Gratian

Flavius Gratianus was born on 18 April 359 at Sirmium, a garrison city on the Sava river in the province of Pannonia that served as one of the great military headquarters of the late Roman world ^[1]. His father was Valentinian I, a Pannonian officer who rose through the army, and his mother was Marina Severa, Valentinian's first wife. When the emperor Jovian died early in 364, the army proclaimed Valentinian emperor, and the five year old boy at Sirmium suddenly became the son of an Augustus ^[2].

Valentinian took the western half of the empire for himself and assigned the east to his brother Valens. Gratian grew up close to the imperial court on the Rhine frontier, where his father campaigned constantly against the Alamanni. His education was entrusted to distinguished tutors, most famously the poet and rhetorician Ausonius of Burdigala (Bordeaux), whose influence over his former pupil later brought a circle of Gallic aristocrats into high office ^[3]. Contemporaries record that the young prince was handsome, pious, and an exceptional archer and hunter, though some later writers complained that he preferred the hunting field to the business of government ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Gratian must begin with a striking fact: he received the imperial title while still a small child. On 24 August 367, at Ambiani (Amiens) in Gaul, Valentinian, recovering from a serious illness and anxious about the succession, presented the eight year old to the assembled troops and proclaimed him Augustus, a full co-emperor rather than the junior rank of Caesar ^[2]. It was an unusual step. No child so young had been made a full Augustus in the west before, and it signalled that the Valentinianic house intended to make the throne hereditary.

For eight years Gratian's rule was nominal. Valentinian I ran the west with severity and energy, and his son appeared on coins and in ceremonies while learning the routines of court life. That apprenticeship ended abruptly on 17 November 375, when Valentinian, enraged during negotiations with envoys of the Quadi at Brigetio on the Danube, suffered a fatal stroke ^[1]. Gratian, then sixteen, was at Augusta Treverorum (Trier) in Gaul, far from the Danube army.

The generals on the spot acted without waiting for him. Five days after Valentinian's death they proclaimed his four year old half brother, Valentinian II, the son of the empress Justina, as Augustus at Aquincum ^[2]. The move could have provoked civil war. Gratian instead accepted the child as a colleague, taking effective control of Gaul, Britain, and Spain while Italy, Africa, and the Illyrian provinces were nominally administered in the boy's name. Historians have generally read his restraint as a mixture of prudence and mildness of temper, qualities noted even by critics ^[4].

The early years of his independent reign carried the stamp of Ausonius, whom Gratian raised to the praetorian prefecture and, in 379, to the consulship. Taxes in Gaul were moderated, arrears were remitted, and a series of laws softened some of the harsher practices of his father's administration ^[3]. At the same time the young emperor faced the permanent problem of the Rhine frontier, where the Alamanni watched every change of ruler as an opportunity.

Any list of Gratian achievements starts in the spring of 378. The Lentienses, an Alamannic people living near the upper Rhine, crossed the frozen river in strength after learning that the western field army was preparing to march east to help Valens against the Goths. Gratian recalled his troops, and at Argentovaria (near modern Colmar in Alsace) his generals Nannienus and Mallobaudes destroyed the invading force. Ammianus Marcellinus reports that the Lentiensian king Priarius fell in the fighting and that only a fraction of the invaders escaped ^[1]. Gratian then crossed the Rhine himself and forced the surviving Lentienses to surrender recruits for the Roman army, the last major offensive an emperor would conduct on Alamannic soil.

The victory was overshadowed within months by catastrophe. On 9 August 378 his uncle Valens, declining to wait for the western army that was marching to join him, engaged the Gothic host near Adrianople and was killed along with perhaps two thirds of the eastern field army ^[1]. Gratian, still en route down the Danube, suddenly found himself senior Augustus of the whole empire with the east leaderless and overrun. His response shaped the next century of Roman history. In January 379, at Sirmium, he appointed the retired Spanish general Theodosius as Augustus for the east, handing him the Gothic war and, for a time, the dioceses of Dacia and Macedonia ^[2].

Gratian's religious measures were equally consequential. Raised a Nicene Christian and increasingly influenced by Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who addressed his treatise De Fide to the young emperor, Gratian moved against both heresy and the old civic paganism ^[5]. He is reported by the historian Zosimus to have refused the robe and title of pontifex maximus, the chief priesthood held by emperors since Augustus, though scholars debate the date and details of the episode ^[6]. In 382 he ordered the Altar of Victory removed from the Senate house in Rome, confiscated the endowments of the Vestal Virgins and other state cults, and ended public subsidies for pagan ceremonies ^[5]. The senator Symmachus led a delegation of protest that Gratian refused to receive. The dispute over the altar continued after his death, drawing famous exchanges between Symmachus and Ambrose, but the financial disestablishment of Roman paganism was never reversed.

In 374, while his father still lived, Gratian married Constantia, the posthumous daughter of the emperor Constantius II. The match tied the Valentinianic house to the prestige of the Constantinian dynasty, since Constantia was the last direct descendant of Constantine the Great ^[2]. The marriage produced no surviving children; a son mentioned by one source appears to have died in infancy. Constantia herself died early in 383, and Gratian quickly married a woman named Laeta, about whom little is recorded beyond her later charity toward the population of Rome during the Gothic siege of 408 ^[6].

The sources agree on the emperor's personal decency. Ammianus, no flatterer of princes, wrote that Gratian was a young man of remarkable gifts, comparable to the best emperors had he matured, but faulted his devotion to sport, especially the killing of beasts in enclosed parks, as an unworthy obsession for a ruler at war ^[1]. Ausonius, in the speech of thanks he delivered for his consulship in 379, painted his former pupil as modest, generous, and abstemious ^[3].

One habit did him real political damage. In his final years Gratian showed marked favour to a unit of Alan cavalry recruited into his guard, reportedly appearing in their dress and lavishing rewards on them. Roman regulars, already resentful, read this as contempt for the old army, and the grievance is cited by ancient writers among the causes of the mutiny that destroyed him ^[4].

After 380 the centre of Gratian's government shifted from Trier to Milan, closer to Ambrose and to Italian affairs. The influence of Ausonius and his Gallic circle waned, and army opinion in the provinces he had left behind hardened against him ^[4]. In Britain, the general Magnus Maximus, a Spaniard who had served under Theodosius's father, commanded troops who felt neglected by a distant and, in their view, frivolous emperor.

In the spring of 383 the army in Britain proclaimed Maximus Augustus, and he crossed at once to Gaul with the core of the island's garrison. Gratian marched from Italy and confronted the usurper near Lutetia (Paris). For five days the armies skirmished without a decisive battle. Then the Moorish cavalry deserted to Maximus, and the defection spread through the ranks until Gratian was left with only a small escort ^[6].

He fled south, hoping to reach the Alps and Italy. At Lugdunum (Lyon) he was overtaken by Andragathius, the commander of Maximus's cavalry. Sources report that Gratian was seized under a pretence of safe conduct, or of negotiation, and killed on 25 August 383, aged twenty four ^[2]. Maximus refused for a time to surrender the body for burial, using it as a bargaining piece in his negotiations with Theodosius and Valentinian II. Ambrose, who twice travelled to Trier as an envoy, later mourned Gratian in his funeral oration for Valentinian II and pressed for the return of his remains ^[5].

Gratian's reign lasted sixteen years on paper but barely eight in practice, and its importance lies less in what he built than in what he set in motion. His elevation of Theodosius in 379 gave the empire the ruler who would settle the Goths in the Balkans, defeat two western usurpers, and found the dynasty that governed both halves of the Roman world into the fifth century ^[2]. Without Adrianople and Gratian's decision after it, that dynasty would not have existed.

His religious policy marked a genuine turning point. Earlier Christian emperors had tolerated the machinery of the state cults even while favouring the church; Gratian defunded it. The removal of the Altar of Victory and the confiscation of priestly endowments in 382 stripped Roman paganism of its official standing a decade before Theodosius banned sacrifice outright, and the refusal of the title pontifex maximus, whenever exactly it occurred, ended a religious office the emperors had held for four hundred years ^[5]. Edward Gibbon treated the episode as a milestone in the fall of the old religion, and modern historians, whatever their revisions of detail, still place Gratian at the centre of that story ^[7].

The verdict on the man himself has always been mixed, and Gratian facts collected from the ancient sources point both ways. He was brave at Argentovaria, merciful toward his child half brother, and loyal to his teachers and his church. He was also, by the end, an emperor who had lost his soldiers' trust, and in the late Roman state that failure was fatal. Students of any Gratian biography tend to close on the same note struck by Ammianus: a ruler of real promise cut down before the promise could be tested ^[1].