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By Root 330 0

the start of the campaigning season, masses of Tervingi occupied the northern bank of the river, begging for admission into the empire.[131] They offered to abide peacefully inside the imperial frontiers and to furnish auxiliaries for the Roman army if required to do so.[132] These Tervingi were divided into many different groups, without any overall leadership. The one leader who might have claimed some sort of supremacy, Athanaric himself, was certainly not among them, fearing that the breach between him and Valens was too great for him ever to be admitted to the empire. We hear of two Tervingian chieftains, Alavivus and Fritigern, in the context of the Danube crossing, and it is clear from later events that they led not all the Tervingi, but rather the most significant of several independent bands. Although Alavivus led the negotiations with the empire, Fritigern was perhaps the more powerful of the two chieftains. He was probably better known to the empire, if Socrates’ story of his conversion to Christianity in the earlier 370s is correct, and he was certainly the more competent general, for by 377 he was in overall command of the Goths’ military operations.[133] As to Alavivus, we can reject outright speculation that he was the father of the later general Alaric, a theory based on nothing more than the alliteration of their names.

Negotiations over terms of entry must have taken quite some time, certainly several months, given that messengers and ambassadors had to travel more than a thousand kilometres to Antioch in Syria before returning to Thrace with the imperial decision. Even if the senior negotiators moved very fast indeed, as a letter of Basil of Caesarea implies, agreements could not have been reached before high summer.[134] How order was maintained in the interim, we do not know, nor how the massed Tervingi were kept supplied with the necessities of life. But since we have no evidence for any disturbances during the ongoing negotiations, we must postulate a firm hand among the Goths, and an assumption on both sides that everyone involved was negotiating in good faith. In other words, the Tervingian leaders must have felt it likely that their petition would meet with success – success which was, to a degree, dependent upon their good behaviour.

From Valens’ point of view, the Tervingian offer was both opportune and welcome – every source tells us as much, and there is no reason to disbelieve that evidence or maintain that the Gothic entry to the empire was permitted only because it could not be repelled. The emperor was in the midst of preparing a substantial war against Persia, made necessary by complicated manoeuvres over who should control the kingdoms of Armenia and Iberia. Persian wars were always costly and sufficient manpower could be hard to come by. If the Gothic petitioners were indeed allowed into the empire, that would fulfill the promises that the Valens’ orator Themistius had made in 369 at the end of the last Gothic war.[135] In that speech, as we saw in the last chapter, Themistius had been forced to put a good face on a clearly compromised peace, arguing for public consumption that the empire benefited more from sparing its enemies and keeping them alive as potential soldiers than it did from their destruction. What was at the time an argument of necessity, and a weak one at that, could now be made into happy reality for all concerned. The Tervingi could be admitted as humble suppliants, and then formed up into units to be dispersed to the eastern frontier. Given that, it is no wonder that Valens seized the chance which fate had offered him, giving orders that the Tervingi should be allowed to cross the river, fed for a time, and thereafter offered lands to farm; the Goths, for their part, probably gave hostages to the imperial government to guarantee an orderly crossing and settlement.

The Crossing of the Danube

It took several days and nights to transport all the Goths across the river, and Ammianus gives the impression of people coming over in their thousands.[136] Where exactly