Honorius

• 1. Introduction

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  Honorius was emperor of the Western Roman Empire for thirty years, from 393 to 423, and he presided over one of the most catastrophic stretches in Roman history. He came to the throne at ten years old, inheriting a crumbling western half of a divided empire. Before his reign ended, Rome itself had been sacked by the Visigoths for the first time in roughly eight centuries. His name would become synonymous with imperial weakness and missed opportunity. But who was this man, and how did a boy emperor end up watching the western world fall apart around him? What drove the decisions that left Rome undefended, and what did the people of his era really think of him?

• 2. A Child on the Throne

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  Honorius was born on the 9th of September 384 in Constantinople, the younger son of Emperor Theodosius I and his first wife Aelia Flaccilla. His mother died when he was two years old, in 386. His father then married Galla, and that union produced a daughter, Galla Placidia, who would later play a central role in the struggles of the western empire.

  Theodosius had declared Honorius co-ruler as early as the 23rd of January 393, after the death of Valentinian II and the rise of a usurper named Eugenius. Honorius had even held the consulate at the age of two, in 386, a ceremonial honor that said more about dynastic ambition than any real capacity for governance. When Theodosius died in January 395, the empire was formally divided. Arcadius, Honorius's older brother, took the east. Honorius, ten years old, got the west.

  To manage the boy emperor, the general Stilicho stepped in. Appointed by Theodosius himself, Stilicho was of mixed Vandal and Roman ancestry, and he bound himself to Honorius in the most personal way available: he married his own daughter Maria to the young emperor. The court poet Claudian wrote an epithalamion for the occasion, and that poem survives. Honorius would also develop a relationship with the church: Pope Innocent I and western bishops appear to have influenced him in matters of religious policy, including correspondence with his brother about calling a synod at Thessalonica.

• 3. Stilicho's Shield

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  Alaric I, king of the Visigoths, had already been the Eastern Empire's magister militum in Illyricum when he turned his army toward Italy. Stilicho was away in Raetia in the latter months of 401 when Alaric marched through the Julian Alps and entered the peninsula. The crisis forced Stilicho to race back, and legions were summoned from Gaul and Britain to reinforce him.

  Honorius, still in Milan, found himself besieged as Alaric moved into Liguria. Stilicho finally caught Alaric at Pollentia on the river Tanarus on Easter Day, the 6th of April 402, scoring a narrow victory. Alaric retreated to Verona, the two forces fought again without a clear outcome, and the Visigoths were eventually allowed to withdraw back to Illyricum.

  In 405, a commander named Radagaisus led a vast army across the Danube and invaded Italy. Stilicho defeated them in 406 and folded most of the survivors into his own forces. That same year, or perhaps in 405, a coalition of tribes including Vandals, Alans, and Suebi crossed the Rhine into Gaul. By 409 they had reached Hispania. The western empire was stretched beyond its means.

  In Britain the situation was equally dire. Cut off from imperial support, British soldiers backed a series of would-be emperors: Marcus, Gratian, and then Constantine III. Constantine left his son Constans to hold Britain, invaded Gaul in 407, and occupied Arles. When British cities sent a plea to Honorius for military help against local raids in 410, he could offer nothing. The Byzantine scholar Zosimus, writing in the sixth century, records that Honorius simply wrote to the cities of Britain telling them to guard themselves. Scholars have debated ever since whether this letter was addressed to Britain at all, or to Bruttium in southern Italy, since Zosimus places the sentence oddly in the middle of a passage about southern Italy with no further mention of Britain.

  Back on the continent, Stilicho moved to shore up his personal position in 408, marrying his second daughter, Thermantia, to Honorius after Empress Maria had died in 407. He also forced the Roman Senate to pay Alaric 4,000 pounds of gold to keep the Visigoths out of Italy.

• 4. The Fall of Stilicho

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  Honorius was travelling from Ravenna toward Ticinum, stopped at Bononia, when word reached him in May 408 that his brother Arcadius had died. He considered going to Constantinople to help stabilize the transition to Theodosius II. Stilicho, summoned for advice, counselled against the trip and went himself.

  In Stilicho's absence, a minister named Olympius worked his way into Honorius's confidence. He convinced the emperor that Stilicho was conspiring with the barbarians to overthrow him. When Stilicho returned to Ravenna, Honorius ordered his arrest and execution. The purge that followed was sweeping. Key allies of Stilicho were killed or tortured. Property of anyone who had held office under Stilicho was confiscated. Thermantia was removed from the imperial throne and returned to her mother. Stilicho's son Eucherius was put to death. The families of Stilicho's foederati troops were massacred, and those soldiers defected in large numbers to Alaric.

  The consequences were immediate. In October 408, Alaric came back to Italy. He had been promised gold and land by Stilicho; with Stilicho gone, those promises were void. Rome, after a short siege that left it near famine, paid Alaric 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 pounds of silver to lift the blockade. A peace negotiation followed, but another shift of factions at Ravenna led Honorius to repudiate the agreement just as it was about to be concluded. An enraged Alaric returned to Rome in late 409 and compelled the Senate to proclaim a senator named Priscus Attalus as emperor in his place.

• 5. The Sack of Rome

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  Rome had been under Visigothic siege, off and on, since shortly after Stilicho's execution in the summer of 408. In 410, the Eastern Roman Empire dispatched six legions from Ravenna to relieve the city. Legions of that period numbered around 1,000 soldiers, down from the 6,000-soldier legions of the Republic and the early empire. Alaric ambushed them on the road. Only a handful reached Rome.

  Honorius, lacking a capable general to command the by-then mostly Germanic Roman army, could not attack Alaric directly. He tried to cut off Rome's food supply by restricting grain shipments from North Africa. Attalus, the rival emperor installed by Alaric, sent an army to seize Africa and restore the supply, but the governor Heraclian, loyal to Honorius, wiped it out as soon as it landed. Rome's grain shortage deepened. The populace blamed Attalus. Desperate and unable to pay his debts to Alaric, Attalus lost the support of both Romans and Goths. Alaric dethroned him in 410 and offered Honorius fresh negotiations.

  Honorius refused. Emboldened by Attalus's fall and Heraclian's victory in Africa, he declared Alaric the eternal enemy of the Republic. Starving Rome then opened its gates. The Visigoths poured in. The sack that followed was, by ancient standards, restrained: churches and religious statuary were left unharmed. But the psychological blow was enormous. The shock spread from Britain to Jerusalem. Augustine, responding to the catastrophe, wrote his magnum opus, The City of God.

  Procopius, writing in the following century, preserved a story that captures how posterity remembered the emperor. On the day Rome fell, a eunuch reportedly told Honorius that Rome had perished. Honorius was alarmed, thinking the message referred to a favourite chicken he had named "Rome." Relieved to learn the city had fallen rather than his bird, he breathed easily. Edward Gibbon and other historians treat the anecdote as apocryphal, but it circulated widely because it expressed exactly what people believed about the man.

• 6. Constantius and the Fractured West

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  The decade after the sack saw Honorius find, at last, a capable commander. Constantius defeated the usurper Maximus, then killed Constantine III's general Gerontius, and finally brought down Constantine III himself in 411. Jovinus, who revolted in northern Gaul with support from Alans, Burgundians, and Gallic nobility, tried to negotiate with the Visigothic leader Ataulf in 412, but Ataulf instead allied with Honorius. Jovinus was defeated and executed in 413. Heraclian, who had served Honorius loyally in Africa, raised his own revolt that same year, invaded Italy, failed, fled to Carthage, and was killed there.

  In 414, Constantius drove Ataulf into Hispania. Attalus, the perennial puppet emperor, was captured and deposed again. Honorius personally punished him at a triumph in Rome: he cut off Attalus's right finger and thumb, the same mutilation Attalus had once threatened for Honorius. He then sent Attalus into exile on the island of Lipara.

  A treaty signed in 418 gave the Visigoths southwestern Gaul, the former Gallia Aquitania. The Edict of 418, issued under Constantius's influence, was designed to maintain some imperial grip on the surrendered provinces. It dissolved the administrative connections between the Seven Provinces, which included territories from the Maritime Alps to Viennensis, and the central government, and established a yearly assembly of town representatives at Arles to handle local affairs.

  In 417, Constantius married Honorius's half-sister Galla Placidia against her will. Honorius recognised him as co-emperor Constantius III in 421. Constantinople refused to acknowledge the elevation. Constantius began planning a military response, but died in September 421 before he could act. By that point, the frontier provinces were deeply compromised: Britain, Spain, and Gaul had all been ravaged. Honorius's final years saw him fall out with Galla Placidia after their soldiers clashed. She fled to Constantinople with her children, including the future emperor Valentinian III and his sister Honoria.

• 7. Legacy and Odd Details

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  Honorius died of edema on the 15th of August 423 with no heir. A period of interregnum followed, during which a man named Joannes was proclaimed emperor. The Eastern Emperor Theodosius II then intervened, installing his cousin Valentinian III, son of Galla Placidia and Constantius III, to rule the west.

  The Mausoleum of Honorius stood on the Vatican Hill, reached from the transept of the Old Saint Peter's Basilica. Maria, Honorius's first wife, was the first to be buried there. Thermantia, his second wife, and probably Galla Placidia and other family members were interred there as well. In the eighth century the structure was converted into the Chapel of St Petronilla, which housed the relics of that saint. It was demolished when the new St Peter's Basilica was built.

  The 19th and 20th century historians who assessed Honorius were largely unkind; J.B. Bury was among those who judged him harshly. Yet his reign also produced some unexpected moments of domestic legislation. He issued a decree banning men from wearing trousers in Rome. He banned gladiatorial games in 399 and again in 404, reportedly because a Christian monk named Telemachus was killed by spectators while protesting a match. The last known gladiatorial games in Rome took place during his reign, making that ban one of the few decisions of his thirty-year rule whose effects proved durable.