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By Root 354 0

Adrianople in August 378. The structure of the history is complex and we cannot be sure of how it was originally organized, or indeed whether the numbering of the books as we have them is correct – it is possible that the original text consisted of thirty-six books, five of which are now lost and the rest misnumbered.[95] Almost all of Ammianus’ Gothic material is contained in the extant book 31, which is structurally and thematically very different from all those that precede it and may perhaps have been initially composed as a separate treatise. Regardless, the pessimism that pervades the Res Gestae is shaped by and focused on the catastrophic defeat of Valens by the Goths at Adrianople. The whole narrative is therefore filtered through the understanding of the terrible disaster that was to come, a disaster that Ammianus blames on a failure to honour Rome’s ancient traditions. This penetrating gloom must inform our own reading of Ammianus whenever we try to mine his text for information on the events of this period – we must always ask why he says what he says in the way he says it, for he is a master of innuendo and misdirection. On the other hand, he was a keen observer of Roman decline, and understood how Roman failures could lead directly to barbarian successes. Indeed, he alone demonstrates that at least some contemporaries understood and could articulate why the intersection of Roman internecine strife and barbarian invasion was so lethal: the barbarians ‘were like wild beasts who have acquired the habit of stealing their prey through the negligence of the shepherds’.[96]

Constantius on the Danube

The greatest barbarian danger, as the narrative of Ammianus shows, lay along the Rhine and the upper Danube, where neglect and the civil war that followed the death of Constans had weakened the frontiers. Both Alamanni and Franks were restive and the latter even succeeded in sacking so important a town as the imperial residence of Trier. Constantius, the last surviving heir of Constantine, was a deeply suspicious man, mistrustful of everyone, not least his own family. But he could not govern alone, certainly not with simultaneous disturbances on Rhine, Danube and eastern front, and even a suspect cousin was preferable to another usurper like Magnentius. Constantius turned to his only surviving male relatives, but the caesar Gallus, Julian’s elder brother, proved a disaster and soon met his end at the hands of the executioner. In 356, Julian alone remained and was duly appointed caesar. For half a decade, he campaigned more or less continuously along and beyond the Rhine. Constantius, meanwhile, devoted himself to the Sarmatians and Quadi of the middle Danube in year after year of campaigning. In 358 and 359, Constantius conducted massive punitive raids against Sarmatians and Quadi, and then against the Sarmatians’ former subjects the Limigantes. Deliberately sowing terror, Constantius sat in judgement on the many petty kings of the region, allocating territories to different groups.[97] As a result of these campaigns, the Sarmatians were eliminated as a serious power in the barbaricum. What is more, the suppression of the Limigantes created a sort of no-man’s land opposite the Danube bend between the powerful Quadic chieftains to the northwest and the Tervingian ones to the south and east. Both Quadi and Tervingi were to benefit.

Gothic power was presumably rendered all the more stable by these campaigns. Certainly neither Constantius, nor later Julian, ever felt the need to campaign along the ripa Gothica of the lower Danube, which was entirely peaceful between the 330s and the 360s. That peace allowed for the trade relations advertised in the name of a little fort called Commercium – ‘the marketplace’ – and for the recruitment of Gothic soldiers into the garrisons on the imperial side of the river.[98] Such garrison troops are probably responsible for the fairly widespread distribution of Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov decorative styles in places like Iatrus south of the frontier, and we know that Constantius was