Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius (review)

In the wake of Theodosius’ death in 395, when imperial rule was divided between Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West, rivalries among the court ministers exacerbated the Gothic danger. Not many years later, Constantinople was the site of a rebellion and a massacre, in which thousands of Goths were butchered by Roman citizens. The stated purpose of this book is to reinterpret this episode, one that had far-ranging reverberations. This reinterpretation comes primarily through a fresh examination of the works of an eyewitness, Synesius of Cyrene, and especially his De regno and De providentia. Cameron (whose book this is, for the most part; the contributions of Long and Sherry will be noted when apposite) has thus provided the Eastern counterpart to his Western-oriented Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford, 1970).

The episode in question has not lacked for modern attention, and chapter one gives an overview of the problems. It was the usually reliable Seeck who assigned the date of Synesius’ arrival in Constantinople to 399 and his departure to 402, and who saw the events of those years in terms of a struggle between pro- and anti-barbarian parties. “This book attempts to show that Seeck’s chronology and interpretation are alike mistaken” (10).

The demolition begins in earnest in chapter two, which focuses on Synesius and the details of his life. Most importantly, Cameron constructs a convincing (if not air-tight) argument for Synesius’ life-long Christianity, which he calls orthodox, if somewhat “unconventional.” Building on an essay by Marrou, here he contradicts many scholars (including Bregman, whose intellectual study of Synesius was an earlier book in this same series) who have seen in Synesius’ Neoplatonist enthusiasms and in his dedication to his teacher, Hypatia of Alexandria, two clear indications of his pagan persuasion. (Synesius, of course, became bishop of Ptolemais in Libya in 410.) The biographical portion continues with chapter three, which narrows the focus to Synesius’ three-year stay in Constantinople, during which time he wrote both De regno and De providentia. Aurelian, the praetorian prefect, granted Synesius’ request for a reduction in the taxes of Pentapolis. His embassy successful, Synesius stayed and became further embroiled in local politics. Cameron boldly reconfigures the chronology of these years by relocating the only fixed point, an earthquake (during which Synesius, as he himself describes, left for home), from 402, where Seeck had placed it (and where others, such as Roques, still do), to 400. This major shift, first suggested by Barnes, moves Synesius’ local compositions back two years, and necessitates an extensive reassessment of them and of all the contemporaneous political machinations of the Eastern court.

De regno is analyzed in chapter four. It seems that this work on the virtues and duties of the ideal king, although addressed to Arcadius, was much too offensive to have been delivered before him. (Despite the customary practice of parrhesia by philosophers and its new use by bishops, prudence still dictated restraint.) The audience was probably a group of men linked by their hostility to Arcadius’ current ministers, for De regno’s most important section is a lengthy tirade against the Goths in Roman service (and especially Eutropius). The summary and discussion of De regno are very illuminating; one wonders why a translation is lacking.

The analysis of De providentia, the heart of this book, begins with chapter five. Within the allegorical framework of the myth of Osiris and Typhos (from which Isis has been omitted), Synesius gives his perspective on the political situation in Constantinople in 399–400. Cameron painstakingly demonstrates the high degree of distortion, while simultaneously extracting, in brilliant fashion, the factual value of the tale. Osiris represents Aurelian, obviously. The evil Typhos, says Cameron, represents Caesarius, which is much less obvious. Seeck identified him with Eutychian (as have others, including Jones and Liebeschuetz), but Cameron, through...