Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [81]
The fighting and the very fact of physical settlement in the empire disrupted the social hierarchies that had existed amongst Gothic elites back home in the barbaricum. Many Gothic noblemen will have quite suddenly found themselves lacking the resources and power that they had enjoyed before 376, and so they turned to Roman careers as the best alternative available. Among attested Gothic officers, we have already met Modares, one of the generals who helped pacify the Balkans for Theodosius in 381 and 382 and also the recipient of a very complimentary letter from bishop Gregory of Nazianzus.[201] Other such generals include Fravitta and Eriulf. The rivalry between these two Gothic nobles stretched back to before their entering imperial service and was only resolved when Fravitta killed Eriulf at a drunken banquet hosted by Theodosius himself.[202] Thereafter, Fravitta had a distinguished career in the eastern army, marrying a Roman bride and actually putting down a mutiny led by another Gothic general, Gainas. That mutiny, as we shall see, brought down several eastern governments and left thousands of Goths dead in rioting which Gainas himself did not long survive. All of these men illustrate the sudden influx of skillful and important Gothic leaders into the Roman imperial hierarchy, and their rapid assimilation into roles which their Frankish and Alamannic peers had played for many decades already. But a far more significant figure than any of these generals was Alaric, whose career climaxed with the notorious sack of Rome.
The Importance of Alaric
Alaric is one of the most important figures in the whole history of the later Roman empire. His career was entirely unprecedented. Like the many Gothic generals just named, Alaric had no power base outside the empire, no kingdom from which he could manage his relationship with the emperor and into which he could retreat if his position became unsustainable. Yet unlike them, Alaric did not follow the well-established path up the career ladder of the army, becoming part of the imperial elite by the only route open to a barbarian. He became a Roman general, but never held a regular military command. He may have been a Gothic king, but he never found a kingdom. In other circumstances, he might have been a splendid anomaly, like Attila the Hun a generation later, a man whose historical impact was so completely the product of his singular personality as to defy parallel or sequel. Instead, Alaric’s career was a watershed in the history of the empire, inadvertently forging an entirely new model for a barbarian leader inside the imperial frontiers: Alaric proved that it was possible to dwell inside the empire and play a commanding role in imperial politics, without being absorbed into the structures of imperial government. Unlike anyone before him, Alaric was able to maintain a body of supporters inside the empire whose only connection to the empire came through him. That power-base permitted him to act in ways that no one inside the imperial hierarchy could.
In the process of pursuing his own personal interests, Alaric also re-created the Goths, and what it meant to be a Goth. Although, as we have just seen, there were any number of other Gothic leaders in the army, and large Gothic populations both inside and on the fringes of the empire, Alaric and his followers soon became ‘the Goths’ as far as contemporaries were concerned. In fact, Alaric’s following came to be identified as the direct successor of those Goths who had crossed the Danube in 376; in some sense, they were thought to be the same Goths.[203] Strictly speaking, this identification is simply incorrect: the Gothic groups who had crossed the Danube no longer existed, and