Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [83]
An Important Source: The Poet Claudian
We do not know how many – if indeed any – of these rebellious units were drawn from the Gothic settlers of 382. Our sources are unusually opaque. The narrative in Zosimus’ New History is filled with narrative incident, but little historical detail. The poems of Claudian, meanwhile, bathe genuine incidents in a wash of poetic embellishment. Claudian, whose earliest surviving works date to the early 390s, is often our fullest historical witness to events of that decade, which brings with it a number of problems. Claudian – as we call the man born Claudius Claudianus – was a young Egyptian from Alexandria, a Greek speaker by origin, who made his career in the Latin West as a court poet, rising to the rank of tribunus et notarius and earning a statue in the forum of Trajan in Rome.[207] He is widely regarded as the last great Latin poet of antiquity, and he has left us work in several poetic genres, all equally accomplished. Most of his career, from what we can tell, was spent in the service of the general Stilicho, a close confidant of Theodosius, the husband of the emperor’s niece, and regent for his younger son Honorius from the time of Theodosius’ death in 395. Stilicho was undoubtedly the most powerful man in the western empire, and spent much of his career attempting to assert the same level of control over the East. In Claudian, he had a mouthpiece and a panegyrist of genius, who magnified events great and small and transformed poems on every subject into opportunities to praise his patron. Between his panegyric on the third consulate of Honorius, delivered on 1 January 396 and fulsome in its defence of Stilicho’s conduct a year earlier, until his own death soon after 404, Claudian is often our only extant source. What is more, his is the only evidence not contaminated by the hindsight of the sack of Rome in 410. Although poetry is not history, and teasing out narrative reference from the poetic context in which it is embedded is not always easy, we learn a great deal from Claudian. Indeed it is one of his poems that gives us our first introduction to Alaric.
Alaric’s Early Career
When Theodosius finally returned to the East in 391, he supposedly came close to being killed by Gothic rebels, among whom, we may surmise, was Alaric. Claudian tells us that Theodosius was confronted by Alaric at the river Hebrus, the modern Maritsa.[208] If this episode actually took place, late summer 391 is the only point in Theodosius’ career that can accommodate it. We do not know what position, if any, Alaric held in 391. Although it is still often claimed that Alaric ruled the Goths because he belonged to the royal dynasty of the Balthi, the only source for this is Jordanes – and Jordanes at his most transparently fictitious, inventing a ‘Visigothic’ dynasty to match the Amal family of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric.[209] Jordanes’ testimony on this point can be taken seriously only by those whose theoretical superstructure requires an aristocratic Traditionskern to transmit Gothic ethnicity. All the contemporary evidence shows that Alaric was a new man and in 391 he was not yet a significant figure, just one of the many bandits and rebels who made the Balkans a festering wound in the body politic. Rather than getting bogged down in Balkan guerrilla warfare, for which he had shown not the slightest aptitude, Theodosius left matters to the general Promotus.