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By Root 374 0

the followers of Alaric who sacked Rome were made up not just of Balkan Goths but those from many other places as well. Yet over time the identification of Alaric’s followers as ‘the Goths’ took on a reality all its own. Fifteen years of his leadership gave Alaric’s following a sense of community that survived his own death. First under his brother-in-law Athaulf, then under a series of other leaders, Alaric’s Goths remained together inside the empire, going on to settle in Gaul. There, in the province of Aquitaine, they put down roots and created the first autonomous barbarian kingdom inside the frontiers of the Roman empire.

The Usurpation of Magnus Maximus and Problems in the Balkans

Alaric came to prominence in 395, but we know that he was already active a few years earlier, in the aftermath of Theodosius’ first campaign against a western usurper. Theodosius, as we saw in the last chapter, became emperor in 379, possibly without the approval of Gratian. He was given control of the Balkans in order to end the Gothic wars, but he received only limited western assistance in this task. Gratian’s main concern was to confine the Gothic problem to the eastern Balkans and away from Pannonia, while he devoted himself to the Rhine frontier. Back in the West, however, Gratian soon made himself very unpopular with the regular army, supposedly because he showed excessive favouritism to his Alanic bodyguard. In 383, he faced a mutiny in Gaul, led by a general of Spanish origin named Magnus Maximus. Maximus (r. 383–388) overthrew and killed Gratian, taking control of the western regions of Gaul, Spain and Britain, while leaving the twelve-year-old Valentinian Ⅱ in precarious control of Italy and Africa.

Preoccupied with settling affairs in the eastern provinces, which were still deeply disturbed by the years of uncertainty that had followed Adrianople, Theodosius could not have spared the resources for a campaign against Maximus, even had he wanted to. But it is hard to imagine his having felt much desire to avenge a colleague with whom he had been on such bad terms. In fact, relations had been deteriorating since the early part of 383, half a year before Gratian’s death. At that point, Theodosius had raised his own five-year-old son Arcadius to the rank of augustus, a promotion that Gratian’s western court refused to recognize.[204] At least initially, therefore, Theodosius may actually have welcomed the murder of Gratian as a chance to entrench his own dynastic control. Certainly he made no move against Maximus. Things only changed in 387 when Maximus invaded the territory of the young Valentinian Ⅱ. He and his mother Justina fled to Theodosius. Exiled in Thessalonica, they beseeched Theodosius’ aid in restoring a legitimate augustus to the throne from which he had been evicted. Theodosius owed his position to a member of the Valentinianic dynasty and he could hardly refuse this request, however uncongenial. With no great enthusiasm, he mustered an army and marched west in 388. Maximus’ revolt was crushed thanks to the superior skills of Theodosius’ generals, and Theodosius himself remained in Italy until the summer of 391, graciously accepting the excuses and regrets of the many western aristocrats who had collaborated with Maximus.

While Theodosius was away, there was trouble in the Balkans. Units of the army stationed there had been offered money by Maximus to raise a disturbance at Theodosius’ rear.[205] We do not know where fighting started, and it is very unclear whether we should think in terms of a major revolt, a long-lasting rebellion of auxiliary troops, or simply wide-scale banditry. Since the depredations of a fractious auxiliary troop and the bands of brigands that haunted many imperial provinces throughout Roman history could look identical even to contemporaries, our own inability to separate the phenomena should come as no surprise. All the same, the scale of the Balkan problem is revealed by the fact that a high-ranking general named Botheric was stationed in Thessalonica in 390. Botheric’s murder in