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

approach. One of the Gothic leaders, Athaneric, who had been outmanoeuvred
by Fritigern and who was now seriously ill, approached Theodosius asking for
formal settlement of his followers in the empire. Theodosius decided to make a
show of the affair. He left Constantinople himself to meet Athaneric and his
force and then welcomed him back into the city. The Goths were overawed by
the opulence and grandeur of Constantinople, and when Athaneric died soon
afterwards his troops joined Theodosius’ forces. It was a small achievement but
it showed the world at large that the Romans were prepared to offer some kind of
settlement with the Goths.
Fritigern, however, was still on the move. For the next two years Theodosius
appears to have delegated command of his campaigns to generals, some of them
from the western empire. Possibly he had decided that he could not risk defeat in
person and so kept himself away from the battlefields. The campaigns appear to
have been successful in that they gradually pushed Fritigern’s Goths out from the
central Balkans into Thrace, in fact where Valens had originally agreed they
would settle. By October 382, Theodosius was at last able to sign a treaty with
the Goths.
The treaty reflected Theodosius’ weakness. Normally such an agreement
would have broken the Goths up into separate groups, which would then have
been made subject to Roman control in the form of taxation and military
recruitment as if they had been native peoples. Now, however, they were to be
allowed to stay as one unit and were formally addressed as ‘allies’. If the
Romans wanted them to be recruited for future campaigns, they had to negotiate
with them as a group. The ever-resourceful Themistius was on hand to trumpet
the peace as a victory: ‘Was it better to fill Thrace with corpses or with farmers?
... To make it full of tombs or of living men? ... I hear from those who have
returned from there that they [the Goths] are now turning the metal of their
swords and breastplates into hoes and pruning hooks ...’ 13 Everyone knew,
however, that behind the rhetoric this was a form of surrender that normally
would not have been tolerated. When four years later, in 386, a much smaller
Gothic force crossed the border, they faced massacre and the survivors were
drafted into the Roman armies or settled as unfree tenant farmers as far afield as
Asia Minor. There can be little doubt that Theodosius would have liked to have
done the same to the victors of Adrianople.
In short, the first three years of Theodosius’ reign must have been deeply
frustrating for him. He was still an outsider, a Latin-speaking Roman in a Greek
world who had not yet succeeded in gaining the allegiance of his people. In the