THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYBoth Heather and Ward-Perkins, especially the former, are mainly concerned
with the western empire, but are also reacting against what they see as the
excessively bland approach established by Brown, The World of Late Antiquity.
According to Ammianus, whose narrative stops at this chronological point,
the Goths came dangerously close after their victory at Adrianople to threat-
ening Constantinople itself, but while they had defeated and killed a Roman
emperor, capturing the city was far beyond their capacities, and in 381 Roman
forces drove them back from Macedonia and Thessaly into Thrace; Athanaric
had died in Constantinople early in 381 and was given a ceremonial funeral,
and a treaty was concluded in 382; it was accompanied by grants of land.
Some contemporaries, including Ambrose, bishop of Milan, realized that
these events were the beginning, not the end of Roman difficulties, but the
orator Themistius depicts the treaty as an act of far-sighted Roman generosity
inspired by the new emperor Theodosius.^50
Theodosius I (379–95) spent much of his reign in Constantinople, apart
from his move to crush Magnus Maximus in northern Italy in 388, and
Eugenius, defeated at the river Frigidus between Aquileia and Emona in 394.
Milan, the episcopal seat of Ambrose, was an imperial residence in this period,
and Theodosius himself died there in 395, but from the early fifth century
Ravenna became the main imperial centre in the west. Theodosius visited
Rome in 389, where he was praised in an extant speech by the Gallic orator
Pacatus. Valentinian II was expected to base himself in Trier, under the eye
of the Frankish magister militum Arbogast, but met his end when Eugenius
made common cause with Arbogast and took the title of Augustus. Though
he was a Christian himself, his attempt was represented as a pagan challenge
to the Christian Theodosius and his young sons Arcadius and Honorius, both
now also Augusti, and caused some excitement among the Roman senato-
rial aristocrats; however, the view put forward by Herbert Bloch in 1963 and
maintained by many others thereafter that there was a real ‘pagan reaction’ has
now been shown to be fundamentally misconceived.^51
The final decades of the fourth century marked a distinct intensification of
the Christian offensive. The pro-Nicene Ambrose, bishop of Milan since 374,
was a forceful advocate and politician who had to deal with several emperors,
their families and their rivals.^52 He influenced first Gratian and then Valen-
tinian II to resist the pleas of the senate, led by Symmachus, to restore the
altar and statue of Victory to the senate house in Rome, he resisted imperial
pressure to favour the Homoeans, and in the case of Theodosius he used his
power to deny the emperor communion as a weapon and forced him to do
humiliating public penance for the actions of imperial troops at Thessalonica.
In Rome another forceful churchman, Damasus, had become pope (bishop
of Rome) in 366 amid scenes of public tumult, and in the early 380s was the
patron there of the controversial Jerome, while in the east John Chrysostom
was preaching in Antioch and became an equally controversial bishop of Con-
stantinople in 398.^53 Under the late fourth-century emperors a series of laws
were brought in laying down increasingly severe penalties and exclusions, not