted him by Gratian was a further sign of God’s support for his promotion. ²

The images that Themistius used to glorify Theodosius, with their references to Zeus (or Jupiter, as the Romans knew him - Themistius was speaking in Greek) and Homer, can be traced back to the adulation offered to the kings who succeeded Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BC. However, it had only been in the previous hundred years that they had been applied to Roman emperors. In the early empire the tradition had been that an emperor might be recognised by the senate in Rome as having acquired divinity only after his death. Julius Caesar, Augustus and Trajan were among those accepted as divus once their bodies had been burned. (A senator claimed to have seen Augustus’ ‘spirit’ ascending intact to heaven through the smoke of the funeral pyre.) Any appropriation of divinity while the emperor was still alive was considered highly offensive and one of the reasons why the emperor Domitian, who had claimed to be ‘lord god’, was assassinated with senatorial approval in AD 96. However, by the end of the third century AD, when the empire was under severe pressure, emperors did begin to elevate themselves above the masses in order to enhance their credibility. Aurelian, emperor from 270 to 275, a man of immense energy and military talent, minted coins bearing the words deo et domino nato, ‘born god and master’. He claimed to be the viceregent of the god Sol Invictus, ‘the Unconquered Sun’, a popular cult with his soldiers. His successors, Diocletian and Constantine, also aligned themselves with favoured gods, Diocletian with Zeus/Jupiter, Constantine with Apollo and Sol. The honorific title divus was used of emperors in the east until the sixth century.

Although Constantine associated himself with Sol on coins as late as 320, he announced in 312 that his victory over his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge just outside Rome was due to the support of the god of the Christians. Following Constantine, all emperors, with the exception of Julian (361-363), were Christian and their ‘divinity’ had to be shaped so as not to conflict with the supremacy of the Christian God. This was not as difficult as it might seem, because most pagans accepted some form of supreme god (often presiding over lesser deities), and Themistius appears to have been able to use terminology that was acceptable to Christian and pagan alike without offence.

An ideology of Christian kingship had first been elaborated by the historian Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, between 313 and 339, in his eulogistic Life of Constantine. Eusebius uses Constantine’s vision of a cross inscribed ‘Through this, conquer’ in the sky before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge as unassailable evidence of God’s support for his cause. It was God, Eusebius goes on, who drew Constantine’s rival Maxentius out of Rome into open ground where he could be more easily defeated. The ongoing support of God was shown in the success of Constantine in war and in the effective control of the empire for the rest of his reign: ‘so God-beloved and Thrice-blessed that with utter ease he governed more nations than those before him and kept his dominion unimpaired to the very end’. In other words, God’s will was shown through the ongoing victories of the emperor. In his sonorous Oration in Praise of Constantine, delivered at Constantinople in 336 to mark the end of Constantine’s thirtieth year of rule, Eusebius develops the theme that Constantine is God’s viceregent on earth, mortal perhaps but enveloped in a supernatural aura as the result of the close friendship and support of his creator. In fact, he equates him with Christ: Christ leads the heavenly armies, Constantine the earthly ones; each is ‘like a prefect of the great Emperor [God]’.³ This is very much an Old Testament conception. In the Hebrew scriptures, the Messiah himself is envisaged as a warror king anointed as such by God.

Themistius was able to work within this tradition, and he developed the idea that the prosperity and good order of the empire under Theodosius were due to divine support. In his panegyric of 381 he stressed that rather than relying on the ‘unchangeable and rigid letters’ of the law books, Theodosius was able to transcend them with the help of God, producing justice and mercy to suit each individual case. The following year, 382, Themistius emphasised the prosperity brought by Theodosius’ rule: ‘Behold, how great is the power of [Theodosius’] just rule, the rewards of which extend not only to palaces and law courts, but to living beings and plants, and even to seeds and children yet in the womb.’ The theme was taken up in Christian rhetoric. Christian and pagan writers might employ their rhetoric for different ends but they had ‘in common a high level of shared vocabulary: the imagery of the ruler as good shepherd, God as father of all, man made in the image of God, the magnanimity of the good ruler - all are part of the common language of ruler theory since Plato - and available to Christians and pagans alike’.⁴

Themistius’ panegyrics are echoed in the most famous surviving image of Theodosius, on a silver missorium, a large silver plate, dating from 388 and marking the beginning of the tenth year of his rule. The emperor is shown in the centre, larger than his co-emperor Valentinian II, who succeeded Gratian as sole emperor in the west in 383, and Theodosius’ son Arcadius, who are on either side of him. His face is ageless and he floats as if in a different sphere of existence from the material world. Behind him is the imperial palace. Subject to the emperors, and much smaller in size, is an official receiving his codicilli, a document case containing his appointment in the imperial service. Below the tableau, images of fertility stress the prosperity of Theodosius’ rule, just as in the panegyric of 382. A personification of Tellus, the earth, is portrayed to show the extent of the emperors’ domination of the whole earth, an image reinforced by including barbarians among the soldiers flanking the emperors.

The presentation of the emperor to his subjects had to match the rhetoric. In Trier, the imperial capital on the Rhine frontier, the fourth-century audience hall still stands, although it has long since been stripped of the fine marbles that once encased its walls. The emperor was enthroned behind a screen of curtains and there were elaborate conventions governing which of his subjects could approach him and how closely. Petitions would be relayed upwards through officials, and only those of the highest status had the right to kiss the emperor’s purple robe. Any direct physical contact with the emperor’s flesh was forbidden, and one can see on the missorium that the official’s hands are veiled to preserve the separation. The emperor could not be referred to by name, and it was in these years that indirect methods of address such as ‘Your Majesty’ and ‘Your Serenity’, even ‘Your Everlastingness’, evolved. Through association with him, his palace was considered sacred, and the defacing of a statue of the emperor was treated as a direct assault on the quasi-divine ruler and subject to brutal punishment.

It was within this atmosphere and imagery that Theodosius suddenly found himself enveloped in January 379. It was a remarkable promotion. When Themistius stressed how God’s approval had been shown through Theodosius receiving imperial status from Gratian (who, of course, was divus in his own right) rather than seizing it, he was making an important point. All Theodosius’ immediate predecessors as emperor owed their promotion to the army or to family ties. Constantine had fought his way to power, but his father, Constantius, had been one of Diocletian’s Caesars (deputy emperors). Constantine was succeeded by his three sons, the last of whom, Constantius II, died in 361 and was succeeded in his turn by his cousin, the pagan emperor Julian. Jovian was already a senior officer when he was proclaimed emperor by his troops on the death of Julian, as was Valentinian on Jovian’s death. Valens, Gratian and Valentinian II were all, of course, members of the imperial family. In the circumstances, Theodosius’ accession, from relative obscurity in Spain, must have seemed miraculous. While there is no direct record of what the Christian Theodosius felt, it seems likely he would have believed that he really was the chosen of God.

Yet an emperor was a human being on whom the demands were awesome. He could hardly sit impassively behind a curtain in the imperial audience chamber for long. Some of his public appearances, before the crowds in the hippodrome or when he entered a city in a ceremonial known as the adventus, might be stage-managed, but the image of mystique must have been hard to sustain. Ammianus Marcellinus provides a superb description of the entry of Constantius II into Rome in 357, the first time he had ever visited the city. ‘The emperor was greeted with welcoming cheers, which were echoed from the hills and riverbanks, but in spite of the din he exhibited no emotion, but kept the same impassive air as he commonly wore before his subjects in the provinces ... he was like a dummy, gazing straight before him as if his head were in a vice and turning neither to right nor left. When a wheel jolted he did not nod, and at no point was he seen to spit or wipe or rub his face or nose or to move his hand.’⁵ How long could such a stance be kept up, especially when outside the rarified atmosphere of the court the empire was in such disarray and only the emperor could galvanise a response to the chaos?

This was the crucial tension inherent in Roman imperial rule in late antiquity. Earlier emperors had remained close to the people. Hadrian, emperor from 117 to 138, was so easy to approach that there is a record of an old woman berating him for not listening to her petition, telling him that he had no right to be emperor if he did not respond. On campaign, the emperor was expected to share the hardships of his men; it was said that the emperor Augustus went so far as to sleep on a bed of straw. In complete contrast, the later Byzantine emperors in the east emphasised their imperial divinity and delegated their fighting to generals who would then offer the triumphs of any victories back to the emperor in a public ceremony in the hippodrome in Constantinople. Valentinian, Valens, Gratian and now Theodosius were in a transitional phase between these two extremes. They enjoyed the honour of imperial power, but they had also to plan strategies, raise resources and in the final resort win victories themselves. The fate of Valens showed what disasters could follow if they cracked under the pressure.

 

Imperial rule was conditioned by the vastness of the empire. The northern border, from the mouth of the Rhine to that of the Danube on the Black Sea, was 2,000 kilometres long. The land route from the Black Sea to the Red Sea was 3,000 kilometres. In 376 Valens in Antioch was 500 kilometres from the Danube where the Goths were massing, and a message and its reply would have taken a month. The land routes were relatively secure; those across the Mediterranean less so as winds and currents varied. In the winter the weather was so unstable that shipping virtually came to a halt. As a result an emperor could never be sure when orders sent by sea might arrive, if at all. Studies of voyages between Rome and the wealthy province of Egypt show that they varied in length between 25 and 135 days. Very often an emperor could not have an accurate picture of an uprising or a raid over the border until it was over, and so he was very dependent on the initiative of his local officials. Yet their independence allowed them to build their local power bases outside the reach of the emperor. In theory, the emperor had absolute power embedded in his quasi-divine status and his role as supreme commander of the armies. In practice, policy-making could easily be confused by the immediate pressure of events and the strengths and weaknesses of the praetorian prefects, the senior administrative officials, and their subordinates. In remote areas the emperor might not even be known of at all. One of the most interesting intellectuals of late antiquity, Synesius of Cyrene, claimed that for his fellow Libyans ‘the emperor, his close advisers, and the wheel of fortune ... are just names that, like flames, have been kindled up to the height of splendour and then quenched’. For all they might know, he went on, the mythical king Agamemnon was on the throne and the Homeric Odysseus still alive as one of his advisers.⁶

It was, in fact, extraordinary that the Roman Empire had survived as a cohesive unit at all. The secret was the Roman openness to the integration of local peoples. In the short term, conquest could be exceptionally nasty. Often a city was taken and razed to the ground as an example to its neighbours. Revolts were brutally crushed, as the Jews found when three uprisings between AD 66 and 135 led to the destruction first of the Temple in Jerusalem and then of the whole city itself, which was later reconstituted as a Roman colony. Well might the historian Tacitus record (or perhaps make up) a British chieftain’s cynical remark that the Romans created ‘a wasteland’ in conquered territory and called it ‘peace’.⁷ It was in the aftermath that local elites were drawn into Roman civilisation. The key was the city. In the east, cities had been the core of civilised life for centuries, and it was the imposition of the Pax Romana that allowed them to transfer their resources from defence into self-glorification. ‘Under you all the Greek cities emerge ... all other competition between them has ceased, but a single rivalry obsesses every one, to appear as beautiful and attractive as possible’ was how the Greek orator Aelius Aristides put it in a panegyric to Rome in AD 150.⁸ In the west, among the Celtic peoples, urban life was rudimentary at first, but Tacitus, who maintained an ironic detachment from what his fellow Romans termed ‘civilisation’, tells of Britons speaking Latin, appearing in togas and being ‘seduced’ by bathhouses, arcades and banquets. Local gods would be merged into the Roman pantheon - a provincial god of thunder could simply be seen as Zeus or Jupiter in a different guise - with the result that a complex of interlocking rituals and sacred sites could sustain local cultures without undermining Roman supremacy. Over one or two generations of Roman rule, provincial elites, ancient or newly created, would come to recognise that it was in their interests to cooperate in the long-term survival of the empire.

As a result, the imperial administration was astonishingly light. The emperor ruled from Rome, although he could, of course, be called away on a campaign or to make a tour of the provinces. Some emperors actually preferred life on the move. Hadrian, for instance, was more interested in the Greek world than the Roman and was outside Rome for more than half his reign. Each province had its own governor, with a small staff, but much of the day-to-day administration rested with the local elites. There was, of course, a taxation system in place, a poll tax and property tax, the proceeds of which were sent to Rome to cover the costs of administration. It was always a tricky moment when Roman officials entered a new province to make the assessments, but once established, the system seems to have worked tolerably well. Its weaknesses were that the richer classes tended to pass demands down to the poorer, and that when there were unexpected pressures on the empire, as from a sudden attack, it was difficult to tap fresh resources quickly.

The borders of the empire were manned by so-called auxiliary troops who were drawn from the subject peoples of the empire and who often fought in their own units and with their own equipment. They were certainly well trained enough to deal with minor incursions, and are even recorded as winning battles in some campaigns, but when something more threatening was at hand, the legions, the crack infantry made up of Roman citizens, were called in. In times of peace the legions were strategically stationed along the more vulnerable borders - the Rhine, the Danube and the Persian - and could move into action when and where they were needed.

As has already been mentioned, it was the emperor Hadrian who had been shrewd enough to recognise in the early second century that continuous expansion meant there would be ever longer borders to defend and so was self-defeating. It was better to fortify the existing borders and focus on the existing prosperity of the empire. But any respite offered by this new policy was short-lived. Again, as has already been noted, there was major unrest on the northern frontiers as German tribes began raiding over the border from the 160s onwards. The causes of the unrest were varied. The empire was wealthy, its cities accessible to invaders along good roads, and the frontiers were too long to defend easily. Population pressures were causing realignments among the Germanic peoples, and the chance of victory and booty from the empire tempted the ambitions of many chieftains. There was essentially no way the Germans could be permanently defeated. The Romans developed a variety of tactics, in some cases allowing Germans into the empire for settlement, in others playing rival tribes against each other or just meeting them head on with a legion in the hope of warning off a particular grouping for ever. They could only be temporary solutions. The situation became more desperate in the third century with a revival of the Persian Empire under the Sassanians. Now the Romans often had to fight two very different kinds of enemies on two fronts. The difficulty was finding a stable leadership. If an emperor was defeated or killed, his successor was often an ambitious general, declared emperor by his troops, but this did not, of course, guarantee him any wider legitimacy across the empire as a whole. There were eighteen emperors between 234 and 284 and as much infighting among them as between them and Rome’s enemies.

One of the great strengths of the Roman empire was its ability to reinvent itself to meet the new demands. Eventually the crisis threw up a succession of brilliant soldiers from the Balkans, many of them of surprisingly humble birth. There can have been no greater tribute to the loyalty the empire inspired. The most impressive of these new men was Diocletian, possibly the son of a freed slave, who seized power as emperor in 284. Diocletian had the political and administrative skills to put into action a comprehensive programme of reform. He realised that it was no longer possible for one emperor to control the vast extent of the empire, so he created a system by which four men, two senior emperors, the Augusti, and two junior ones, the Caesars, would share the responsibility. A Caesar would be promoted to an Augustus if there was a vacancy, with a new Caesar appointed to fill his place. This was a much more stable arrangement and the links between the four were strengthened by marriages between their families. Four frontier cities, Trier on the Rhine border, Milan for the central area, Sirmium on the Danube and Nicomedia in the east, were designated imperial capitals, from which campaigns could be planned. This was the moment when Rome ceased to be the active core of the empire.

The new system started well. A massive defeat of the Persians by Galerius, one of the Caesars, in 297 was so decisive that it brought peace on that frontier for decades to come and allowed Diocletian and his fellow rulers a breathing space in which the borders could be strengthened and other long-term reforms introduced. The provinces of the empire were now split into smaller units, the taxation system was reformed so that it was based on expected produce, and for the first time, a budget could be planned. Each of the new provinces had a separate military and civil administration. The military leader (dux) was in charge of its forces and responsible to more senior commanders, the magistri militum, the ‘masters of the soldiers’, and so ultimately to the emperor. The 114 provinces of the empire were grouped into fourteen dioceses, each under a vicarius, a deputy, while there were also proconsuls who might be given responsibility for a smaller number of provinces. The civilian governors reported to the praetorian prefects, men who held considerable power in their own right as the immediate subordinates of the emperor. Normally there were three of these ‘regional prime ministers’, one for the east, one for Italy, Africa and Illyricum, and one for Gaul, Spain and Britain. These reforms allowed resources to be grouped more effectively so as to provision and support the Roman forces, which were concentrated in the three most vulnerable areas, the Rhine, the Danube and the Persian frontier. There has been scholarly controversy over the total number of men under arms, with estimates ranging between 450,000 and 600,000.⁹ This, then, was the administrative structure that Theodosius inherited in 379, with his own sphere of authority covering the whole of the eastern empire, under its own praetorian prefect, and, so long as the Gothic crisis lasted, IIlyricum, again with its own prefect.¹⁰

 

So how was Theodosius able to exercise his own ‘divine’ power? Over the centuries the emperor had absorbed the traditional legal powers of the Roman senate and magistrates and so had become the focus of lawmaking in the empire. One way for an emperor to express his wishes was through an edict. In early Roman law, an edict had been a statement made by a magistrate when he assumed office of how he proposed to carry out his duties. It had no permanent effect and lapsed as soon as his appointment came to an end. The emperors used edicts as a way of announcing a new policy to the empire. One of the best-known examples is the edict of the emperor Caracalla, the so-called Antonine Constitution of 212, which gave citizenship to all free men and women of the empire. An edict might be addressed to the empire as a whole or to a particular city or province. In order to convert an edict into enforceable law, it had to be confirmed, normally in a letter (epistula) sent to a named official, a praetorian prefect or provincial governor perhaps, asking him to effect the specific policy or providing him with guidance for conduct in the courts. When the emperor or his jurists dealt with a case in person, their decisions might be issued as decreta or decrees, and these could be used as precedents in local courts. The majority of imperial lawmaking, however, was in the form of rescripta. These were the replies to petitions, many of which were requests for a clarification of a particular law.¹¹

The implementation of laws and the administration of taxation and defence depended on the quality of the imperial civil service. The days when provincial governors and a small staff of a few hundred in total could run the empire were long over. From Diocletian onwards, a much larger civil service had grown up, with perhaps some 6,000 senior officials. Jobs were keenly fought over. As the emperor assumed the attributes of divinity, and even his palace and stables were regarded as sacred, so the status of his officials rose. There were many other perks to the job, including access to military rations, the chance to charge fees for services, and opportunities for corrupt activity. There was such a flow of eager young men towards the court that the emperors had to issue laws instructing them to remain in the cities, where they were needed for local administration. One result of the competition within the service was the proliferation of a mass of different grades. At the very highest level were the illustres, consuls, praetorian prefects and other chief ministers closest to the emperors; then came the spectabiles, a class including higher provincial governors, with both groups being part of the clarissimi, a status awarded to all those considered of senatorial rank, with other grades below these. Inevitably, preoccupation with maintaining status must have taken up a great deal of administrative energy. The sheer extent of the empire and the enormous pressures it was under made inefficiency and poor decision-making inevitable. It was remarkable that the system continued to operate as well as it did.

 

The challenges facing Theodosius when he became emperor of the eastern empire in 379 were immense. He had had experience as a successful commander and as dux in Moesia, a strategically important province on the lower Danube, but he had never been further east in the Greek-speaking world. He had not even visited his new capital, Constantinople. He was taking over a part of the empire where the Romans had lost the initiative. The borders along the Danube were breached and the Goths were moving freely through the Balkans, attracting other groups already settled there and ravaging the countryside. The Roman armies were demoralised and their manpower was diminished. The margins for success were very small - it would only need one more major defeat for the whole area to be lost to the empire.

The events of the next three years are poorly documented, but they appear to show Theodosius gradually strengthening his fragile position. ¹² Various laws he promulgated during 379 insist, hardly surprisingly, that taxes and dues be paid in full and that only fit men, not slaves or riff-raff, be provided by landowners as their contribution to the army. These laws were issued from a number of small towns in the Balkans, suggesting that the emperor was on the move in campaigns that are otherwise unrecorded. His strategy appears to have been to strengthen the cities the Goths were unable to take and build up resources behind their walls. There is some evidence that he had a number of tactical successes against the Goths during 379, but there is no record of any major victory.

In the winter of 379, during which it would have been impossible to fight, Theodosius moved to Thessalonika, an important city on the Via Egnatia, which ran across the southern Balkans to Constantinople. Strategically this was a sensible choice, as the city could be provisioned from the sea and communications with the rest of the empire were good, but it was an admission that the northern Balkans were still not under his control. He stayed in the city well into the following year. A serious illness in February 380 was one reason for the delay; so close was Theodosius to death that he was baptised by the city’s bishop, Acholius. (Baptism was often delayed, even by committed Christians, to shorten the period between its cleansing powers and death.) By the summer he was recovered, and boosted by the arrival of two legions from Egypt that had marched overland to the Balkans, he felt strong enough to risk a confrontation with the Goths, still under the leadership of Fritigern. It does not appear to have gone well, and his troops suffered further losses. Fresh demands for emergency taxes and pleas to Gratian for more troops are recorded. Later in the summer, Gratian and Theodosius met again, at Sirmium, to plan tactics, before Theodosius finally entered his capital, Constantinople in a stage-managed triumph in November 380 (see p.91). It seems largely to have been a propaganda show; there was little sign yet of any real progress in regaining control of the occupied provinces.

In these months, however, the emperor appears to have reassessed his position. He realised that it was unlikely he would ever defeat the Goths, and even if he did there would simply be new raids in the future. In 381, in fact, there are reports of Huns crossing the Danube border. But something had to be done as the continual ravaging of the Goths was causing immense hardship and local populations were beginning to collaborate with the invaders. A compromise peace was inevitable. In January 381, Theodosius reverted to a more conciliatory approach. One of the Gothic leaders, Athaneric, who had been outmanoeuvred by Fritigern and who was now seriously ill, approached Theodosius asking for formal settlement of his followers in the empire. Theodosius decided to make a show of the affair. He left Constantinople himself to meet Athaneric and his force and then welcomed him back into the city. The Goths were overawed by the opulence and grandeur of Constantinople, and when Athaneric died soon afterwards his troops joined Theodosius’ forces. It was a small achievement but it showed the world at large that the Romans were prepared to offer some kind of settlement with the Goths.

Fritigern, however, was still on the move. For the next two years Theodosius appears to have delegated command of his campaigns to generals, some of them from the western empire. Possibly he had decided that he could not risk defeat in person and so kept himself away from the battlefields. The campaigns appear to have been successful in that they gradually pushed Fritigern’s Goths out from the central Balkans into Thrace, in fact where Valens had originally agreed they would settle. By October 382, Theodosius was at last able to sign a treaty with the Goths.

The treaty reflected Theodosius’ weakness. Normally such an agreement would have broken the Goths up into separate groups, which would then have been made subject to Roman control in the form of taxation and military recruitment as if they had been native peoples. Now, however, they were to be allowed to stay as one unit and were formally addressed as ‘allies’. If the Romans wanted them to be recruited for future campaigns, they had to negotiate with them as a group. The ever-resourceful Themistius was on hand to trumpet the peace as a victory: ‘Was it better to fill Thrace with corpses or with farmers? ... To make it full of tombs or of living men? ... I hear from those who have returned from there that they [the Goths] are now turning the metal of their swords and breastplates into hoes and pruning hooks ...’¹³ Everyone knew, however, that behind the rhetoric this was a form of surrender that normally would not have been tolerated. When four years later, in 386, a much smaller Gothic force crossed the border, they faced massacre and the survivors were drafted into the Roman armies or settled as unfree tenant farmers as far afield as Asia Minor. There can be little doubt that Theodosius would have liked to have done the same to the victors of Adrianople.

In short, the first three years of Theodosius’ reign must have been deeply frustrating for him. He was still an outsider, a Latin-speaking Roman in a Greek world who had not yet succeeded in gaining the allegiance of his people. In the circumstances, Themistius’ panegyrics were little more than rhetoric. Theodosius was beginning, however, to learn the importance of distancing himself from the disastrous legacy of Valens’ defeat and establishing his own distinct image. One issue he could use was the controversy, to be explored in detail in the chapters to come, over the relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son. While Theodosius supported the Nicene formula, that God the Father and Jesus were of equal majesty, even of one substance (see p. 54), Valens supported the alternative ‘Arian’ view that Jesus was in some way subordinate to the Father. Theodosius now claimed that Valens had been defeated because he had forfeited divine approval as a result of his ‘heretical’ views. The Christian historian Theodoret, writing two generations later, recorded one of the stories that was put about. Valens had charged one of his defeated generals with cowardice. ‘I have not been beaten, sir,’ was the retort. ‘It is thou who had abandoned the victory by fighting against God, and transferring His support to the barbarians.’¹⁴ When Theodosius cleverly equated his Nicene beliefs with the promise of divine approval, he was not alone. At very much the same time, in the western empire, the Bishop of Milan, the formidable Ambrose, claimed that those areas of the empire where the Nicene faith was strong were stable while those where Arianism prevailed, notably along the Danube, were the most unsettled. He was building on the tradition that God expressed his support of the ruling emperor through bringing him victory.

Early in his reign, Gratian had followed in the footsteps of his father Valentinian in upholding toleration. The first signs that change was in the air came in August 379, when Theodosius and Gratian issued a joint edict proclaiming the Nicene faith. The edict is normally interpreted as the result of pressure placed by Bishop Ambrose on the young Gratian, and there is no evidence that Arian bishops were subsequently expelled from their sees. So the next edict, issued from Thessalonika in January 380 by Theodosius to the people of Constantinople, was rather startling:

 

It is Our will that all peoples ruled by the administration of Our Clemency shall practise that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans ... this is the religion followed by bishop Damasus of Rome and by Peter, bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic sanctity: that is, according to the apostolic discipline of the evangelical doctrine, we shall believe in the single deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity.

We command that persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom We judge demented and insane, shall carry the infamy of heretical dogmas. Their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by Divine Vengeance, and secondly by the retribution of hostility which We shall assume in accordance with the Divine judgement.’¹⁵

 

Theodosius had gone very much further than his previous legislation by actively condemning alternative beliefs and promising both divine vengeance and ‘the retribution of hostility’ to the ‘demented and insane’ heretics. As yet this was no more than an edict issued only to the people of one city of the empire, but the historian Sozomen notes that it would have ‘quickly become known in the other cities, as if [proclaimed] from a kind of acropolis of the whole area subject to him’.¹⁶ Why did Theodosius issue it? It is certain that the formula of ‘the single deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity’ was typical of the beliefs held by Spanish Christians, many of whom had joined the new court. There is evidence, from both texts and archaeological sites, that in Spain and Gaul the aristocratic class to which Theodosius belonged had already begun to enforce its Nicene views, often violently.¹⁷ Theodosius must also have been encouraged by the Nicene Bishop of Acholius, who had links with the west. According to Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, Acholius’ prayers were so effective that they had resulted in the expulsion of a barbarian invasion in Macedonia and the spread of a plague among them! Thus Theodosius’ adoption of the Nicene faith after he had come into close contact with such a miracle-worker was not remarkable in itself. It was his active and sustained condemnation of alternative views that was the innovation; in the years that followed, this was widened into an attempted suppression of all pagan thought. One can only imagine that, confronted by the unsettled atmosphere of his empire, Theodosius’ immediate concern was to restore order through enforcing unity of belief. However, the uncompromising language of the edict suggests that he had no understanding of the diversity of spiritual life in the east and the long-standing tradition of freedom of speech that had sustained intellectual life there. This tradition needs to be explored.