Theodosius I, Emperor of Rome

Theodosius I was born in Spain on 11^th January 347. His father, also called Theodosius, was a general who was involved in the campaign to restore Britain to the Empire after the “Great Conspiracy” of 367. It is quite likely that the younger Theodosius accompanied him on this campaign. It is certainly the case that he learned a great deal about the arts of war from his father.

The elder Theodosius was later involved in a rigged trial in which he was unjustly accused of treason and then executed in 376. It was possibly for this reason, as a way of making amends, that Emperor Gratian appointed the younger Theodosius to take military control of Illyricum after the death of Valens, who was Gratian’s co-Emperor.

Theodosius had no experience of senior command but was clearly a fast learner. He allowed himself to be declared Eastern Emperor in January 379, which was not actually unwelcome news to Gratian, whose officials offered Theodosius all the help he needed. Being in charge of the Eastern Empire was clearly going to be a difficult job, after what had happened to Valens, and anyone who was willing to do it was welcome to do so.

However, it was not possible for him to claim the throne in any realistic sense until the problem of the Goths had been settled. He therefore decided to set up court in Thessalonica rather than Constantinople so that he could keep an eye on both the northern and eastern frontiers.

Theodosius continued to benefit from assistance from Gratian’s generals up until the treaty of 382 that Theodosius struck with the Goths. This gave them lands in the Balkans, to be governed by their own chiefs, in return for giving service, when required, to the Roman forces in the east. The effect of this treaty was, far from the Goths becoming staunch allies of Rome, that they were henceforth mere pawns in the power struggles between different parts of the Roman bureaucratic machine.

Despite the generosity that Gratian had shown to Theodosius, when the former faced problems of his own Theodosius did not rush to his aid. Indeed, when Magnus Maximus invaded Gaul from Britain in 383, Theodosius responded by recognising Maximus’s claim to be Emperor of Britain, Gaul, and Spain. However, Maximus then invaded Italy in 386, sending the young co-Emperor Valentinian II (then aged 15) into exile in Theodosius’s part of the Empire. Theodosius responded by attacking Maximus, who was captured and executed near Aquileia. Valentinian was restored to power, but only nominally, with Theodosius being the only Emperor that mattered.

Theodosius made use of the services of marshals to mop up any further resistance, one of these being the Frankish general Arbogast, who placed Valentinian under house arrest at Vienne. When Valentinian tried to depose Arbogast, he paid with his life.

In 390, while Theodosius was in Milan, a riot broke out in Thessalonica and several officials were killed. Theodosius sent an army of Goths eastwards to take revenge on the city. The people were tricked into gathering in the circus where they were massacred, with at least 7,000 people being killed. This act led St Ambrose to rebuke Theodosius and demand that he acknowledge his guilt, which he did in front of the whole congregation in the church at Milan. The Emperor was excommunicated for eight months.

Civil war broke out in 394 between Theodosius and Arbogast, which the former represented as a war between Christianity and paganism. Theodosius regarded his victory at the Battle of the Frigidus in September as being due to divine intervention in the form of a violent storm.

Theodosius died in January 395, having declared that his sons Arcadius (18) and Honorius (11) would rule jointly after him.

Theodosius was the last Emperor who could claim to rule the whole Empire. The split that followed between east and west placed the Balkan dioceses of Illyricum and Macedonia, which included the lands settled by the Goths after 382, in the west. The Goths therefore became a problem that only the Western Empire would have to face in future.

© John Welford

Hades in Ancient Greece

Hades is the name both of the Greek god of the underworld and of the underworld itself. However, this article concentrates mainly on the latter.

Much of Greek mythology derives from what the people of ancient Greece saw in their world, and the stories they told each other to explain how that world came to be as it was. The Greek mainland consists largely of a mass of limestone that has been broken up by frequent violent earthquakes into a succession of steep mountains and deep valleys. It is common for rivers to disappear underground into inaccessible caverns, and so it was natural for people to imagine that that was where the souls of the dead must go, borne along a river into the underworld.

Although the Greeks did have a concept of Heaven, it had nothing to do with the hereafter of righteous souls; not even the Gods lived there, as their abode was the top of cloud-wreathed Mount Olympus.

Hades was therefore where all dead people went, whatever they had done in their lifetimes. Also, the dead were seen as retaining most or all of their bodily functions, as opposed to being merely disembodied souls.

The concept of Hades changed somewhat down the centuries. Homer describes Odysseus visiting Hades in the Odyssey. Its entrance is in a grove of black poplars beyond the stream of Ocean. It is a dark sunless abode, populated by ghosts and the dim figures of dead heroes, who have only a shadowy existence. The god Hades and his wife Persephone live in a region called Erebus.

Later authors developed Hades into a much more substantial place, where the life of the upper world and its amusements can be repeated. There are many entrances, protected by rivers as mentioned above, in particular the Styx, Cocytus and Acheron. Indeed, these are real rivers, to which mythical attributes were then attached.

The dead must be ferried across by the boatman Charon, and the Greeks placed a coin in the mouth of a dead person before burial, to pay Charon for the journey.

The landing place, and thus the actual entry to Hades, was guarded by Cerberus, the “hound of hell”. Greek people were used to seeing dogs guarding properties in the real world, so it was natural to assume that Hades would have its own terrible guardian, which, according to some myths, had a hundred heads, but later writers only ascribe three heads to him, plus a serpent’s tail and serpents round his neck.

The notion of Hades as a place of judgment and retribution also developed down the centuries. The stories of Tantalus and Sisyphus, for example, appear in Homer but were probably later additions. The stories have many variations on the theme, but the punishments consist of something always being out of reach, in the case of Tantalus; or a task having to be constantly repeated, as with Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill only for it to roll back down again.

Judgment was not conducted by Hades the god, but by Rhadamanthus (for Asiatics) or Aeacus (for Europeans), with Minos acting as referee in cases of doubt.

Homer, and later writers, introduced the concept of Hades being divided into different regions, such as Tartarus, the prison of the Titans, which was set apart by the flaming river Pyriphlegethon. Those who deserved neither reward nor punishment dwelt in the asphodel meadows.

For Homer, Elysium was not part of Hades, but a separate world to which heroes went without dying and enjoyed a pleasant eternity. However, some later writers placed the “Elysian Fields” firmly within the realm of Hades.

These “departments” of Hades saw their greatest development many centuries later as Dante’s seven circles of Hell.

The role of Hades the god, as ruler of the underworld, is not well defined in the ancient myths, and it was left to later Roman writers to develop his character as “Pluto”, who is also regarded as the god of the earth and all that it gives.

The best developed myth involving Hades is that of the abduction of Persephone, the corn goddess who is buried underground for much of the year but is allowed to emerge briefly in the springtime so that the corn can grow.

It is not surprising that, given the oral nature of storytelling in ancient Greece, and the centuries over which the stories were refined and developed, there are many various and conflicting versions of what Hades meant to the Greeks, and indeed to the Romans, who subsumed much of the Greek culture into their own. This short account, however, summarises what can be taken as the accepted version of Hades in the bulk of the writings that have come down to us.

© John Welford

Julian, Emperor of Rome

Julian was born in Constantinople in the year 331, being the son of Julius Constantius and a nephew of Emperor Constantine the Great. On the death in May 337 of Constantine, who had begun to convert the Empire to Christianity, his sons, Julian’s cousins, divided the Empire between them, although the youngest, Constans, was still a minor.

The reign of Constantius

The real power was wielded by Constantius, the second son of Constantine, whose first move was to arrest and execute all his cousins, with the sole exceptions of Julian and his older half-brother Gallus. The boys were confined to virtual house arrest in Diocletian’s former palace at Nicomedia.

Constantius began by ruling the eastern half of the empire but in 350 found himself challenged in the west when his surviving brother Constans was killed and a usurper, Magnentius, declared himself Emperor. Constantius had plenty of problems of his own to sort out, and he needed a figurehead to fly the dynastic flag in the west, this being somebody who would make it clear that the western empire had not been abandoned to Magnentius but who, at the same time, would not do anything rash to put Constantius’s realm at risk.

Having only two cousins left, Constantius had little choice but to appoint Gallus to this role, at the same time releasing Julian from his house arrest, so that the studious young man could resume his education.

Julian’s unexpected rise to power

Julian chose to travel to the eastern Mediterranean where he was influenced by Greek philosophers and teachers who had not been converted to Christianity. One such teacher was Maximus of Ephesus, a Neoplatonic thinker who kept in his house a statue of the pagan goddess Hecate which appeared to speak and produce bursts of flame. Julian seems to have been greatly impressed by Maximus and his statue, and he developed a belief in “theurgy” which taught that, by dint of intense study, magical ritual and animal sacrifices, humans could influence the actions of the gods.

As his reign advanced, Constantius became ever more dangerous to those around him, ruling by sowing fear and suspicion among his senior officials. Among those to suffer was Gallus, who had forgotten that his role was a purely nominal one and tried to exercise a modicum of power in Gaul. Constantius had him executed for treason and appointed Julian to take his place.

Julian may have been eccentric in his beliefs but he was no fool. He knew that, as the last survivor of his generation apart from his cousin the Emperor, he would be in constant danger. His best chance of staying alive was to go along with everything that Constantius demanded and not excite his wrath or envy. He also decided that, by doing as little as possible, he could not be held to blame for anything that went wrong.

His plan worked quite well in 356, when a campaign against the Alamanni (a Germanic tribe) was led by generals Ursicinus and Marcellus with Julian acting solely as figurehead. When Julian found himself cut off by Frankish raiders he was able to lay the blame entirely on the two generals and take the credit for his own escape.

In the following year a similar operation was conducted under a new general, Barbatio, with Julian again doing as little as possible while hoping that this campaign would also run into trouble so that he could be relieved of his duties and go back to the life of a scholar that he much preferred.

However, this time things did not go quite as Julian expected, because he found himself faced with an army of Alamanni near Strasbourg which he was able to defeat through his own efforts as a commander, thus revealing talents that even he did not know he possessed. Julian now found himself in Constantius’s good books and entrusted with real authority.

Julian decided to follow the course adopted by Constantius and stay at arms length from the day-to-day administration of his province. By only trusting a small circle of close acquaintances he was able to build an atmosphere of fear among the officials who really ran things. This was designed to keep everyone in line in that nobody really knew the wishes of the top man, or who was watching whom.

But, just like his half-brother Gallus, Julian began to get ideas about seizing more power than his cousin was prepared to yield. In Julian’s case, not surprisingly, he claimed to have had dreams that foretold that he would overthrow Constantius and he then corresponded with his spiritual gurus in ways that were frankly treasonous. The Emperor, again not surprisingly, became suspicious of Julian’s motives and took steps to place his own men in Julian’s inner circle. However, it would not have been in his best interests to remove Julian at this stage, given that the latter was at least efficient and Constantius had more pressing issues to deal with.

The empire was threatened from the east, with the Persians under Shapur II invading in 359 and besieging the city of Amida (in modern southeast Turkey), which eventually fell with huge losses of life. The Persians withdrew, having been delayed by the long siege, but would clearly return during the next campaigning season. Constantius knew that he had no chance of defending his borders without help from the west, and for that he needed the co-operation of Julian.

Julian now grabbed his opportunity to rebel against his cousin, occasioned by the troops in Gaul refusing to move east and declaring their loyalty to Julian instead. In 360 Julian allowed himself to be declared Augustus and offered to divide the empire with Constantius. The emperor had little choice but to accept.

As Julian moved east with his army to meet any challenge from Constantius he heard confirmation that his faith in the old gods was justified, because Constantius died from a fever in southern Turkey on 3^rd November 361, leaving Julian as the undisputed Emperor.

Julian as Emperor

Julian’s short reign as Emperor was marked by constant attempts to turn back the tide of Christianization that had been begun by Constantine. Julian had little reason to put his faith in the new religion, especially when he recalled how his supposedly Christian cousins had behaved, and had he lived longer he might have succeeded in restoring Paganism to the empire.

His main tactic was to set bishop against bishop and to establish rival pagan priesthoods that would attract people away from the Christian ones. In this latter endeavour he was largely unsuccessful because the pagans could not replicate the charitable works of the Christians and so were unable to compete with them.

Another plan was to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Titus in AD 70. Julian’s idea here was to disprove the Biblical prophesy that the Temple would never be rebuilt. However, the project ended in 362 when an earthquake struck Jerusalem.

Julian then turned his attention to taking on the Persians, by beginning an invasion of Iraq in the spring of 363. However, his planning was woefully inadequate, neglecting, for example, to include equipment for laying siege to cities along the way. As he advanced along the Euphrates the Persians flooded the land in his rear, thus cutting off his retreat by the same route.

The invasion was a disaster and Julian had no choice but to return along the Tigris, his troops being harried from the rear all the way along. The army eventually ran desperately short of food and supplies.

On 26 June 363 Julian was killed during a Persian attack on the rearguard of his army and a relatively junior officer, Jovian, was declared Emperor in his place.

Julian is known to Christian historians as “The Apostate” for his attempts to revive the old religion, although his conduct before and during his reign was, in the main, more in keeping with Christian principles than that of several of his predecessors and successors.

He left behind a number of writings that show evidence of a remarkably active mind, including letters and satires.

© John Welford