Theodosius: The Empire at Bay by Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell (review)

500 BOOK REVIEWS react to the new order ofthings. Interconnected as were religion and politics in the fourth century, they were not identical, and there were some matters where the decision lay with the secular ruler and the Church could only minister consolations to the individual Christian. McLynn, who likes a theatrical metaphor, calls Ambrose "the supreme impresario of the Christian empire" (p. 330). This seems a not inappropriate description of the civil servant turned prelate in a city which was, for a good deal of his reign, the capital of the western part of that Empire. McLynn tells a good story, which will be widely read and rightly applauded ; but it is not the whole story of the man whom Baynes called "a courageous but very bellicose saint." Gerald Bonner Durham, England Theodosius: The Empire at Bay. By Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell. (New HavemYale University Press. 1995. Pp. 238. $28.50.) During the reign ofTheodosius the Great (379-395), new relationships were forged between the Roman Empire and the two forces traditionally identified with its decline—Christianity and the Germanic peoples. In this work, the authors attempt a comprehensive reassessment of both of these developments, but it takes only a glance at the table of contents, where ten of the twelve chapters and all five ofthe appendices are devoted to military and diplomatic topics, to see where their real interest lies. On these latter topics, the authors write with a sure hand. From the disaster at Adrianople in 378 that first brought Theodosius to the purple to the sparring between Alaric and Stilicho,with whose death in 408 the narrative ends, the authors confidently re-evaluate hoary judgments on Theodosius' "barbarian policy " and the unraveling of Roman military supremacy that followed his death in 395. Theodosius' recruitment and use of Gothic forces was not "a catastrophic mistake," in their view, but a necessary policy and a sign of his undervalued diplomatic skills. "Perhaps no other emperor could have conciliated and managed the Goths as he did," they conclude (p. 171). The authors have sensible comments about the need to distinguish between ethnic Germans serving in Roman armies and Germanic tribes who fought under their own commanders when assessing barbarian loyalty, and they warn against careless comparison of German settlement in the potpourri of indigenous cultures that made up the Roman Empire with immigration in more culturally homogeneous modern states. They argue that the real cause for decline after Theodosius was not due to the quality of Rome's armies but rather to its loss of that preponderance of force whereby it had previously been able to overawe barbarian peoples. Where the authors fault Theodosius is not for recruiting barbarians, but for failing to train his sons to succeed him, or for seeing that, untrained, they should BOOK REVIEWS 501 not succeed. This failure, they argue, opened the way for ambitious chieftains like Alaric to exploit the ensuing rivalries between Eastern and Western courts. Whatever one thinks of these conclusions, they are nonetheless based on current scholarship and reasonably argued. The same cannot be said about the authors' treatment of the equally significant religious developments of this reign, which saw a quantum leap in the level of coercion against non-Catholic Christians and pagans. Here the authors are content to paste together a collage of views, taken uncritically from such disparate sources as Edward Gibbon and Ambrose of Milan. If by so doing they aimed at impartiality, what they hit was cartoon, with the sober Theodosius of other chapters now a "persecuting fanatic , priest-ridden to the point of puppetry" (p. 70). Not coincidentally, at this point the authors' rhetoric goes over the top as well, including a summation of Theodosius' religious policy as "the Christianity of the monks and the mobs, expressed in the language of imperial law; inspired not by a sober policy of desirable religious aims, but the ruler's dread of damnation and need for magical prescriptions to counteract the juju"(pp. 120-121). While not, therefore, a comprehensive reassessment of the career ofTheodosius , this is nevertheless a book with many useful things to say about a pivotal period in Roman relations with Germanic peoples...