Claudian of Alexandria's last datable poem, the Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of Honorius, was delivered in Rome in 404, presumably on 1 January. This performance occurred in the course of the first visit to Rome by an emperor for nearly a decade and a half. Imperial visits to Rome were notoriously rare in the fourth century and, in a well-known passage of that poem, the goddess Roma herself muses on their rarity: she had only seen an Augustus three times in the last hundred years (VI Cos. 392–3). This is not quite true, but the only legitimate emperors known to have paid formal visits to Rome in that period were Constantine in 312–13, 315 and 326, Constantius II in 357, and Theodosius I, accompanied by his four-year-old son Honorius, in 389.Footnote 1 In this article I shall begin by making an observation about the court's intentions in moving to Rome in late 403 (Section I), and then deal with two problems bound up with the interpretation of this poem and with the circumstances of imperial visits. The first problem (Section II) concerns the visit of Honorius during which the poem was first performed. In Claudian's narrative the description of Honorius' triumphal entry leads into a description of his assumption of the consulate, and scholars have sometimes asserted that he made a triumphal entry as consul on 1 January 404.Footnote 2 This is clearly wrong: Honorius arrived in Rome weeks or months before. But even when this point is recognized, it is often asserted that the poem blends triumphal and consular imagery, and elements of the triumphal entry are confused with the assumption of the consulship (most recently by Michael Dewar in his generally outstanding commentary on the poemFootnote 3 ). My argument therefore moves from the chronology of Honorius' visit to elucidating the structure and imagery of Claudian's poem, as well as casting light on the patterns of the late antique imperial aduentus more broadly. The second problem (Section III) concerns the description of Honorius' previous visit to Rome with his father in the summer of 389. Here it has sometimes been inferred (including again by Dewar) on the basis of Claudian, and of late chronicles, that Honorius was created Caesar by his father on 13 June, the day of the aduentus. I shall show on the basis of a critical examination of the chronicle tradition, as well as a survey of contemporary numismatic, epigraphic and literary evidence, that this belief is unfounded, and that the relevant passages of Claudian require a different interpretation. However, this evidence also makes clear that signals were being sent in 389 about Honorius' imperial future.
I. HONORIUS' VISIT TO ROME IN 403–404/5
When Honorius came to Rome in 403 before taking up his sixth consulship, he had not been in the city for fourteen years, although he had been the sole Augustus of the West since 395 and imperial visits had often been requested or expected.Footnote 4 The chronological extent of his stay is unknown. Honorius had moved his court from Milan to Ravenna at some point in 402; in the spring and late summer of that year, his father-in-law and magister militum, Stilicho, had fought the Goths first at Pollentia and then at Verona, after which they withdrew to Illyricum.Footnote 5 Herein lay justification for a triumphal entry. The evidence of legislation attests Honorius' movements as follows:
-
6 December 402 to 25 July 403 RavennaFootnote 6
-
27 February 404 to 25 July 404 RomeFootnote 7
-
4 February 405 onwards RavennaFootnote 8
Additionally, the evidence of Claudian shows that Honorius arrived in time for new year 404, but as I shall show below (Section II), the beginning of his residence cannot be dated more precisely than between August and December 403, probably towards the later part of the period. Going by this lacunose evidence, the visit could have lasted nearly a year and a half from summer 403 to the first weeks of 405 or it could have been as short as seven months. The end date for the visit is unknown and seemingly unknowable, though Andrew Gillett has argued that, given the prestige of assuming the consulship in Rome, the court may well have waited there long enough to inaugurate Stilicho's consulship of 405.Footnote 9
One general assumption that is often made is that Honorius was visiting Rome from his permanent court at Ravenna.Footnote 10 But to use the adjective ‘permanent’ is to speak with hindsight. Honorius certainly travelled from Ravenna (VI Cos. 494–5), and in the poem Roma presents him as having been kept away from her at Milan and Ravenna (characterized indirectly by Ligus and Rubicon respectively, 361–5). But he had only been in Ravenna for slightly more or less than a year when he moved his court to Rome in the latter half of 403, and he may have stayed in Rome for well over a year. It is only because we know that Honorius was to spend most of his reign at Ravenna and that his eventual successor Valentinian III would be based primarily in Ravenna for the first fifteen years of his reign (from 425 to 440) that it is assumed that when Honorius left Milan in 402 the intention was to settle permanently in Ravenna.Footnote 11
In fact, Claudian's poem is full of hints that the court might remain in Rome. The coming together of Rome and the emperor is the dominant theme of the poem, heralded from the preface where Claudian compares praising Honorius in Rome to praising Jupiter in the central citadel of the starry heavens (pr. 13–26). The opening section of the poem proper (1–121), which corresponds roughly to the subsections of a conventional panegyric that cover homeland, family, and upbringing, is geared entirely towards the emperor's presence in Rome, looking back to how Theodosius had brought Honorius to Rome in 389 as part of his training for empire. We are told that the star of empire has been brought to its proper place (22–3); that Rome and the Palatine are the only home for the rulers of the world (39–40, 53); that Rome had been Honorius' spiritual home since infancy, even if he had been born elsewhere (77–87). The following section of the poem, covering Alaric's defeat (122–330), does not share this element, but the rest does: Rome's longing for Honorius is transmuted into a conversation between Roma and Honorius (331–493), which ends in his agreeing to come to the city; and finally come the journey, the aduentus, and then the celebration of the new year (494–660). A few lines from the end, Claudian wishes that Honorius' former consulships should worship this sixth one, uel quos habiturus in urbe | post alios, Auguste (‘or those others you will have in the city later, Augustus', 657–8).
It may legitimately be objected that Claudian was telling Rome, and the Senate, what it wanted to hear: one can certainly find similar flattery of Rome in earlier works for Roman audiences, if not to the same extent.Footnote 12 But this does not mean that permanent residence in Rome was not seriously considered. The natural defensibility of Ravenna is sometimes cited as a reason that this is impossible, but this is to speak again with hindsight: Alaric had retreated to Illyricum, and Rome was adorned with new walls.Footnote 13 The argument that there might be an intention to make Rome a permanent seat of government is also reinforced by the strong possibility that on this visit Honorius seems to have begun the construction of his mausoleum next to St Peter's: what came to be known in later centuries as S. Petronilla.Footnote 14 Here his wife Maria would be buried when she died, probably in early 408, and here he and many other members of the family would subsequently be laid to rest. A great imperial procession from the Palatine which Honorius undertook in Rome in 403 or 404 made no impact on Claudian, but is referred to repeatedly by Augustine.Footnote 15 In it the young emperor ostentatiously bypassed the mausoleum of Hadrian—the conventional burial place of emperors in Rome—and processed to St Peter's to lay down his diadem and prostrate himself at the fisherman's tomb. The contrast was designed, it may be conjectured, to display his intention of establishing a mausoleum by St Peter's (there would never of course have been any question of a Christian emperor being buried in a long-unused and pagan site like Hadrian's mausoleum). One obvious observation about this choice of burial site—a separate mausoleum adjacent to an apostolic memorial—is that it closely parallels the pattern of the imperial mausoleum attached to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, an important architectural symbol of the emperors' ties to the New Rome. And indeed the Christianized form of urban ceremony is strongly reminiscent of exactly the sort of ceremonies which his father and brother had begun to employ and to gain public visibility from in the new imperial city.Footnote 16 For an unmilitary emperor (as was the general trend from Theodosius' reign on), the possible prestige of successful ceremonial interaction with Rome might seem to outweigh the problems of having the Roman Senate and People too close that sometimes afflicted fourth-century emperors.Footnote 17 In the end Honorius decided to return to Ravenna; later he made either two successive visits or a single extended visit to Rome, from late 406 or early 407 until early 408, which seemingly ended unhappily; and there was at least one further visit over the next decade.Footnote 18 But we should consider the possibility that Claudian's suggestions that the emperor might remain in Rome were in fact a reflection of genuine imperial policy, or at least an option that the court wanted to leave open.Footnote 19
II. HONORIUS' ADVENTVS AND CONSULSHIP
Thanks to Claudian, Honorius' aduentus into Rome in 403 has attracted abundant scholarly attention, focussed both on the poem and on the ceremony, which has been dubbed ‘the last triumph that we know to have been celebrated by an emperor in Rome’.Footnote 20 (The language and doubtless the performance of aduentus were suffused with triumphal imagery, but little is achieved by detailed attempts to map this and other late antique aduentus to the classical triumph.) I shall begin by correcting a minor error in that scholarship, before showing how a misinterpretation of Claudian has led to a larger misinterpretation of the ceremony itself. Honorius entered Rome at some point in the second half of 403, as many scholars have rightly recognized.Footnote 21 Then, on the first day of 404, he entered his sixth consulship. But scholars have often imprecisely conflated Honorius' aduentus with his consulship of 404, speaking of his aduentus of 404, or his triumph of 404, or his consular aduentus—a description which is wrong because the aduentus was in 403. In many cases, the reference is very much in passing, or the chronology is far from being the main point, and it would seem pedantic to labour a venial mistake in fine works of scholarship.Footnote 22 It is easy to elide the reality, that Honorius came to Rome to take up the consulship of 404, into the false claim that Honorius arrived in Rome at the beginning of 404 to take up the consulship. The error is helped along by the fact that, on a superficial reading, the last 167 lines of Claudian's poem (494–660) describe triumphal aduentus, games, and assumption of the consulship as a through-composed narrative with no apparent breaks.
But the aduentus has also been placed at the start of 404 by those for whom precise chronology and the nature of the ceremonies are more of an issue. For Ehlers, author of the Pauly entry on triumphus, Honorius made a combined triumphal and consular entry at the end of 403;Footnote 23 Sabine MacCormack's well-known account of aduentus sees Honorius' entry as a ‘pompa, in which the theme of triumph is combined with that of consulship in the structure of the poem’. It is clear that she sees this not only as a feature of the poem but of the ceremonies that the poem describes, since she repeatedly dates the aduentus to 404, and she cites Alföldi's Die monarchische Repräsentation in support of her views.Footnote 24 In Dewar's commentary on the poem, the aduentus is dated to October or November 403, but he sees it as suffused with consular imagery, and much of the ceremonial (the emperor's clothing, addresses to People and Senate, entry to the palace, the games) is seen as specifically consular.Footnote 25 In what follows, I shall reiterate briefly why the aduentus must belong to late 403, and then show in greater detail that the case for consular imagery or ceremonial in the aduentus is vastly overstated. Although the poem crescendos magnificently to portray Honorius as both consul and triumphator in Rome, the two roles only combine in the very last lines (640–60).Footnote 26
A number of arguments lead inescapably to the conclusion that Honorius did not make a triumphal entry on 1 January. It has been pointed out that for a new year's panegyric, given on or very soon after 1 January, Claudian needed time to write his poem. The point is a reasonable one, though one should not neglect either Claudian's facility of composition or the extent to which the aduentus ceremony was planned in advance and conventionally described in earlier writers such as Ammianus or Pacatus.Footnote 27 Next, Claudian refers to the aduentus as coming in fine weather when all the preceding days had been rainy (537–42):
It was Müller who saw a potential dating reference in the unprecedented phrase luna rudis (new or young moon).Footnote 29 New moons in the second half of 403 occurred on 4 August, 2 September, 2 October, 31 October, 30 November and 29 December. The actual passage describes two separate events with parallel pluperfects: the south wind had spoiled all the days before the aduentus with showers, and had soaked the new moon. Müller took this to imply that the court had begun the ten to fifteen-day journey from Ravenna at the new moon, which may be overly precise, but the natural implication is that the time of the new moon was at least several days before Honorius' arrival. The new moon of 29 December does not allow long enough for drear weather to last for days before the aduentus, so the latest date thereby implied is from a few days to two weeks after the beginning of December (though the same length of time after the various other new moons are all possibilities).Footnote 30
The same implication for the passing of time is present in the poem. Here, the crucial point is that the last 140 lines of the poem describe, admittedly without interruption, a sequence of events that must have taken place over several and probably many days. As we shall see in more detail shortly, the day of the aduentus itself included the imperial party's welcome outside the city, the procession, the speech or speeches to People and Senate, and the emperor's entry to his palace. Emperors typically began holding games on the day after their aduentus;Footnote 31 in Rome, at least, these could go on for many days uninterrupted, as Ammianus implies in his description of Constantius' visit of 357.Footnote 32 In the case of Constantius' visit, we were told that he often took pleasure in the free speech of the plebs at the games (16.10.13): this saepe makes it clear that we are dealing with the events of several and probably many days. Similarly, in Claudian, the extended nature of the games is implied by saepe … cernimus (622, 625). The end of the description of Honorius' games, where bloodless military displays replaced gladiatorial combat, leads into the description of the arrival of the new year, using Janus, the god of peace but also the god of the new year, as a transitional figure (636–41):Footnote 33
That is to say, the events described up to that point have occurred before the new year. The reason that Claudian does not describe new-year ceremonies in detail is that his speech is in fact part of them (it may also be that the consular elections described early in the poem, 5–10, are a part of the these ceremonies). Combining the reference to the new moon with the reference to the games, the likeliest date for Honorius' arrival is early December 403. However, given Claudian's tendency to compress considerable gaps in time, it could quite possibly be the case that the aduentus and the games following it belong significantly earlier in 403.Footnote 34
I turn now to the suggestion that there is a consular element in the description of the triumphal aduentus and the games that follow. I will engage here with Dewar's commentary above all, simply because it is a recent and authoritative work, but the idea he expresses is heavily influenced by MacCormack and before her Alföldi, and can be found at least as far back as Gesner in 1759.Footnote 35 Dewar realizes that the aduentus took place well before the beginning of the new year, but he preserves the assumptions of his predecessors by seeing Claudian as ‘effortlessly—and unhistorically—blending together the language of aduentus, triumph, and consular inauguration ceremonies'.Footnote 36 In fact the elements that he sees as consular are not exclusively so at all. The banal truth is that Roman imperial ceremonies were not all that varied, and just as a new consul would process to the senate house, make a speech, return to his house, give games, so the same repertoire of processions, speeches, and games can be found when emperors visit Rome (or other cities). The pattern can be seen to varying degrees in the visit of Constantine in 312, as described by various panegyrists, in that of Constantius in 357, as described by Ammianus, and in that of Theodosius in 389, as described by Pacatus and indeed by Claudian himself earlier in this very poem. None of these visits was at the beginning of the year or for the purpose of taking up the consulship (though it is true that both Constantine in 312 and Constantius in 357 were already consuls), but they provide by far the closest parallel for Honorius' aduentus.Footnote 37
The emperor was met outside the city by the Senate (551–9): an element attested for Constantine in 312 by Eusebius and two separate panegyrics, as for Constantius by Ammianus.Footnote 38 For the triumphal procession into the city the emperor rode in a carpentum (as sculpted on the arch of Constantine) adorned with jewelled stones; he was surrounded by heavy cavalry—the cataphractarii and their horses alike in full body-armour—and dragon standards waving and hissing in the wind (here Claudian's description, 564–77, seems clearly modelled on Ammianus, 16.10.6–8).Footnote 39 In the procession the haughtiness of Constantius elicited disapproval, at least from Ammianus, and his successors made various concessions to ciuilitas:Footnote 40 Theodosius got out of his chariot and walked some of the way, displaying his triumph over pride (Pacatus, Pan. Lat. 2[12].47.3); Honorius forbade the senators to walk before his chariot (VI Cos. 551). It is at the halt in the forum that Dewar begins to identify consular elements in earnest (587–91):Footnote 41
Dewar argues that this harks back to the tradition from the Republic and Early Empire that a new consul ‘formally inaugurated his consulship by publicly taking oaths to observe the laws of the State and then [addressed] the first meeting of the Senate for the new year’ (note on 587); he specifically cites the example of Trajan (Plin. Pan. 65.1); he glosses the report to the Senate (note on 589–90) as ‘the consul's report to the Senate of his deeds, though not here the deeds as consul but here the deeds (above all the victory over Alaric) which have earned him the consulship’. But as well as being problematic, since the arrival is weeks or months before the start of the consulship, these assumptions are quite unnecessary, since we learn from Ammianus that Constantius in April 357 addressed first the Senate in the Curia and then the People from the rostra (16.10.13), and from Pacatus that Theodosius adopted the same procedure in the opposite order in June 389 (Pan. Lat. 2[12].47.3): nothing to do with the consulship in each case. As for the report of the deeds to the Senate, the imitation of the ancients is simply that of returning magistrates with imperium presenting their acta to the Senate. After the senate meeting comes discussion of the sparsio (604–10): here there is some debate as to whether Honorius actually distributed money to the People or not,Footnote 42 but it is clear from the arch of Constantine that such a distribution took place in 312, and Claudian himself (72–3, quoted below) attests it for 389, as do many other sources. And Honorius' formal journey along the sacred way to the Palatine is not the journey of a consul returning to his house (Dewar on 603) but exactly what happened at the end of any imperial aduentus procession (compare, for example, Amm. 16.10.13). Finally, the games, as we have seen, are not consular games but what regularly happened on the days following an imperial aduentus: the fact that in other consular panegyrics Claudian only narrates the preparations for consular games (Dewar on 611–39, citing Theod. 270–332, Stil. 3.223–369) proves that Honorius' are not consular games—which had probably not yet begun at the point when Claudian recited his panegyric on 1 January.Footnote 43
Dewar's discussion relies on one other factor as well as the ceremonial: the emperor's clothing. As he processes in, the emperor wears a trabea (562), which is a ceremonial robe associated with the consulship: the word can be used by Claudian as a metonymy for the consulship, as in line 4 of this poem.Footnote 44 Here it is certainly reasonable for Dewar to see imagery suggestive of Honorius' coming consulship. But some qualification is in order: as he also points out (notes on 4 and on 562), the word can also (and here, in Dewar's view, does) indicate the triumphal toga picta, which might be worn by emperors in various ceremonial contexts. Furthermore, when Theodosius addressed the Senate in 389 with Honorius in tow, he was trabeatus (74, quoted below), but he was not consul. Later, in the senate house, Honorius is described as wearing habitus Gabinus (that is, the toga tied close around the body by one end, 594): here again there are certainly consular associations (compare, for example, III Cos. 3, IV Cos. 6), but it is not an exclusively consular dress,Footnote 45 and can equally be read as indicative of the Realien of the ceremonial: old-fashioned forms adopted for a display of traditional Roman ciuilitas.
In summary: Honorius' aduentus and his assumption of the consulship were quite separate ceremonials, weeks or months apart, as a close reading of the poem confirms—although a few elements in Claudian's description of the aduentus may anticipate the consulship, and although in structural terms he builds a crescendo from aduentus to games to the assumption of the consulate. For those interested in ceremonial, it is important to realise that Honorius' presence in Rome did not manifest itself by one vast ceremony but by continuous celebrations of various ceremonies over an extended period.
III. WAS HONORIUS MADE CAESAR IN 389?
Early in the panegyric Claudian describes the visit of Theodosius, the emperor's father, to Rome in the summer of 389, for which the young Honorius had also been present (VI Cos. 65–76):Footnote 46
Now this passage can be read simply as saying that Honorius was his father's companion on his visit to Rome, participating in the triumph (67–8) and in the reception of ambassadors (69–72), and accompanying Theodosius to the distribution of money to the People (72–3), and to the Senate (73–5), and that this in some way marked him out as a future ruler (socium … honorum, 66; nouus … heres, 76). But in his commentary on this passage Michael Dewar argues for a stronger meaning: that, given the description of Honorius as socius … honorum (used elsewhere in Claudian to hint at an imperial roleFootnote 47 ), the detail that he did not wear a diadem may be more pointed and hint at the possibility that he was appointed to the junior imperial office of Caesar (only full Augusti and not Caesars are portrayed wearing the diadem), and that he was presented to the Senate for this purpose (73–6). But this interpretation is based on a mistranslation. Dewar translated te … socium sumebat honorum as ‘he took you … as companion of his honours', as if the reading were the aorist perfect sumpsit; but the imperfect sumebat should be understood as continuous or inchoative: ‘he would take you’ or ‘he began taking you’. Moreover, the image that follows, purpureo fotum gremio, suggests that Honorius was constantly seen on the purple background of his father's lap at the various events, in a symbol of his future rule, rather than wearing the purple himself. A nice parallel comes in the description of Stilicho's son Eucherius as an infant crawling around in his grandfather Theodosius' purple (Stil. 3.178–9): a brilliant means of glorifying Stilicho's connexion to the imperial family and of hinting at Eucherius' possible imperial future but not evidence of any formal role at all.
This passage is not the only evidence for the suggestion, however. Dewar appeals to an article by Alan Cameron, where he argued that a passage of the ninth-century chronicler Theophanes, which has Theodosius making his son emperor (basileus) at this point, refers to his creation not as full Augustus (which is well attested as happening in January 393Footnote 48 ) but as Caesar.Footnote 49 Cameron and Dewar also cite a passage of the panegyric on Honorius' fourth consulship (169–70) which appears to refer to Honorius having been Caesar before he was created Augustus. More recently, Timothy Barnes remarks as an aside in a note on a different topic that it is a well-attested fact that Honorius had been Caesar for over three years by the time he was made Augustus in January 393, and that this fact is inexplicably ignored in the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire's entry on Honorius. Besides the passages of Claudian, a number of chronicles and consularia come into account (Chronicon Paschale can be added to Barnes's list).Footnote 50 Meaghan McEvoy's important new book on child emperors also gives credit to Honorius' elevation to Caesar, relying on much the same evidence.Footnote 51 In what follows I shall first set out the context of the visit, then look at the evidence of chronicles and other historiography, followed by epigraphic and other indirect contemporary evidence, before finally returning to Claudian.
a) The political context of Theodosius' visit of 389
The immediate context of Theodosius' visit to Rome in 389 was the aftermath of a civil war. Magnus Maximus had ruled Gaul, Spain and Britain for five years following his overthrow of Gratian in 383, while Gratian's teenage half-brother Valentinian II held on to Italy, Illyricum and Africa; Theodosius and his elder son Arcadius (in 389 about 12 years old) were the Augusti of the East. When Valentinian II was driven out of Italy in 387, a marriage alliance was created between his sister Galla and Theodosius; Theodosius then went to war against Maximus, whom he defeated and killed in summer 388. But he had no intention of allowing his young brother-in-law to rule the whole West. Valentinian was left in northern Italy when the visit to Rome occurred, and thereafter sent to Gaul with an entourage dominated by Theodosius' men; meanwhile Theodosius remained in Italy for three years and filled the high offices of the region.Footnote 52 Bringing Honorius to Rome doubtless reinforced the impression that Valentinian II was being sidelined and that the future belonged to the sons of Theodosius. Making Honorius Caesar at this moment would have reinforced this point,Footnote 53 but the point would have been made whether he was appointed Caesar or simply paraded prominently.
It should be noted that creating a Caesar was not, as Dewar calls it, ‘in accordance with the usual practice’ in 389.Footnote 54 The last time a Caesar had been created was when Julian was elevated by Constantius II on 6 November 355. For nearly seventy years thereafter, as far as we know, all legitimate emperors to nominate a colleague (even when those colleagues were small children or in one case a baby) created them Augustus immediately.Footnote 55 No other legitimate Caesar is attested as being created until Theodosius II promoted Valentinian III in 424, and in that case a certain logic can be discerned: Valentinian III was being sent from Constantinople to replace a usurper as emperor in the West. This way, the new emperor would be subject to Theodosius II's orders and, if the mission failed, Theodosius would not have the embarrassment of a spare Augustus rattling about; when it succeeded, Valentinian III had the ceremonial advantage of being crowned Augustus in his own territory, in the city of Rome.
b) The evidence of chronicles
Three Latin chronicles give very similar accounts of Theodosius' and Honorius' visit to Rome in 389; they do not mention promotion to Caesar. The Descriptio consulum is a fifth-century text preserving earlier recensions written contemporaneously with or soon after the events described, while the Consularia Vindobonensia is a sixth-century compilation reflecting (as does Marcellinus) the late fourth- or early fifth-century tradition of the Consularia Italica.Footnote 56
-
1. Descriptio Consulum s.a. 389: His cons. introiuit Theudosius Aug. in urbem Romam cum Honorio filio suo die Iduum Iuniarum et dedit congiarium Romanis. (‘Under these consuls Theodosius Augustus entered Rome with his son Honorius on 13 June and gave a distribution to the Romans.’)
-
2. Consularia Vindobonensia priora 512: his cons. Theodosius Romam introiuit cum Honorio idus Iunias et exiuit inde iii Kl. Septembr. (‘Under these consuls Theodosius entered Rome with Honorius on 13 June and left there on 30 August.’)
-
3. Marcellinus comes, Chron. 389.1 (c. a.d. 534): Theodosius imperator cum Honorio filio suo Romam mense Iunio introiuit, congiarium Romano populo tribuit urbeque egressus est kal. Septembr. (‘The emperor Theodosius with his son Honorius entered Rome in the month of June, gave a distribution to the Roman people and left the city on 1 September.’)
Two later Greek chronicles have reference to Honorius' promotion in Rome to basileus (but not specifically to the junior rank of Caesar):
-
4. Chronicon Paschale s.a. 389 (compiled a.d. 630): ἐπὶ τούτων τῶν ὑπάτων εἰσῆλθεν Θεοδόσιος ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐν Ῥώμῃ μετὰ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ Ὁνωρίου καὶ ἔστεψεν αὐτὸν ἐκεῖ εἰς βασιλέα. καὶ ἐβασίλευσεν ἐκεῖ Ὁνώριος ἔτη ιδ΄ (‘Under these consuls Theodosius the emperor entered Rome with his son Honorius and crowned him emperor there. And Honorius ruled there for fourteen years.’)
-
5. Theophanes AM 5581 [70.31–3 De Boor] (written a.d. 817): τούτῳ τῷ ἔτει ἦλθε Θεοδόσιος ἐν Ῥώμῃ μετὰ Ὁνωρίου τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐκάθισεν αὐτὸν βασιλέα ἐν αὐτῇ πρὸ έ ἰδῶν Ἰουνίου καὶ ἀνῆλθεν ἐπὶ Κωνσταντινούπολιν. (‘In this year Theodosius came to Rome with Honorius his son and established him as emperor there on 9 June and returned to Constantinople.’)
A third Greek source is sometimes adduced, the Goleniščev papyrus, an illustrated world chronicle from Alexandria.Footnote 57 The degree of reconstruction in this very fragmentary text required may cause readers' jaws momentarily to drop. Its first editor Bauer suggested two possible reconstructions, of which he preferred the first (a position accepted with reservations by its most recent editors, Burgess and Dijkstra).Footnote 58
-
6. Consularia Golenischevensia s.a. 389 (Fol. VI verso, 1–5):
From its closeness to other chronicles and consularia, this section must deal with Theodosius' and Honorius' visit to Rome, and it is likely, not least because the accompanying illustration has an older and a younger figure both holding orbs, that the papyrus had the same version as is found in the Chronicon Paschale and Theophanes.Footnote 59 But it is clear that little can be rested on this source; moreover, the fifth-century date, for which its first editors argued, is no longer given credence: it is probably late sixth-century.Footnote 60
The question is therefore whether Honorius' elevation was wrongly omitted in one group of texts or wrongly added in another group. Although the Latin texts do not logically contradict the Greek ones, we should nevertheless treat these two versions as incompatible: it is hard to imagine that a chronicler would intentionally omit the creation of a new emperor. It seems fair to remark that the Latin tradition which does not have Honorius promoted to emperor can be traced to an earlier date and is generally more reliable. Moreover, those arguing that Honorius was made Caesar also need to explain why the Greek texts have basileus not kaisar.
A few observations can be made on the relationships of the sources. First, the similarities make it likely that all the texts ultimately go back to an official announcement of Theodosius' visit.Footnote 61 Such an announcement may, however, have entered different chronicle traditions independently. The Descriptio Consulum was called Consularia Constantinopolitana by Mommsen because the most detailed part of its narrative, in the mid fourth century, presents a consular list with Constantinopolitan supplementary information. Such a chronicle of Constantinople is an important source for Marcellinus as well as for Chronicon Paschale; but Burgess, the most recent editor of the Descriptio, argues that the work as we have it left Constantinople in 388/389, before this entry was written.Footnote 62 If that is correct, its testimony to the visit of Theodosius is potentially independent of the chronicle tradition to which Marcellinus and Chronicon Paschale had access. Secondly, the Greek tradition can be reduced to a single chronicle source. Parallels between Chronicon Paschale and Theophanes have long been observed and are conjectured to have arisen through shared use of an Alexandrian chronicle.Footnote 63 Meanwhile, Burgess and Dijkstra show that the Consularia Golenischevensia, like the Consularia Scaligeriana,Footnote 64 derives from a Greek chronicle that was translated from a Latin original in the tradition of the Consularia Vindobonensia and supplemented by local Alexandrian sources; they also identify a number of shared errors between the consularia Golenischevensia and Theophanes. A single late fifth-century Alexandrian chronicle can be seen as lying behind the Greek sources for Honorius' elevation in 389, which is to be considered a further shared error.Footnote 65
But is there any reason why the creation of a new emperor would be invented? I think that the answer to this question is yes: it has to do with a Byzantine perspective on the political situation—with multiple emperors and less of an established divide between East and West—of the fourth century.Footnote 66 Neither Chronicon Paschale nor Theophanes attests Honorius' real elevation in Constantinople in 393, but their source knew that Honorius, the son of an emperor of the East, became emperor of the West, and even a late fifth-century author would have imagined that this meant ruling from the old Rome. So it was easy to infer that Theodosius' visit to Rome with Honorius, attested in his chronicle source, was intended for this purpose of establishing Honorius there as emperor. This assumption can be seen in the confused notice found in Chronicon Paschale that Honorius ruled for fourteen years in Rome,Footnote 67 and in Theophanes' conclusion that Theodosius then returned to Constantinople, which did not in fact happen for another two years.
A similar error can be found in the historiographical tradition: the late fifth- or early sixth-century pagan Zosimus, who records neither Theodosius' visit to Rome in 389 nor Honorius' elevation to Augustus in 393, describes Theodosius as coming to Rome after the defeat of Eugenius in 394 and there promoting Honorius to emperor (4.59.1). It looks like an addition to explain how Honorius became the western emperor after Theodosius' death; it certainly cannot be used to justify claims about what could have happened in Rome in 389.Footnote 68
c) Epigraphy and numismatics
Contemporary epigraphy and numismatics also offer no support whatsoever for the putative granting of the title of Caesar to Honorius, and indeed strongly support the case against it.
The numismatic evidence can be simply summed up: there is none. Previous fourth-century Caesars had had coins minted for them, though it was not to be the case for Valentinian III in 424–5 (who was, however, portrayed as a smaller figure on the coins of Theodosius II). This is a serious silence for those arguing for Honorius as Caesar.
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of epigraphic references to Honorius before he is Augustus comes from his first consulship of 386, when he is clearly attested as nobilissimus puer—by the manuscripts of the law codes and papyri as well as epigraphy.Footnote 69 While there are no inscriptions attesting Honorius as Caesar, there are several approximately dateable inscriptions subsequent to his consulship which refer to his status as nobilissimus. Three of these are associated with Tatianus, who was praetorian prefect of the East from a point between March and June 388 down to late 392—for most of which period Theodosius was in the West (Tatianus was disgraced on leaving office, and in each inscription his name is damaged so as to be almost or wholly illegible). The first is a statue base from Aphrodisias, in Greek, calling Honorius epiphanestatos (= nobilissimus). It also bears the name of Antonius Priscus, a governor of Caria whose precise years in office are unknown; found nearby were separate statue bases with matching dedications to Valentinian II and to Arcadius, which does not narrow down the date significantly within Tatianus' Prefecture.Footnote 70 Louis Robert suggested plausibly that there was also originally a statue base with a dedication to Theodosius.Footnote 71 Two very similar dedications are attested: in Antinoopolis in Egypt, where Tatianus had held his first post as governor of the Thebaid in the 360s, and at Side in Pamphylia.Footnote 72 The Antinoopolis dedication reads: τοὺς τῆς ὑφ’ ἡλίῳ γῆς αὐτοκρά/τορας καὶ τροπαιούχους δεσπότας/ ἡμῶν Οὐαλεντινιανόν, Θεοδόσιον,/ Ἀρκάδιον, τοὺς αἰωνίους Αὐγούσ/τους, καὶ Φλαύιον Ὁνώριον, τὸν/ ἐπιφανέστατον, Φ̣[λ(άουιος) Εὐτόλμιος]/ Ṭα̣[τιαν]ό̣ς̣, ὁ λαμπρότατος ἔπαρχος/ τοῦ ἱεροῦ πραιτωρίου, τῇ συνήθει/ καθοσιώσει ἀφιέρωσε<ν>, ἐπὶ Φλαυίου/ Σεπτιμίου Εὐτροπίου τοῦ λαμπροτάτου/ ἡγεμόνος (‘The emperors of the whole world, and our triumphant lords, Valentinian, Theodosius and Arcadius, eternal Augusti, and the nobilissimus Honorius, F[lavius Eutolmius] Ta[tian]us, prefect of the holy praetorium, set up with the customary dedication under Flavius Septimius Eutropius v.c., the governor’). The rare phrase τῇ συνήθει καθοσιώσει clearly links this to the Side inscription and the Aphrodisias dedication; and we have the striking and repeated combination of three Augusti and one nobilissimus.Footnote 73 While the name of the governor on the Side inscription is lost, papyri give us some indications on the governorship of Eutropius in the Thebaid. He is attested in office on 26 December 389. His successor Fl. Asclepiades Hesychius is attested between September 390 and May 391. His predecessor, Fl. Eutolmius Arsenius, is attested on 14 June 388: it is tempting to think, with PLRE, that he might have been a relative benefitting from the patronage of Fl. Eutolmius Tatianus, who became praetorian prefect in the spring of that year.Footnote 74
A fourth inscription is found in Rome, dedicated to Theodosius' mother Thermantia by the prefect of Rome from 389 to 391, Ceionius Rufius Albinus (CIL 6.36960). Only the right-hand portion of the inscription survives, but it refers to Thermantia as the emperor's mother and the ‘grandmother of our lords [Arcadius], most […] emperor, and [Honorius,] most [noble] youth’ (auiae dd. nn. / [Arcadi] … simi principis/ [et Honori nobilis] simi iuuenis). In the phrase used to describe Honorius (if nobilissimi is the right reconstruction), iuuenis can really not mean Caesaris: a natural inference is that it is a somewhat aggrandized version of nobilissimus puer; alternatively, perhaps Honorius was given some different title by his father in Rome, princeps iuuentutis or nobilissimus iuuenis (and the Greek inscriptions do not contradict this). At any rate, it is striking that Honorius is included under the characteristically imperial abbreviation dd. nn.
In each of these four cases a dating before Honorius' putative appointment to Caesar in June 389 is not impossible. The bases from Aphrodisias and Side could be any time between mid-388 and mid-392; the Antinoopolis one could be between June 388 and September 390, though I think it likeliest to belong to a one-year governorship between summer 389 and 390. The Roman dedication is in my view likeliest to date from Theodosius' visit to Rome between 13 June and 29 August 389, but it could belong any time in Albinus' prefecture, which lasted till 391 but could have begun some time before Theodosius' visit.Footnote 75 In each of the four cases, the odds are in favour of a date in or after the summer of 389; but an earlier date is possible. It is nevertheless striking that there are no inscriptions attesting Honorius as Caesar, a rank which he is argued to have held for three and a half years. Arguments from silence are dangerous, but when measured against the four inscriptions cited here which pay Honorius quasi-imperial honours before he held an imperial position, or against the dozens of inscriptions dedicated to Valentinian, Theodosius and Arcadius, the absence of inscriptions attesting him as Caesar suggests strongly that he never was Caesar. By contrast, it is easy to find epigraphic attestation of the one-year reign of Valentinian III as Caesar in 424–5.Footnote 76 If it is accepted that Honorius did not hold the office of Caesar, the four inscriptions are best dated to a time soon after Theodosius on his visit to Rome implied Honorius' status as a future Augustus, whether through some title other than Caesar or simply through his actions: these inscriptions were after all put out at the behest of two of Theodosius' highest-ranking officials. This harmonizes perfectly with the emphasis on Honorius' presence alongside his father found in the Descriptio Consulum, the Consularia Vindobonensia, and Marcellinus comes.
d) Other indirect evidence
A panegyric of Theodosius survives from the time of his visit to Rome. Composed by Latinius Pacatus Drepanius, it stands second after Pliny's in the collection of Latin panegyrics (the usual and credible assumption is that the collection was edited by Pacatus himself; his own panegyric clearly inspires some details in Claudian's poem of 404). The panegyric seems to have been given to Theodosius in the Senate at some point in the middle of the visit, since it includes descriptions of Theodosius' behaviour after his aduentus (Pan. Lat. 2[12].47.3). But the panegyric says very little indeed about Theodosius' sons. Pacatus remarks (Pan. Lat. 2[12].16.4) that he had favoured his friends with office before his sons (a reference to the fact that Arcadius did not first become consul in 384, the year after his promotion to Augustus, but only in 385).Footnote 77 And he ends imagining what he will say at home in Gaul (Pan. Lat. 2[12].47.5): uidi illum principis patrem, uidi illum principis uindicem, uidi illum principis restitutorem (‘I have seen that father of an emperor, I have seen that avenger of an emperor, I have seen that restorer of an emperor!’). This must refer respectively to Arcadius, Gratian and Valentinian II.Footnote 78 Pacatus' phrase would have been hopelessly ambiguous—not to say tactless and incompetent—if more than one of Theodosius' sons held imperial office at the time of the speech.Footnote 79
It is clear too that Honorius subsequently marked his reign as beginning with his proclamation as Augustus in January 393, rather than in 389. Several chronicles explicitly attest his celebration of tricennalia in the year 422, 30 years on from 393 counting inclusively (Chron. Gall. 452 s.a. 422, Marcellinus comes 422.1, Ravenna Annals 422), and Marcellinus additionally notes his vicennalia being celebrated alongside Theodosius II's decennalia in 411 (a year early).Footnote 80 The chronicle evidence, with the odd inevitable misdating this way and that, converges on January 393 for Honorius' dies imperii.Footnote 81 So does his series of consulships for every fifth anniversary: 398, 402, 407, 412, 417, 422.Footnote 82 Since in all previous cases emperors are known to have marked their anniversaries from the date on which they became Caesar rather than that on which they became Augustus, the plausible inference is that Honorius was never Caesar.
e) Claudian's panegyric on the fourth consulship of Honorius
So far, the evidence for Honorius being made Caesar in Rome in 389 has proved entirely illusory, and the evidence that he was not has proved collectively very forceful. I have left till last the strongest piece of evidence that has been cited in favour of Honorius having been Caesar, a passage from Claudian's Panegyric on the Fourth Consulship of Honorius of 398. Claudian has described the baby Honorius being appointed consul (in 386), given a diadem by his mother in anticipation of his future role, and held up to the kisses of his father (IV Cos. 153–68). He continues (169–70):
and then describes Honorius' promotion to Augustus in 393. The usual translation is more or less that of Platnauer (archaisms removed): ‘Nor was that honour long in coming; you, then Caesar, became emperor and were straightway made equal with your brother.’Footnote 83 The crucial words are mutatus principe Caesar. These words clearly play on the diversity of imperial titles; given their various possible meanings, different interpretations of the phrase are possible. (I must acknowledge greater uncertainty in my conclusion here than elsewhere in this article.)
First, since elsewhere in Claudian, princeps always means full emperor (Augustus) and that the commonest use of Caesar in the later empire (albeit not otherwise attested in Claudian) is the junior imperial position below the Augustus, the most obvious conclusion is that reached by Platnauer, as by most translators. The words will mean ‘changed from Caesar to princeps', and imply that Honorius had indeed held the junior rank of Caesar for a period before becoming Augustus (when this Caesarship might have started is passed over in the notes of Fargues, Barr and Charlet; Lehner asks the question but has no firm answer).
However, as we have seen already, the suggestion that an interim promotion to Caesar occurred at Rome in 389, sometimes inferred from Claudian's VI Cos. and the chronicle tradition, is derived from a misinterpretation of VI Cos. and from a much later interpolation into the chronicle tradition; it is effectively ruled out by the absence of evidence for the promotion from coinage, epigraphy, and the contemporary panegyric of Pacatus. The passage offers nothing to contradict that conclusion. And indeed, that Honorius was not promoted in Rome is the implication of Claudian's whole political œuvre: focussed on presenting Honorius and his court sympathetically to a senatorial audience, would he have failed to be anything other than repeatedly explicit if Honorius could really have claimed Rome as where his reign began?
A second possibility: might a promotion have happened later than 389 but before 393? The silence of Pacatus would be meaningless; that of other literary sources would remain noteworthy; that of coinage and epigraphy, while still striking, would have ever-diminishing significance. But the evidence of the anniversary celebrations suggests that Honorius viewed his reign as having begun in 393. The immediate context in the poem also raises a severe objection to this interpretation: why would Claudian suggest that the honour was not delayed (169), or that Honorius was immediately (170) made the equal of his brother Arcadius (that is, Augustus) if there had been a long tenure of the in-between rank of Caesar? Panegyric likes to exaggerate (and in this case certainly does by leaping from Honorius' consulate, aged one, to his elevation to Augustus, aged eight); but if there was a prolonged stage when Honorius held a middle rank, nec dilatus and protinus are very odd verbal choices.
A third and a fourth possibility are that Honorius was made Caesar very shortly before he was made Augustus, either a few days earlier or even indeed in the same ceremony.Footnote 84 This would overcome the objections about anniversary celebrations and the problems with nec dilatus and protinus. There is some evidence in fourth-century accession ceremonies as described by Ammianus for separate stages in imperial proclamations: first the candidate is brought forth, and then he is acclaimed as Augustus. This can be seen in the elevation of Valentinian I and Valentinian II, and, in a different way, for Jovian.Footnote 85 In general, too, clothing the new emperor in the purple (worn by both Caesars and Augusti) precedes the coronation with the diadem (Augusti only). However, some examples suggest that the various stages are not equated to the various ranks.Footnote 86 Still, appointment as Caesar shortly before Augustus in January 393, or as part of the same ceremony, can perhaps not be entirely ruled out, even if it is hard to see what the political motivation for it would be.
Further possibilities arise from looking at Claudian's use of Caesar, a word which has other meanings than simply a junior rank of emperor (a rank not otherwise conferred for nearly half a century when Claudian wrote). Elsewhere in his œuvre, Caesar is used to refer to Julius Caesar and Augustus and their family,Footnote 87 although at two points the adjective caesareus is used essentially to mean ‘royal’ (IV Cos. 313; Fesc. 2.29). A fifth possibility would be that Caesar, as in the Early Empire, is simply a ‘junior member of the imperial family’: this of course would give an appropriate meaning (‘changed from a royal to an emperor’), but the lack of parallels from this period should probably rule it out.Footnote 88 However, an exceptionally common usage, especially in verse and even in this period, is that Caesar simply means emperor, without distinction of rank: it was, after all, part of the imperial titulature of Augusti.Footnote 89
If Caesar means emperor, what does principe mean? The ablative following the verb muto most commonly describes the feature into which, or in respect of which, someone is transformed, or for which something is exchanged.Footnote 90 But it can also less commonly refer to the thing or person which is substituted.Footnote 91 Could princeps mean something else, from which Honorius was changed to become emperor? A sixth possibility might be to revive what seems to be Gesner's view of this passage, that Honorius had been princeps iuuentutis.Footnote 92 The title is attested down to the early part of the reign as Augusti of Gratian and Valentinian II (RIC 9.16, CIL 8.14290), and although generally applied to young Augusti and Caesares, there is no reason it could not have been applied to Honorius, perhaps in Rome in 389—which would cohere with his designation as [nobilis] simus iuuenis on Albinus' inscription in Rome (CIL 6.36960). Against such a suggestion, however, the ablative after muto in the sense of an individual being transformed seems normally to represent the result rather than the source of transformation, and it would be unnatural for princeps without further glossing to be understood as princeps iuuentutis.
My seventh and preferred interpretation of the passage is that both principe and Caesar mean simply ‘emperor’. It will be necessary to repunctuate:
The juxtaposition, at once playful and emphatic, of two words for emperor can be seen as harking back to poets of the Early Empire, who liked to combine imperial titles in this way, and who also liked the vocative Caesar.Footnote 93 While I think that this solution is far more attractive than the others, I think it worth stating that other suggestions made above cannot be disproved, especially the third and fourth possibilities, that Honorius was made Caesar soon before his promotion to Augustus, or that the reference is to a detail of the ceremony; but it should now be clear that, even if he could have received that rank, it is most improbable that that happened in Rome in 389.
IV. CONCLUSION
The primary aim of this article has been historical elucidation of Claudian's magnificent last poem, supplementing and correcting Dewar's fine commentary, and enabling future literary studies to approach the poem with a better appreciation of its political context. All three sections demonstrate the inseparability of philological and historical approaches in dealing with Claudian; they are also united methodologically by stressing the primacy of contemporary evidence, of every sort, over teleological narratives (Section I) or later interpolations in the historical tradition (Section III). My conclusions are of broader historical interest: in Section I, I argued that Rome was treated seriously as a possible long-term imperial residence in the visit of 403–4/5. In Section II I showed that the ceremonials of that visit should be seen as a sequence of celebrations, rather than a single grandiose one, that would have aimed to impress by duration as well as by grandeur. Section III returned to the last imperial visit to Rome in 389 and an issue important to understanding Theodosius' dynastic policy and the marginalisation of Valentinian II: I demonstrated from a multiplicity of evidence that the claim occasionally made that Honorius was raised to Caesar on that visit should be rejected, as (in all probability) should the idea that he was ever Caesar. Instead, his designation as a future emperor in the late 380s was conveyed without a specific appointment. Though only titled nobilissimus, he was offered statues and other forms of commemoration alongside the emperors (III[c]); his future role was also indicated by his prominence in his father's visit to Rome, the public announcement of which entered the chronicle tradition (III[b]). This fact, like the squeezing of the maximum possible ceremonial advantage in the visit of 403–4/5 and the public hints that Honorius might stay long term, should remind us again of the city of Rome's enduring and overwhelming political and symbolic importance in the fourth and early fifth centuries, even though emperors were usually absent.
