The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 by John Julius Norwich Page B

managed to do. The initial blame seems to have been Constantine's. The eldest of the three - born early in 317, he had been appointed Caesar when only a month old - he found it impossible to look on his co-Emperors as equals and was forever trying in one way or another to assert his authority over them. It was Constans's refusal to submit to his will that led Constantine, in 340, to invade Italy from Gaul in an attempt to bring his refractory young brother to heel. But the latter, for all his tender years, was too clever for him, and ambushed him with his army just outside Aquileia. Constantine was struck down and killed, and his body thrown into the river Alsa. From that time onward there were two Augusti only, and Constans, aged just seventeen, held supreme power in the West.1
    Unfortunately, the character of Constans was no better than that of
    1 Constans was to visit Britain in 345, the last legitimate Roman Emperor ever to do so.
    his surviving brother. Sextus Aurelius Victor, the Roman Governor of Pannonia whose History of the Caesars is one of the principal sources for the period, describes him as 'a minister of unspeakable depravity and a leader in avarice and contempt for his soldiers'; he certainly neglected the all-important legions along the Rhine and Upper Danube whose duty it was to secure the Empire's eastern frontier against the unremitting pressure from the barbarian tribes, preferring to take his pleasures with certain of his blond German prisoners, as dissolute and debauched as himself. By 350 the army was on the brink of revolt, and matters came to a head when, on 1 8 January of that year, one of his chief ministers gave a banquet at Augustodunum - the modern Autun - while Constans was away on a hunting expedition. Suddenly in the course of the festivities, a pagan officer of British extraction named Magnentius donned the imperial purple and was acclaimed Emperor by his assembled fellow-guests. On hearing the news Constans took flight, but was quickly captured and put to death.
    The usurper did not last long. Constantius, realizing that the revolt in the West was potentially more serious even than the Persian menace, marched against him with a large army, pausing only to appoint his young cousin Gallus - one of the three survivors of the massacre of 337 — Caesar of the East, and to marry him off to his sister Constantina, widow of the less fortunate Hannibalianus. In September 351 Magnentius was soundly defeated at Mursa - now Sisak, in Croatia - and two years later, having failed to regain his following or to rebuild his scattered forces, decided his position was hopeless and fell on his sword. The Emperor, however, still felt threatened. Late in 354, suspecting - almost certainly wrongly - that Gallus was plotting his overthrow, he had the young Caesar beheaded, thereby widowing the luckless Constantina for the second time.
    Constantius was now the undisputed sole ruler of the Roman Empire. His defeat of Magnentius, however, did not mean the end of his problems in Gaul. The German confederations beyond the Rhine, emboldened by the neglect of the frontier by Constans and the ensuing rebellion, were making themselves increasingly troublesome. Among his own army, too, several other minor conspiracies had been brought to light. On the other hand the Persian War was by no means over, and he could not stay in the West indefinitely. Much as he would have preferred to keep the power in his own hands, by the autumn of 355 he had at last come to accept the fact that he would have to appoint another Caesar.
    On the assumption that any new Caesar was to be chosen from within the Emperor's immediate family, there was only one possible candidate. A philosopher and a scholar, he had no military or even administrative experience; but he was intelligent, serious-minded and a hard worker, and his loyalty had never been in question. Messengers were accordingly dispatched post-haste to Athens to fetch him: the Emperor's