Arcadius
Arcadius was born around 377 in Hispania, and by the time he was five years old, his father had named him co-ruler of the eastern Roman Empire. On the 19th of January 383, the emperor Theodosius I declared his eldest son an Augustus. It was a title with real weight, and almost no practical meaning for a child who could not yet govern himself. What followed across the next quarter century was one of the most turbulent periods in the late Roman east: a reign defined not by what Arcadius did, but by what the people around him could persuade him to do. Who really ran the eastern empire while Arcadius sat on the throne? And what does it mean when power belongs, in name, to someone who cannot wield it?
Theodosius I died on the 17th of January 395, leaving behind two sons who were by any measure unprepared for sole rule. Arcadius was seventeen. His brother Honorius was ten. The historian J. B. Bury described Arcadius in blunt terms: short in stature, dark in complexion, thin, inactive, his dullness betrayed by speech and by sleepy, drooping eyes. His mental deficiency and weak character, Bury wrote, made it inevitable that he would be governed by stronger personalities at court.
Arcadius had been educated by the rhetorician Themistius and by a monk named Arsenius Zonaras, but learning and governance are different disciplines. In the months before his father's death, he had briefly exercised independent power in Constantinople while Theodosius went west to fight the usurpers Arbogastes and Eugenius. That interval gave him no real preparation. The moment Theodosius died, the praetorian prefect of the East, Rufinus, moved to fill the vacuum. He aimed, according to the historian Zosimus, to marry his own daughter to the young emperor and secure the prestige of being the emperor's father-in-law.
Rufinus's plan collapsed in an unlikely way. While the prefect was away on business in Antioch, Arcadius was shown a painting of Aelia Eudoxia, the daughter of a deceased Frankish military commander named Bauto. The eunuch chamberlain Eutropius saw Arcadius's interest and arranged a meeting. The two were married on the 27th of April 395. Rufinus reportedly did not discover he had been outmanoeuvred until the wedding procession travelled to Eudoxia's residence rather than his own.
Rufinus did not survive long enough to plan a second attempt at influence. On the 27th of November 395, as Arcadius and his court received the general Gainas and his Gothic mercenaries at a parade ground called the Campus Martius outside Constantinople, Rufinus was assassinated by the Goths. The killing was ordered by Stilicho, the western military commander, and possibly supported by Eutropius. The murder handed power directly to the two figures who had engineered Arcadius's marriage: Eutropius and Eudoxia.
Eutropius held power for four years. In that time he made two structural changes to imperial administration that outlasted him. He transferred control of the postal service and the military manufacturing office from the praetorian prefects to the magister officiorum, concentrating logistical power in a single office. He also elevated his own position, the praepositus sacri cubiculi or grand chamberlain, to the rank of illustris, placing it on equal footing with the praetorian prefects. He brought criminal charges against two prominent military officers, Timasius and Abundantius. In 398 he personally led a military campaign against the Huns in Roman Armenia.
The following year he overreached. Eutropius persuaded Arcadius to grant him the consulship. For traditionalists across the empire, the consulship going to a eunuch and former slave was an insult to Roman tradition. The western court under Honorius refused to recognise him as consul. An edict issued in Arcadius's name in the autumn of 397 had already alarmed the military by declaring that any conspiracy by soldiers against holders of the rank of illustris was treason, punishable by death, with the conspirators' descendants stripped of citizenship. The measure was widely read as an attack on military independence, and it made Eutropius enemies who were willing to act.
The revolt that finished Eutropius began in Asia Minor, where the Ostrogoths settled there by Theodosius I rose up under a leader named Tribigild. Arcadius sent two forces against the rebels. The first, under an officer named Leo, was defeated. The second was commanded by Gainas, who happened to be Eutropius's rival at court. Gainas returned to Arcadius with a recommendation: the Ostrogoths could not be defeated, and their demand for Eutropius's removal should be granted.
Arcadius was displeased by this suggestion. But Eudoxia wanted Eutropius gone as much as the rebels did, and she persuaded the emperor to act. On the 17th of August 399, Arcadius dismissed Eutropius and sent him into exile. He was recalled that autumn to face trial and execution. The imperial edict ordering his banishment survives in full, and its language is striking for its venom. It strips Eutropius of all dignities, orders the destruction of every statue and image of him in bronze, marble, paint or any other material, and condemns him to Cyprus under guard. It declares that all his acts are to be repealed and that "all time may be dumb concerning him."
Eudoxia had removed the man between herself and the emperor. But consolidating that position would bring her into conflict with a figure of very different kind.
John Chrysostom became Archbishop of Constantinople in the same period that Eudoxia rose to dominance. He was ascetic, stern, and known for sermons that attacked the display of wealth with particular sharpness when it came to women and their clothing, jewellery, and cosmetics. Eudoxia concluded that these denunciations were aimed at her.
The conflict escalated through the early years of the fifth century. Chrysostom preached a sermon in 401 in which Eudoxia was openly called Jezebel, the infamous wife of the Israelite king Ahab. Eudoxia retaliated by backing Bishop Severian of Gabala in his quarrel with the Archbishop. Chrysostom was so popular in Constantinople that riots broke out in his support, forcing Arcadius and Eudoxia to publicly ask him to reverse Severian's excommunication.
Eudoxia found her opening in 403, when Theophilus of Alexandria presided over a synod known as the Synod of the Oak to charge Chrysostom with heresy. Arcadius initially backed the Archbishop, but when Chrysostom refused to attend his own trial, Arcadius changed his position and supported Theophilus. Chrysostom was deposed and banished. He was called back almost immediately when the population threatened to burn the imperial palace, and an earthquake on the night of his arrest was read by Eudoxia herself as a sign of divine anger.
The peace lasted weeks. In September 403, a silver statue of Eudoxia was erected in the Augustaion, near the Magna Ecclesia church. During the dedication ceremonies, Chrysostom denounced the noise as pagan and preached against the Empress with words drawn from the story of John the Baptist: "Again Herodias raves; again she is troubled; she dances again; and again desires to receive John's head in a charger." Arcadius would not overlook that. A new synod condemned the Archbishop in early 404. Arcadius delayed enforcement until Easter, then sent soldiers to escort Chrysostom into exile. The Archbishop refused to leave. By the 20th of June 404, Arcadius finally compelled him to go, this time to Abkhazia in the Caucasus. Eudoxia died later that same year, before any long-term advantage could be enjoyed.
Between the fall of Eutropius and the long conflict with Chrysostom, Arcadius faced the most dangerous military confrontation of his reign. After Eutropius's exile, the general Gainas joined the Ostrogoth rebels and demanded a face-to-face meeting with the emperor. Arcadius agreed and was forced to grant Gainas the rank of magister militum praesentalis and designate him as Consul for 401. He also agreed to dismiss specific officials, including the urban prefect Aurelianus, and to provide land in Thrace for Gainas's troops. Arcadius drew a single line: he refused Gainas's demand for an Arian church in Constantinople, following the advice of John Chrysostom.
By July 400, the presence of Gothic troops had exhausted the patience of Constantinople's population. A general riot broke out in the city. Gainas's forces were stationed outside the walls, and he either could not or would not bring them in. As many as 7,000 Goths were killed during the rioting. Those who took shelter in a church were stoned and burned to death, with the emperor's permission and without condemnation from Chrysostom.
Gainas withdrew with his surviving mercenaries into Thrace and openly rebelled. He tried to move his forces across the Hellespont into Asia, but was intercepted by Fravitta, a Goth who held the same rank of magister militum praesentalis. Defeated, Gainas fled north toward the Danube, where he was killed by Uldin the Hun. The interpretation of these events has shifted among historians over time. Scholars such as Otto Seeck once read the massacre of the Goths as a deliberate anti-barbarian policy that kept the east from being dominated by a military strongman the way the west was dominated by Stilicho. Thomas S. Burns, representing more recent scholarship, concluded that despite civilian hostility toward the army and the barbarians within it, there were no organised anti-barbarian or pro-barbarian parties at court. Personal ambition and private enmity, not ethnic ideology, drove the intrigue.
Arcadius was more focused on appearing as a devout Christian than on military or political matters. Not being a military leader, he developed a model of imperial authority built on visible piety rather than battlefield victories. On the 13th of July 399, he issued an edict ordering that all remaining non-Christian temples be immediately demolished.
In terms of physical legacy, a new forum was built in his name on the seventh hill of Constantinople, the Xerolophos. A commemorative column was begun there to mark his supposed victory over Gainas, though the column was only finished after his death by his son Theodosius II. In June 1949, excavation for university buildings at Beyazit in Istanbul uncovered a Pentelic marble portrait head of Arcadius, now held in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. The neck was designed to be inserted into a torso, but no statue, base, or inscription was found alongside it. The diadem he wears is a fillet edged with rows of pearls, with a rectangular stone set in pearls above the young emperor's forehead.
In his later years Arcadius increasingly delegated to Anthemius, the Praetorian Prefect, who tried to mend the decade of divisions by seeking peace with Stilicho in the west. Stilicho had run out of patience with the eastern court by then, and in 407 he encouraged Alaric and the Visigoths to seize the Praetorian prefecture of Illyricum. The plan failed. Arcadius died on the 1st of May 408, and was buried like Constantine the Great in the Church of the Holy Apostles, in a porphyry sarcophagus. The 10th-century emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus described it in his work De Ceremoniis. He was succeeded by his son, the future Theodosius II, who was still a child at the time of his father's death, and who would complete the column his father never saw finished.
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Common questions
Who was Arcadius and when did he rule as Roman emperor?
Arcadius was a Roman emperor who ruled from 383 until his death on the 1st of May 408. He governed the eastern half of the empire from 395 onward, following the death of his father Theodosius I.
Who held real power during the reign of Arcadius?
Real power during Arcadius's reign shifted among a series of court figures: the praetorian prefect Rufinus, the eunuch chamberlain Eutropius, the general Gainas, and the empress Aelia Eudoxia. Historian J. B. Bury described Arcadius as inevitably governed by the stronger personalities around him.
Why was Eutropius exiled and executed during the reign of Arcadius?
Eutropius was dismissed on the 17th of August 399 and later executed after he persuaded Arcadius to grant him the consulship, provoking widespread outrage across the empire. The Ostrogoth revolt led by Tribigild also demanded his removal, and Empress Eudoxia used the crisis to push Arcadius into acting against him.
What was the conflict between Arcadius and John Chrysostom about?
John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, preached against displays of wealth and was believed by Empress Eudoxia to be targeting her personally. After he compared Eudoxia to Jezebel in September 403, Arcadius supported a synod that condemned the Archbishop, and by the 20th of June 404 had him exiled to Abkhazia in the Caucasus.
How many Goths were killed during the Constantinople riot in 400 AD?
As many as 7,000 Goths were killed during the rioting in Constantinople in July 400. Those who sought shelter in a church were stoned and burned to death with the permission of the emperor Arcadius.
Where is Arcadius buried and what does his portrait look like?
Arcadius was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in a porphyry sarcophagus, alongside Constantine the Great and several other emperors. A marble portrait head of him, wearing a pearl-edged diadem with a rectangular stone set above his forehead, was discovered in Istanbul in June 1949 and is now held in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum.
All sources
8 references cited across the entry
- 1Portrait head for insertion of Emperor, Arcadius (?). Constantinople. Late fourth to early fifth centuryJ. Lenaghan — University of Oxford — 2012
- 2BookThe Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical WorldOxford University Press — July 2017
- 4BookNicene and Post-Nicene FathersSocrates Scholasticus — Hendrickson Publishers — 1995
- 5St John Chrysostom the Archbishop of ConstantinopleOrthodox Church in America
- 8JournalImperial Porphyry Sarcophagi in ConstantinopleA. A. Vasiliev — 1848