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the imperial purple not once but twice, while the useless Honorius reigned blissfully on. As for Wallia’s Goths, once properly fed and housed, they went into action as a Roman army, clearing the Iberian peninsula of barbarians – the same Vandals, Alans and Sueves who had crossed the Rhine in 405/406 and then settled in Spain after traversing the Pyrenees in 409. In 418, Constantius called off this hugely successful campaign and settled Wallia’s Goths in Gaul, in the province of Aquitania Secunda and a few of the cities on its fringes. Wallia did not live to see this settlement take place, but under his successor Theoderic (r. 418–451), a distant relative of Alaric by marriage, the Goths became more or less loyal subjects of the Roman emperor in Italy.

The settlement in Gaul begins a new phase in the history of the Goths, and of Gothic relations with the Roman empire. No longer one of many barbarian groups hovering on the fringes of empire, the Aquitanian Goths instead became the first barbarian kingdom inside the empire. In 418, their settlement may not have been viewed as permanent; certainly no one imagined that part of the western empire was being given away to a Gothic king and his followers. But that is precisely what happened over time. As the fifth century progressed, Theoderic I and his successor Theoderic Ⅱ acted not as imperial officials, but as autonomous rulers within the larger Roman empire. In time, the Gothic settlement became a Gothic kingdom. The precedent set by Alaric also had a long future ahead of it. Alaric’s own career was a failure – it is hard for us to judge it as anything else, and it is quite clear from the sources that he regarded it in the same way. But his career had demonstrated the power it was possible to exercise if one possessed a military following with no ties to the structures of imperial government save personal loyalty to an individual leader. As the fifth century wore on, more and more commanders in the western empire – not just barbarian kings, but Roman generals of every sort – turned to the strategy which Alaric had pioneered and used extra-governmental pressure to win political advantage for themselves inside the government. This new dynamic of imperial politics helped bring on the collapse of the western Roman empire in the 460s and 470s, but that is an altogether different story than the one we have been trying to tell in this book.

Our own story comes to a close with Alaric precisely because his career is both an end and a beginning in the history of the Roman empire’s dealings with the Goths. Alaric was the child of a Balkan settlement that had been made necessary not just by the Gothic success at Adrianople, but by the imperial rivalries between the houses of Valentinian and Theodosius. In that sense, it follows in the footsteps of Gothic history throughout the fourth century – conditioned by, and in some sense conditional on, the actions of Roman emperors both beyond and within the imperial frontiers. As we have seen, the Goths themselves were created by the pressures of life on the Roman frontier, and the whole of their social and military history, from its beginnings in the third century until the Gothic wars of Valens in the 360s, developed in the shadow of Rome. Adrianople, and still more the lifetime of Alaric, changed all that. No longer products and victims of Roman history, the Goths – and the many other barbarian settlers who followed in their footsteps – now made Rome’s history themselves.

Glossary of Ancient Sources

Ambrose

see Biographical Glossary

Ammianus Marcellinus

from a well-connected family in Syria, perhaps Antioch, he joined the elite military corps of protectores as a young man, but retired after the death of the emperor Julian, going on to write a history of Rome which he completed around the year 390. This Res Gestae, which ran from A.D. 96 to 378 and is extant from 353, is our single most important source for fourth-century history and our most detailed treatment of the Adrianople campaign.

Arrian

c. 86–160, governor of Cappadocia