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betrayal, he would reject the terms under which he had been received into the empire, lead his followers away from Marcianopole and into open revolt. He and his Tervingi therefore marched out into the province of Scythia, and as news of Lupicinus’ treachery spread, all of the Goths who had crossed the Danube the year before joined Fritigern. Why did things go so very badly wrong at Marcianopole? Modern scholars, influenced by the black colours in which Ammianus paints Lupicinus, tend to assume that he plotted treachery from the beginning. That seems unlikely given the normal habits of Roman officialdom. Exploiting the perquisites of office to get rich was one thing, deliberately provoking a rebellion another thing altogether. If Fritigern’s Goths were already destined for a secure place in the Roman army, as other Goths in Thrace certainly were at precisely this time, then Lupicinus had nothing to gain from eliminating Gothic commanders who had up to that point kept their following obedient and quiescent. Again, the banqueting at Marcianople, and indeed the separation of commanders and attendants from the main body of troops, was perfectly normal – it is exactly paralleled twenty years before, when the caesar Julian entertained his high commanders at Paris while their units were encamped well away from the city itself. Although Lupicinus must have seen that he had a chance of entrapping the Gothic leaders at Marcianople, it seems most unlikely that he actually planned to do so from the beginning. On the contrary, when riotous skirmishing flared up between Gothic and Roman troop, Lupicinus panicked. That panic, in turn, convinced Fritigern that his only safety lay in rebellion.

Retreating from Marcianople, Fritigern and his followers were pursued by Lupicinus and the army stationed there. Fourteen kilometres from the city, the two forces clashed and Lupicinus’ army went down to bloody defeat. The whole of its junior officer corps died on the field, the unit standards were lost, and Lupicinus himself only survived by escaping into Marcianople and shutting up the city behind him. Fritigern’s Goths equipped themselves with the weapons and armour of their fallen enemies and went on the offensive, raiding nearby regions, and then ranging further afield, as far south as Adrianople, about 320 kilometres to the south. We can be fairly certain that the rebellion would have been halted in its tracks had Lupicinus been victorious. Success, however, breeds confidence and Fritigern and his followers, tormented by Roman exploitation for long enough, were now in no mood to see reason. To their standards flocked not just the other Goths who had been admitted into the empire, but also the dissatisfied and oppressed of the provinces – slaves, some of whom were Gothic, miners, and prisoners of all stripes. These, in turn, made rebellion easier, for they knew their way around the provinces, knew the roads and imperial establishments, and thus made the task of supplying the rebels far less complicated than it would otherwise have been.[144]

The Rebellion Spreads

Gothic units in the Thracian army soon joined Fritigern as well. Two commanders named Sueridus and Colias, in winter quarters at Adrianople with their units, had observed with total unconcern the travails of the Tervingi admitted in 376. Nor did the revolt of Fritigern at Marcianople interest them. The fact that Sueridus and Colias demonstrably lacked any special feeling for fellow Goths is a salutary reminder that only extraordinary pressure of circumstances could turn different groups of Goths into ‘the Goths’. In this case, that pressure came from the managerial incompetence of local officials at Adrianople. Early in 377, Sueridus and Colias received their marching orders, detailing them to the eastern front where they were needed for Valens’ Persian campaign. When they asked the local authorities in Adrianople for money to equip their units with food for the journey, they were refused by the head of the local city council, the curia. Ammianus tells us that the councillor