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Flavius Theodosius , also called
Theodosius I and
Theodosius the Great, was
Roman Emperor from 379 until his death. Reuniting the east and west fractions of the empire, Theodosius was the last emperor of both the
Eastern and
Western Roman Empire. After his death, the two parts split permanently.
He is also known for making
Christianity the official
state religion of the Roman Empire.
Career
Born in Cauca , to a senior military officer, Theodosius the Elder, Theodosius accompanied his father to
Britannia to help quell the Great Conspiracy in 368. He was military commander of
Moesia, a Roman province on the lower
Danube, in 374. However, shortly thereafter, and at about the same time as the sudden disgrace and execution of his father, Theodosius retired to Cauca. The reason for his retirement, and the relationship between it and his father's death is unclear. It is possible that he was dismissed from his command by the emperor
Valentinian I after the loss of two of Theodosius' legions to the
Sarmatians in late 374.
From 364 to 375, the Roman empire was governed by two co-emperors, the brothers
Valentinian I and
Valens; when Valentinian died in 375, his sons,
Valentinian II and
Gratian, succeeded him as rulers of the Western Roman Empire. In 378, after
Valens was killed in the
Battle of Adrianople, Gratian appointed Theodosius to replace the fallen emperor as
co-augustus for the East. Gratian was killed in a rebellion in 383. After the death in 392 of Valentinian II, whom Theodosius had supported against a variety of usurpations, Theodosius ruled as sole emperor, defeating the usurper
Eugenius on September 6, 394, at the
Battle of the Frigidus.
Family
By his first wife,
Aelia Flaccilla, he had two sons,
Arcadius and Honorius and a daughter,
Pulcheria; Arcadius was his heir in the east and Honorius in the west. Both Pulcheria and Aelia Flaccilla died in 385. By his second wife, Galla, daughter of the emperor
Valentinian I, he had a daughter,
Galla Placidia, the mother of
Valentinian III.
Diplomatic policy with the Goths
The East was quiet during the reign of Theodosius. The
Goths and their allies entrenched in the
Balkans consumed his attention. The Gothic crisis was bad enough that his co-Emperor Gratian relinquished control of
Illyrian provinces and retired to
Trier in
Gaul to let Theodosius operate without hindrance. A major weakness in the Roman position after the defeat at
Adrianople was in recruiting barbarians to fight against barbarians. Theodosius was reduced to the expensive expedient of shipping his recruits to
Egypt and replacing them with more seasoned Romans, but there were still switches of allegiance that resulted in military setbacks. Gratian sent generals to clear Illyria of Goths, and Theodosius was able finally to enter
Constantinople on November 24, 380, after two seasons in the field. The final treaties with the remaining Goth forces, signed October 3, 382, permitted large contingents of Goths to settle along the
Danube frontier in the
diocese of
Thrace and largely govern themselves. Many would serve in Roman legions and others, as
foederati, would join for a single campaign, while bands of Goths switching loyalties became a destabilizing factor in the internal struggles for control of the Empire. In the last years of Theodosius' reign, one of their emerging leaders named
Alaric, participated in Theodosius' campaign against
Eugenius in 394, only to resume his rebellious behaviour against Theodosius' son and eastern successor,
Arcadius, shortly after Theodosius' death.
Civil wars in the Empire
After the death of
Gratian in 383, Theodosius' interests turned to the
Western Roman Empire, for the usurper
Magnus Maximus had taken all the provinces of the West except for Italy. This self-proclaimed threat was hostile to Theodosius' interests, since the reigning emperor
Valentinian II, Maximus' enemy, was his ally. When Maximus invaded Italy in 387, Theodosius decided to finish him off, and that he did the following year.
Trouble arose again, after Valentinian died, and the
magister militum Arbogast elected
Eugenius. Eugenius started a progam of restoration of the
Pagan faith, and sought, in vain, Theodosius' recognization. Theodosius campaigned against Eugenius, whose army was defeated at the
Battle of the Frigidus. Theodosius became the only emperor.
Theodosius the patron
Theodosius oversaw the raising in 390 of the Egyptian
obelisk from
Karnak. As Imperial spoils, it still stands in the
Hippodrome, the long
racetrack that was the center of Constantinople's public life and scene of political turmoils. Re-erecting the monolith was a challenge for the technology that had been honed in
siege engines. The obelisk, still recognizably a
solar symbol, was removed to
Alexandria in the first flush of Christian triumphalism at mid-century, but then spent a generation lying at the docks while people figured how to ship it to Constantinople, and was cracked in transit nevertheless. The white
marble base is entirely covered with
bas-reliefs documenting the Imperial household and the engineering feat itself. Theodosius and the imperial family are separated from the nobles among the spectators in the Imperial box with a cover over them as a mark of their status. The naturalism of the Roman tradition in such scenes is giving way to a
conceptual art: the
idea of order, decorum and respective ranking, expressed in serried ranks of faces, is beginning to oust the mere transitory details of this life, celebrated in Pagan
portraiture. Christianity had only just been appointed the new state religion.
Nicene Christianity becomes the state religion
In the
4th century, the Christian Church in the
Roman Empire was wracked with controversy over the nature of the
Trinity. In 325, the
Council of Nicea had condemned the teachings of the theologian Arius: that the Son, or Word, who in Christian belief was incarnated as
Jesus Christ, was a created being and inferior to God the Father, and that the Father and Son were of a similar substance but not identical. The Council had formulated the
Nicene Creed, which declared that God the Son and God the Father were of the same substance . The Council did not settle these controversies, and by the time of Theodosius' accession, there were still several different church factions that sought to impose their views on Christianity as a whole.
While no mainstream churchmen within the Empire explicitly adhered to Arius or his teachings, there were those who still used the
homoiousion formula, as well as those who attempted to bypass the debate by merely saying that Jesus was like God the Father. All these non-Nicenes were frequently labeled as Arians by their opponents, though they would not have identified themselves as such. .
The Emperor Valens had favored the group who used the
homoi formula; this
theology was prominent in much of the East and had under the sons of Constantine the Great gained a foothold in the West. Theodosius, on the other hand, cleaved closely to the Nicene Creed: this was the line that predominated in the West and was held by the important Alexandrian church.
Two days after Theodosius arrived in Constantinople, , Theodosius expelled the non-Nicene bishop, Demophilus of Constantinople, and surrendered the churches of that city to
Gregory Nazianzus, the leader of the small Nicene community there, an act which provoked rioting. Theodosius had just been baptized, by bishop Acholius of Thessalonica, during a severe illness, as was common in the early Christian world. In February he and Gratian published an edict that all their subjects should profess the faith of the bishops of Rome and Alexandria . The move was mainly thrust at the various beliefs that had arisen out of Arianism, but smaller dissident sects, such as the Macedonians, were also prohibited.
Although much of the church hierarchy in the East had held non-Nicene positions in the decades leading up to Theodosius' accession, he managed to impose Nicene uniformity during his reign. Later Nicene writers took special glee in the ignominious death of Valens, the Arians' protector, and indeed his defeat probably damaged the standing of the Homoian faction.
For the first part of his rule, Theodosius seems to have ignored the semi-official standing of the Christian bishops; in fact he had voiced his support for the preservation of temples or Pagan statues as useful public buildings. Then, in a series of decrees called the
Theodosian decrees he progressively declared that those Pagan feasts that had not yet been rendered Christian ones were now to be workdays . In 391, he outlawed
blood sacrifice and decreed "no one is to go to the sanctuaries, walk through the temples, or raise his eyes to statues created by the labor of man". The temples that were thus closed could be declared "abandoned", as Bishop
Theophilus of Alexandria immediately noted in applying for permission to demolish a site and cover it with a Christian church, an act that must have received general sanction, for
mithraea forming crypts of churches, and temples forming the foundations of
5th century churches appear throughout the former Roman Empire. Theodosius participated in actions by Christians against major Pagan sites: the destruction of the gigantic
Serapeum of Alexandria and its library by a mob in around 392, authorized by Theodosius and described in exultant detail by Christian propagandists, was only the most spectacular such occasion . The destruction of the greatest temple in Alexandria gave encouragement to Christian vigilantism and mob action in other centers, often spurred on by the local
bishops, as early hagiographies proudly relate.
By decree in 391, Theodosius ended the subsidies that had still trickled to some remnants of Greco-Roman civic Paganism too. The eternal fire in the Temple of Vesta in the
Roman Forum was extinguished, and the
Vestal Virgins were disbanded. Taking the auspices and practicing
witchcraft were to be punished. Pagan members of the
Senate in Rome appealed to him to restore the Altar of Victory in the Senate House; he refused. After the last
Olympic Games in 393, Theodosius cancelled the much-diminished games, and the reckoning of dates by Olympiads soon came to an end. Now Theodosius portrayed himself on his coins holding the
labarum.
The apparent change of policy that resulted in the "Theodosian decrees" has often been credited to the increased influence of
Ambrose, bishop of Milan. The personal piety of Theodosius cannot be assessed. It is worth noting that in 390 Ambrose had excommunicated Theodosius, who had recently ordered the massacre of several thousand inhabitants of
Thessalonica, in response to the assassination of his military governor stationed in the city, and that Theodosius performed several months of public penance. The specifics of the decrees were superficially limited in scope, specific measures in response to various petitions and accusations from the increasingly militant Christians throughout his administration.
In 391 or 392 he officially sanctioned the destruction of the most famous of the temples in the East, the
Serapeum at Alexandria. Bands of monks and Christian officials had long been accustomed to take the law into their own hands and destroy various centers of Pagan worship, but the destruction of the Serapeum seemed to confirm that such actions enjoyed the emperor's tacit approval at least, and served to encourage such action in the future. Theodosius had been effectively manipulated into sanctioning the destruction of the Serapeum by local officials who had essentially engineered the crisis there for this very purpose.
Theodosius died in Milan, in 395. Ambrose preached a panegyric at his
funeral.
The Theodosian women
See also
- Carranque, Spain, the site of a villa attributed to Maternus Cinigius, uncle of Theodosius. Includes marble from the Emperor's quarries.
References
- Brown, Peter, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2003, p. 73-74
- Lenski, Noel, Failure of Empire, U. of California Press, 2002, ISBN 0-520-23332-8, pp. 235-237.
External links
