Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [95]
Another cause of this divergence, though, was the fact of the Goths themselves. When Alaric’s followers finally found a permanent home and permanent security for themselves, it was inside one of the western provinces, where they were from then on a complicating factor in the politics of the western empire. It was, however, a long time before that permanent settlement arrived, because for many years Constantius would brook absolutely no compromise. Until the Goths were prepared to humble themselves and genuinely subordinate their own plans and wishes to the needs of imperial government, Constantius was not interested in accommodation. By 413, moreover, his hands were free to act. In that year, Constantius suppressed the last of the usurpations that had plagued the western provinces from Gaul to North Africa ever since 406. He therefore determined to come to grips with Athaulf, who had been eking out a desultory existence in southern Gaul for a couple of years. The Gothic king, ignored and rejected by Constantius and Honorius despite his best efforts to make himself indispensable to them, decided to once again try the manoeuvre that had worked briefly for Alaric: he again made Priscus Attalus emperor. Attalus, who had traveled in the Gothic train ever since his deposition in 410, accepted the dubious honour despite the disastrous precedent of his first proclamation during Alaric’s second siege of Rome. Perhaps he had genuinely grown to like his position within Gothic society – certainly he was baptised by a homoean Gothic priest named Sigesarius.[255] In 415, he even pronounced the epithalamium – the nuptial poem – at an unprecedented wedding.
In the southern Gallic city of Narbonne, Athaulf married Galla Placidia, the sister of Honorius and a hostage of the Goths since the sack of Rome. It is hard to know what prompted this match, and what political effects it was meant to have, but it is clear that Placidia profited by it in the long-term: for the rest of her life, she possessed a loyal troop of Goths which served as her bodyguard and helped make her a political force in her own right. At the time, though, the wedding only exacerbated the tension between Athaulf and Constantius, who blockaded the southern coast of Gaul and starved the Goths out of the province and into Spain. There, Placidia bore a son by her new husband and named him Theodosius – the name of her own imperial father and a clear sign of dynastic ambitions, given that Honorius remained without heir. But the infant died in Barcelona, and with him yet another dream of reconciliation between Honorius and the Goths. Athaulf soon followed his child to the grave, felled by the dagger of an assassin while he inspected his horses in their stables. The Gothic noble who profitted by this murder was himself killed after only seven days, and the new Gothic king Wallia made peace with Constantius in return for food.
He restored Placidia and Priscus Attalus to the imperial government. The widowed Placidia returned to Italy, where she was married to Constantius, whom she hated. Yet surrounded by an enormous fortune and protected by Goths loyal to her and the memory of her first husband, she went on to become the mother of an emperor: Valentinian Ⅲ, born in 419 to her and Constantius, ruled the disintegrating western empire for thirty years (425–455). Attalus, humiliated, led in triumph, and physically mutilated, was exiled to the island of Lipari where he lived out his days in moderate comfort, no doubt regretting the cruel fate that had seen him lose