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the transfer took place is unclear, though Durostorum, on a straight road line south to Marcianople, seems the likeliest point. Numbers are likewise not to be had. Eunapius speaks of 200,000 Goths, but few have taken seriously a figure that high. Although it has recently been defended as plausible in light of the constant losses which the Goths suffered in the course of the next six years – to have lost so many, there must have been masses of them to start with – that position gives too little weight to significant re-enforcements which the band received in those same years. Questions of manpower in the ancient world never have clear answers, and the best we can say here is that the scale of later fighting implies that the Goths admitted to the empire numbered at least in the tens of thousands, and perhaps considerably more than that.

If Alavivus and Fritigern were the first to be received, there were other Gothic commanders as well. They came voluntarily, not in response to military defeat by the emperor, which may explain their relative strength. Certainly, few of them were disarmed. Standard imperial practice was to disarm barbarians before they were admitted to the empire, and only then to re-arm them out of imperial arsenals at times and places where they could not pose a threat. In this case, however, whether through corruption, neglect, or the sheer scale of the enterprise, many of the Goths retained the weapons they normally carried, despite the clear intention of the emperor that they be disarmed in the usual fashion.[137] When this oversight was combined with appalling abuse, the situation became volatile indeed. The officials put in charge of the crossing were Lupicinus and Maximus, the first a comes rei militaris, the second the dux of either Moesia or Scythia. For Ammianus they were homines maculosi, ‘men of tarnished repute’, but that seems like the judgement of hindsight, perhaps even the verdict of a later imperial inquiry into what had gone wrong in the lead-up to Adrianople.[138] Imperial officials were expected to profit from the offices they held, and we should not assume that the exploitation of the Goths by Lupicinus and his officials was in excess of the late Roman norm. Nor should we discount the possibility that limiting the Goths’ food supply was a deliberate way of controlling what was, after all, a large and potentially dangerous body of barbarians on imperial soil. By modern standards, however, the abuse was shocking. The food that ought to have been allocated to the Goths was diverted by the generals for sales that would line their own pockets. In its stead, the Goths were offered dogmeat at the price of one dog for one Gothic child enslaved. According to Ammianus, even the children of Gothic nobles could be rounded up and sold on to slavers.[139]

Alatheus and Saphrax

While this trouble was brewing, the Greuthungi of Alatheus and Saphrax – those Gothic duces who had taken custody of the child-king Videric – also arrived at the Danube, seeking entry into the empire. As Alavivus had done some months before, these two generals now sent envoys to Valens offering terms and asking for succour. Somewhere in the same vicinity, old Athanaric too had arrived, though it is not clear what finally drove him to seek refuge in the empire. We do not know why, but the request of Alatheus and Saphrax was refused. Some have argued that the emperor began to fear the consequences of letting in too many Goths at once, or that the Tervingi already inside the empire had become so restive that additional newcomers would impose too heavy a burden on an already overwhelmed officialdom. Perhaps, though, the treatment of the Greuthungi was simply a very public demonstration of the imperial power over barbarians: after all, the gesture proclaimed that the decision of whether or not to admit different Gothic groups was entirely in the hands of the emperor, who could pick and choose with total inscrutability. That, at least, was the lesson Athanaric learned: seeing the Greuthungian request rejected, he gave up on