A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

Rome in 357, the first time he had ever visited the city. ‘The emperor was
greeted with welcoming cheers, which were echoed from the hills and
riverbanks, but in spite of the din he exhibited no emotion, but kept the same
impassive air as he commonly wore before his subjects in the provinces ... he
was like a dummy, gazing straight before him as if his head were in a vice and
turning neither to right nor left. When a wheel jolted he did not nod, and at no
point was he seen to spit or wipe or rub his face or nose or to move his hand.’ 5
How long could such a stance be kept up, especially when outside the rarified
atmosphere of the court the empire was in such disarray and only the emperor
could galvanise a response to the chaos?
This was the crucial tension inherent in Roman imperial rule in late antiquity.
Earlier emperors had remained close to the people. Hadrian, emperor from 117
to 138, was so easy to approach that there is a record of an old woman berating
him for not listening to her petition, telling him that he had no right to be
emperor if he did not respond. On campaign, the emperor was expected to share
the hardships of his men; it was said that the emperor Augustus went so far as to
sleep on a bed of straw. In complete contrast, the later Byzantine emperors in the
east emphasised their imperial divinity and delegated their fighting to generals
who would then offer the triumphs of any victories back to the emperor in a
public ceremony in the hippodrome in Constantinople. Valentinian, Valens,
Gratian and now Theodosius were in a transitional phase between these two
extremes. They enjoyed the honour of imperial power, but they had also to plan
strategies, raise resources and in the final resort win victories themselves. The
fate of Valens showed what disasters could follow if they cracked under the
pressure.
Imperial rule was conditioned by the vastness of the empire. The northern
border, from the mouth of the Rhine to that of the Danube on the Black Sea, was
2,000 kilometres long. The land route from the Black Sea to the Red Sea was
3,000 kilometres. In 376 Valens in Antioch was 500 kilometres from the Danube
where the Goths were massing, and a message and its reply would have taken a
month. The land routes were relatively secure; those across the Mediterranean
less so as winds and currents varied. In the winter the weather was so unstable
that shipping virtually came to a halt. As a result an emperor could never be sure
when orders sent by sea might arrive, if at all. Studies of voyages between Rome
and the wealthy province of Egypt show that they varied in length between 25
and 135 days. Very often an emperor could not have an accurate picture of an