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| On the Death of Theodosius his Two Sons divide the Empire. Rufinus is slain at the Feet of Arcadius.
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Chapter I.—On the
Death of Theodosius his Two Sons divide the Empire. Rufinus is slain at
the Feet of Arcadius.
After the death of the Emperor
Theodosius, in the consulate of Olybrius and Probinus or the
seventeenth of January, his two sons undertook the administration of
the Roman empire. Thus Arcadius assumed the government of the East, and
Honorius of the West.819
| 819Cf. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Rom.
Empire, chap. 29.
|
At that time Damasus was bishop of the church at Imperial Rome, and
Theophilus of that of Alexandria, John of Jerusalem, and Flavian of
Antioch; while the episcopal chair at Constantinople or New Rome was
filled by Nectarius, as we mentioned in the foregoing book.820
The body of the Emperor Theodosius was taken to Constantinople on the
8th of November in the same consulate, and was honorably interred by
his son Arcadius with the usual funeral solemnities.821
| 821See Bennett, Christian Archæology, p.
210 seq., and Bingham, Christ. Antiq. XXII. 1 and 2, for
details on the burial of the dead in the early Church.
|
Not long afterwards on the 28th day of the same month the army also
arrived, which had served under the Emperor Theodosius in the war
against the usurper. When therefore according to custom the Emperor Arcadius met
the army without the gates, the soldiery slew Rufinus the
Prætorian prefect. For he was suspected of aspiring to the
sovereignty, and had the reputation of having invited into the Roman
territories the Huns,822
| 822Zosimus (V. 5) says Rufinus invited Alaric and the
Goths to invade the Roman territories; Valesius reconciles
Socrates’ and Zosimus’ statements by assuming that they are
partial and supplementary to one another; Rufinus, according to him,
invited both the Huns and the Goths.
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a barbarous nation, who had already ravaged Armenia, and were then
making predatory incursions into other provinces of the East. On the
very day on which Rufinus was killed, Marcian bishop of the Novatians
died, and was succeeded in the episcopate by Sisinnius, of whom we have
already made mention.823
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