Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [86]
Besides, his earliest goals were more personal and more limited. He wanted a proper command and, in 395, he marched on Constantinople to demand it. We are told that Rufinus bribed Alaric to withdraw from the city by giving him leave to sack provinces elsewhere in the Balkans, but Claudian, our source for this, was always ready to slander Stilicho’s enemies, Rufinus very much among them.[217] More plausibly, as it nearly always did, Constantinople simply looked like too dangerous a target, so that Alaric turned instead to the softer options of Macedonia and Thessaly. Rufinus, for his part, could hardly mount an effective defence, still less go on the offensive, lacking as he did the eastern field army, which remained in Italy under Stilicho’s command. Before 395 was out, however, Stilicho had marched across the Alps and into the Balkans to deal with Alaric.
Stilicho and Rufinus
From the moment of Theodosius’ death, Stilicho always claimed guardianship of both Arcadius and Honorius, on the grounds that this had been the deathbed wish of Theodosius himself. Contemporaries could not have verified that claim any more than we can. Making good on it would have meant displacing the powerful eastern officials who already controlled Arcadius, and they, of course, rejected Stilicho’s position entirely. But by marching his army into the Balkans to deal with Alaric, Stilicho could also apply crippling pressure to the regime of Rufinus. Or so one might have thought, save for the puzzling results of the actual expedition: before the end of 395, Stilicho had returned the eastern army to Constantinople under the immediate command of the Gothic general Gainas, and had himself retired from the campaign against Alaric without having brought him to battle.[218]
Claudian would have it that Stilicho, a loyal servant to both emperors, was only acting in response to Arcadius’ request for the return of the troops, but that cannot be the whole story and may be entirely false.[219] Instead, we may suspect that, when Claudian insists on Stilicho’s firm discipline and skill in leading two armies that had recently fought one another at the bloodbath of the Frigidus, he is covering up the fact that Stilicho had found it impossible to control both eastern and western field armies on a single campaign.[220] Unable to trust the eastern troops in a pitched battle against Alaric, and knowing that the eastern frontier needed its field army, Stilicho sent them back to Constantinople under the command of the general Gainas. When the army was mustered for inspection there in November 395, Rufinus was seized and torn to pieces by the soldiers. The regency in Constantinople was taken over by the eunuch Eutropius, Arcadius’ trusted grand chamberlain, who had himself been plotting against Rufinus for some time. Eutropius’ interests and those of Stilicho coincided only briefly, and when the eunuch proved no more deferential to Stilicho’s claimed regency over the East than Rufinus had been, he became the new target of Claudian’s poisonous invective. By then, Stilicho had beaten a tactical retreat to Italy. Alaric did not as yet pose any threat to the western empire, and leaving him at large could only help undermine Eutropius in Constantinople.
Alaric and Eutropius
Stilicho spent most of 396 in Gaul, repairing the frontier that had been weakened during the civil war between Eugenius and Theodosius.[221] Alaric, meanwhile, advanced into Greece via the pass at Thermopylae and remained in the peninsula until 397, raiding as far south as the Peloponnese, in an action recorded in Eunapius’ Lives of the Sophists.[222] In 397, while Eutropius’ eastern regime was still enfeebled by competition over the regency and faced the added burden of Hunnic raids across the Armenian frontier, Stilicho again felt ready to intervene in the Alaric affair. In early April, he led a naval expedition to Greece, making landfall in the south and forcing the Gothic leader to retreat up into the mountainous province of Epirus, though failing to bring him to submission.[223] Eutropius