Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (17 page)

Procopius could claim kinship with the Constantinian dynasty whose main line had died with Julian. He launched his usurpation at Constantinople in 365, suborning some troops who were
en route
to
the Danube frontier, and almost succeeded in bringing down Valens’ new and insecure regime. Only the opportune treachery of some old associates of Constantius Ⅱ saved Valens, and Procopius was captured and executed in 366. Several
Gothic kings had lent support to Procopius, supposedly sending 3,000 soldiers, but they excused themselves on the grounds of their treaty with the house of Constantine, whose legitimate heir they had taken Procopius to be.
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We cannot tell if they believed their own excuses, but we do know their services were well rewarded: the largest hoard of silver coins in Gothic territory, from
Caracal on the river Olt in modern Romania, contained nearly 3,000 silver coins, including thirty of Procopius.

Valens, as one can well imagine, had no intention of accepting this sort of excuse. He was in desperate need of a victory to shore up his prestige, badly damaged by a usurpation that had nearly unseated him. The Goths made an easier and more attractive target than did the intractable Persian frontier, and he could portray a Gothic war as well-merited punishment for lending support to a usurper. He seized the Goths who had come to support Procopius
and deported them to Asia Minor.
Then, in the three summer campaigning seasons from 367 to 369, Valens assaulted the Goths across the Danube. The campaigns were well prepared, as attested by a flurry of laws issued to the praetorian prefect
Auxonius, responsible for organizing logistical support. What is more, the importance of the campaigns was widely anticipated in the eastern empire, for Valens received the dedication of a
strange treatise, now anonymous, called
De rebus bellicis
, ‘On military matters’, which recommends both sensible measures well suited to Thracian conditions, and bizarre new war machines that no general could have deployed in reality.
The orator
Themistius, a great celebrity in Constantinople and a mouthpiece for imperial propaganda since the reign of Constantius, prepared public opinion for the successes that would soon be forthcoming. Sadly for Valens, Themistius’ enthusiasm went unvindicated by events.

In the first campaign, launched in summer 367, Valens crossed the river at
Daphne on a bridge of boats, which suggests that the Constantinian
bridge from
Oescus to Sucidava was no longer useable for large-scale military operations. The emperor laid waste the territory beyond the river, but failed to bring any large number of Goths to battle, because they fled into the Carpathians or the Transylvanian Alps in the face of his advance. He was, however, inspired to set a bounty on the heads of any Goth his men could capture, and this allowed him to at least salvage some claims to victory from the campaign.
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In 368, rains and heavy flooding hampered the army’s movements, and Valens spent much if not all of the season encamped beside the Danube to no great military effect.
He did, however, undertake a considerable construction campaign, restoring old and building new
quadriburgia
and smaller
burgi
, some of them named after himself or members of his family (for example
Valentia,
Valentiniana,
Gratiana).
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These building efforts are attested by bronze coins showing a
burgus
on their reverse, and by a fragmentary inscription from Cius that is dated to 368.
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The third year of the war was more satisfying. After crossing the river at
Noviodunum in the Dobrudja, Valens marched a long way into Gothic territory, sowing fear and destruction wherever he went. The Tervingian leader
Athanaric gave battle and was defeated, as barbarian armies usually were when a Roman field army could pin them down in a set-piece battle. However, rather than pursue Athanaric in his retreat Valens returned to imperial territory, possibly because of the lateness of the season.
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Ammianus Marcellinus, who is our chief source for these campaigns, had reason to underplay their significance, knowing as he did that Adrianople was soon to come. But Valens’ three years of warfare had brought real successes.
The new Danube forts strengthened Roman defences and the ability to project imperial power against the Goths. In fact, Valens shut down the frontier so effectively that Gothic access to
Roman trade goods was systematically denied them. We saw in the last chapter how prominent a role trade with the Danube provinces played in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov regions, and Valens’ measures must have caused real hardship.
More even than the battlefield defeat of 369, the shortages of Roman goods throughout Gothic territory forced
Athanaric to sue for peace.
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The terms of the peace were arranged in late summer 369 by two of Valens’ trusted generals,
Victor and
Arinthaeus. Valens and Athanaric met to solemnize a treaty near
Noviodunum, but they did so on boats, midstream, Valens respecting the Gothic king’s oath not to set foot on Roman soil.
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Hostages were given on the Gothic side, the emperor stopped paying subsidies to the Goths, and trade was opened up again, though restricted to just two (unnamed) cities.
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Yet the separation of the Goths from the empire was not quite as complete as these measures were meant to suggest, for translators from Greek to
Gothic continued to receive their imperial stipend, suggesting that the lines of communication were to be kept open.
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In the aftermath of this treaty, both sides could claim some sort of victory. The obliging
Themistius, addressing the senate of Constantinople in early 370, preserves for us the official line: Valens’ philanthropy has inclined him to mercy. Why, after all, should a conquered and subjugated foe be wholly destroyed when he might be preserved and put to use on the battlefield?
Valens, for his part, used the cessation of hostilities, and the concomitant propaganda triumph, to deal with growing trouble on the eastern frontier, taking up residence at
Antioch in Syria for nearly half a decade. Athanaric, by extracting from the emperor a dignified peace on equal terms, was free to reassert his authority among the Tervingi. He
chose to do this in part by launching a persecution of Gothic Christians, which may have led him into war against other Gothic chieftains and provoked further Roman intervention. Certainly, the opposition he experienced gives us some hint as to how low his prestige had fallen in three years of inconclusive warfare against Valens. As usual, the available sources leave much open to debate, and it is not at all clear that Gothic Christians had played any active role in helping Valens or opposing Athanaric before he began to persecute them. But, as had been the case with Diocletian decades earlier, suspicion might be grounds enough for persecution. Not only could Christians appear to poison the health of the state by refusing to honour its
protecting deities, they were, from Athanaric’s point of view, potentially spies for the emperor. If, as seems quite possible,
Ulfila’s Gothic community in Moesia maintained ties with co-religionists across the Danube, then
Athanaric’s suspicions are thoroughly explicable.
In times of peace, this sort of contact might be unproblematic, not much different than the to and fro of trade that so characterized the lower Danube of the mid fourth century. But once the Romans went to war against the Goths, and when Valens’ activities cut trade down to a tiny trickle, perspectives were necessarily altered.
Gothic Christians might come to look less like fellow subjects of the Gothic kings and more like prospective sympathisers with Valens.
If, as the fifth-century church historian
Socrates tells us,
Valens began to send missionaries into Gothia in 369, the case against Gothic Christians was that much clearer.
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Persecution followed, its effects well documented in the extant sources.

The most extensive of these sources is the
Passion of St. Saba
, written shortly after 373, within a year or two of the death of its protagonist Saba. The
Passion
was sent to
Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, perhaps the single most influential Greek bishop of his day.
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Basil corresponded with the Cappadocian native
Junius Soranus, who had been appointed to a military command in
Roman Scythia – as
dux Scythiae
– in 373. This sort of letter exchange was a normal part of life for provincial elites, and the accession of a fellow provincial to an imperial office in a distant province usually meant an extension of patronage towards natives of the home region. Maintaining one’s network of correspondents was therefore an essential prerequisite of being able to serve one’s clients, and Basil’s letter collection is one of many that survive to show us how sedulously useful contacts were cultivated. The
Passion of Saba
is still available to us because of just this sort of letter exchange: a Balkan cleric (either
Ascholius of Thessalonica or perhaps more likely a simple priest of the same name) seized the opportunity of Soranus’ appointment and his known connections to Basil to inform the great bishop of church affairs in the Danubian provinces and beyond. Basil, in gracious reply, flatters the author as a ‘trainer of Gothic martyrs’, though we have no way of evaluating the truth of that epithet.
Regardless, the
dux
Soranus was enchanted by the legend of the holy Saba, sending men across the Danube to collect the saint’s relics and ultimately sending them to
Cappadocia, where they would thenceforth rest.
The accidental connection of Gothic Christianity and Cappadocia, whence Ulfila’s ancestors had been taken more than a century earlier, was thereby perpetuated.

The story of Saba, as portrayed in his
Passion
, must detain us a little longer, for its incidental details offer the only glimpse of Gothic social history we possess apart from the archaeological remains of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. Saba, we are told, was a villager somewhere in Gothia, perhaps in the region just to the southeast of the Carpathians. He was a Nicene rather than a homoean Christian, and may have been a cantor or lector in the local church (it is not altogether clear whether the reference to his “singing God’s praises in the church” should be given such a technical meaning). The
Passion
distinguishes several phases of persecution by the Gothic
megistanes
– ‘lords’ or ‘chiefs’, perhaps a direct reference to the Gothic king
Rothesteus mentioned later in the text, perhaps to his more important followers.
In both phases, these
megistanes
tested the loyalty of the villagers by forcing them to eat sacrificial meat. The first time this happened, the pagans in Saba’s village decided to trick the supervising officials by substituting meat that had not been sacrificed to the pagan gods for meat that had been.
For us, this demonstrates the integration of Gothic Christians into village life and the willingness of their fellow villagers to unite against authority from outside the village, however legitimate it was.

For Greek contemporaries reading the
Passion
, however, it was Saba’s actions that proved his sanctity: refusing to go along with the deception, he made a conspicuous show of rejecting the meat altogether, and thus provoked his fellow villagers into exiling him from the village. He was allowed back before long, but promptly stirred up further trouble for himself and the other Christians of the village. When a Gothic noble came to the village for a second time to supervise the consumption of the sacrificial meat, the pagan villagers were going to swear, while eating it, that there were no Christians in the village. Once again, Saba revealed himself and refused to play along. But when the villagers swore that Saba was a man of no account, possessing ‘nothing but the clothes he wears’, the Gothic lord did no more than order his expulsion from the gathering, on the grounds that a man with no property could neither
help nor harm. That response is strong evidence for the essentially political nature of the persecution in Gothic territory: powerful Gothic converts might be a threat, potentially in league with the emperor; a man like Saba was at worst a conspicuous nuisance.

Yet in the final phase of the persecution, Saba’s obstinacy reached a pitch that provoked the martyrdom he so clearly craved. Saba was
en route
to another village to celebrate Easter with a priest named
Gouththikas, when a miraculous fall of snow prevented his going forward and turned him back to celebrate the feast in his own village with his fellow Christian, the priest
Sansalas. Three days after Easter,
Atharidus, the son of the Gothic king
Rothesteus, arrived in the village with an entourage, specifically to arrest Sansalas. Saba, found in his company, was likewise arrested, but while Sansalas was held captive to face a higher authority, Saba was tortured on the spot. First driven through thorny thickets, then lashed to the axles of a wagon and flogged through the night, he defied his tormentors in the approved manner of one born to martyrdom. A friendly village servant freed him and fed him, but the tortures continued on the following day, when Sansalas and Saba were ordered by Atharidus’ men to consume meat that had been sacrificed. Saba naturally refused and was finally condemned to die, on 12 April 372. The soldiers chosen to drown him in the river Musaios, perhaps the Buzaǔ, seriously considered him setting him free: they thought him simple-minded for rejoicing at his coming martyrdom and reasoned that Atharidus would never find out if they just let him go.
But Saba, insisting that he could see an army of saints waiting beyond the river to welcome him into heaven, urged them to their duty. So ‘they took him down to the water, threw him in and, pressing a beam against his neck, pushed him to the bottom and held him there’. It may have been Sansalas
who set down in writing the account of Saba’s martyrdom.
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