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advance, he sent the generals Profuturus and Traianus to keep the Goths in Thrace under control. Meanwhile, Valens’ nephew Gratian likewise realized the gravity of the situation. He despatched two good generals, Frigeridus and the comes domesticorum Richomeres, to support the eastern troops, but also to ensure that the trouble was contained in Thrace and Moesia and did not spread westwards into Pannonia and the Latin provinces.[148] Gratian’s intervention demonstrates how worrisome the Gothic revolt had become during the course of 377. Western generals did not, as a rule, intervene in eastern affairs, nor junior emperors in those of their seniors, lest it look too much like provocation. As recently as 366, Valentinian had declined to help Valens face down the usurpation of Procopius, a far more direct threat to dynastic control than the Goths could hope to be. Only the prospect of chaos along the whole Danube frontier can have prompted Gratian’s intervention.

As it happened, Frigeridus fell ill and returned to the West for a time, leaving Richomeres to lead the western troops to their rendezvous with Valens’ generals Profuturus and Traianus. In late summer 377, they brought the Goths to battle near a site called Ad Salices (‘the Willows’). The precise location of this site remains unknown, though it probably lay somewhere between the coastal town of Tomi and the opening out of the Danube delta into its many channels, very near the imperial frontier rather than in the immediate vicinity of Marcianople. The battle of Ad Salices that followed was a major one, but a draw, for the Goths were secure within their well-guarded wagon train and could retreat into it as necessary. The Roman forces seem to have been smaller than the Gothic, and Profuturus himself fell in battle, but superior drill and training saved the army from total destruction. Having suffered too many losses to continue the assault, the Roman troops retreated south again, back to Marcianople, where the revolt had first begun in earnest.[149] At roughly the same time, Frigeridus returned to the East, fortified Beroe, and inflicted a major defeat on another Gothic noble, Farnobius, who had been raiding through Thrace. Frigeridus sent the survivors of the slaughter back to Italy, where they were settled as farmers, a useful reminder that barbarian settlement within the empire could work perfectly well when managed with a minimum of care.[150]

Despite Ad Salices, Richomeres and the other generals had inflicted serious damage on Fritigern’s Goths. Many of them withdrew into the safety of the Haemus mountains for the winter of 377–378. Richomeres went back to Gaul as autumn fell, planning to collect a larger force for the following year’s campaigning season. Valens, for his part, re-enforced his troops in Thrace with a more senior commander, the magister equitum Saturninus. He, with Traianus as his lieutenant, blockaded the Goths in the Haemus passes and deprived them of food. He hoped that by reducing them to desperate hunger and then removing the guards from the passes he could lure them into the open country and destroy them in pitched battle. The plan failed. Rather than moving north and standing to battle in the plains between the Haemus and the Danube, the Goths allied themselves with some unspecified Huns and Alans, and made their way south into Thrace. In that country’s wide open spaces, with their excellent roads, Fritigern could move freely, laying waste great stretches of land between the Haemus, the Rhodope, and the shores of the Hellespont and of the Bosporus near Constantinople.[151] So badly ravaged were the provinces of Moesia and Scythia that the emperor officially lowered their tax burden in 377.[152] Indeed, by early 378, much of Thrace itself was inaccessible to the outside world: Basil of Caesarea wrote to an exiled fellow-churchman, Eusebius of Samosata, then resident in Thrace, commenting on the unprecedented difficulty of communication and expressing surprise that Eusebius had managed to survive there at all.[153]

Valens Prepares for War