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advanced prematurely and engaged the enemy.[164] Their move disrupted the imperial line of battle, which was then disordered still further by the sudden appearance of Alatheus and Saphrax and their followers, in company with a unit of Alans. What followed was a military disaster, described by all our sources in lurid colours. The Roman left wing drove too far beyond the Gothic line and was cut off, surrounded and slaughtered. With the main infantry’s left flank thus exposed, the Roman line was compressed in on itself, hampering the ability of the soldiers to fight and causing many to die from wounds inflicted by their own side. Towards late afternoon, the Roman infantry line broke and the rout began. The imperial bodyguard and the scholae palatinae must have been almost totally destroyed, for Valens was forced to take cover with the Mattiarii, a unit of the regular field army rather than an imperial schola, but seemingly one of the few Roman units to have stood its ground. Some of the generals attempted to rally the auxiliaries who had been held in reserve, but these had already melted away off the battlefield. Seeing that further attempts at rallying the disintegrating army were useless, the generals Victor, Richomeres and Saturninus fled the field. There, the butchery continued until nightfall.[165]

The fate of Valens was uncertain even at the time. Some said that towards evening he was struck by an arrow and fell dead amongst the common soldiers. Others claimed that, mortally wounded, he was carried off the field by a few loyal bodyguards and eunuchs, and hidden in a farmhouse; there, as the emperor lay dying, Goths surrounded the farmhouse and, rather than waste time breaking in, set the house ablaze and burned to death the emperor and his attendants. Only one man escaped through a window and explained that the Gothic firebrands had just deprived themselves of the glory of capturing a Roman emperor on the field of battle. Whichever story – if either of them – was true, Valens’ body was never recovered.[166] With him at Adrianople fell the generals Traianus and Sebastianus, the tribune and Valens’ relative Aequitius, thirty-five senior officers, and fully two-thirds of the army that had taken the field on the morning of 9 August 378.[167] As Themistius would put it five years later: ‘Thrace was overrun, Illyricum was overrun, armies vanished altogether, like shadows’.[168]

Chapter 7 Theodosius and the Goths

The psychological impact of Adrianople was immediate. Pagans at once interpreted the defeat as punishment for the neglect of the traditional gods. In distant Lydia, the pagan rhetor Eunapius of Sardis composed what has been termed an instant history, to demonstrate that the empire had headed inexorably towards the disaster of Adrianople from the moment of Constantine’s conversion. For Eunapius, it seems, the Roman empire itself had ended at Adrianople: ‘Strife, when it has grown, brings forth war and murder, and the children of murder are ruin and the destruction of the human race. Precisely these things were perpetrated during Valens’ reign’.[169] From a distance of longer years, and with considerably greater penetration, Ammianus made the same argument, choosing the disaster as the terminal point for his history and loading it with coded venom towards the Christians on whom he, like his hero Julian, blamed the empire’s decline. No Christian response was immediately forthcoming, though Nicene Christians seem to have blamed Adrianople on divine punishment for the homoean beliefs of Valens, and Jerome ended his Chronicle in 378, just as Ammianus did his history. This dialogue of blame and excuse, the pagan side of which is now largely lost to us thanks to suppression by the Christian winners, went on throughout the fifth century, exacerbated by Alaric’s sack of Rome. After all, how could the barbarian scourge have stung so painfully if God or the gods were not murderously displeased?

For the modern scholar, too, the battle of Adrianople is a turning point of major importance, though we seek historical rather