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Its rulers seemed to understand the crisis. The East was drained of all available troops, and Sebastian the Manichee, the old enemy of Athanasius, was placed in command. Gratian hurried Thraceward with the Gaulish legions, and at last Valens thought it time to leave his pleasant home at Antioch for the field of war.
There were many ways of upsetting them, and each might lead to gain; only one of defending them, and that was not attractive. Nor were Constantius and Valens without political reasons for their support of Arianism.
But as our attention is no longer engaged by the contrast of freedom and servitude, of recent greatness and of actual misery, we should turn with horror from the frequent executions, which disgraced, both at Rome and Antioch, the reign of the two brothers. Valens was of a timid, and Valentinian of a choleric, disposition.
After the permanent division of the empire, which occurred under Valens and Valentinian in A.D. 364, it was necessary that the political and the ecclesiastical history of the empire should be divided in the prophecy. This inspiration has done.
These new subjects of Rome were treated in a way well calculated to convert them into enemies. The officials of Thrace disobeyed the orders of the emperor, sold the Goths the meanest food at extravagant prices, and by their rapacious avarice bitterly irritated them. While this was going on, the Ostrogoths also appeared on the Danube, and solicited permission to cross. Valens, the emperor, refused.
The great event of the reign of Valens was the irruption of the Huns into Europe, and the consequent invasion of the Goths, by whom Valens was defeated and slain in 378. In 476, after successive invasions of barbarians had disorganized the western part of the Empire, the line of phantom emperors at Rome came to an end.
Ulfilas civilised as well as Christianised the Goths of Bulgaria, and was responsible for the earliest Gothic alphabet the Moeso-Gothic. After a century of peace war broke out again between the Goths and the Roman Empire which may now be called rather the Greek Empire in A.D. 369. The course of the war was at first favourable to the Emperor Valens.
The Huns crossed the Volga, and fell upon the Ostrogoths, who had had a Middle-European empire up through Austria and Germany. The Ostrogoths, somewhat flattened out, joined with the Huns to fall upon the Visigoths; who theeupon poured down through the Balkans to fall upon the Romans; and defeated and killed the emperor Valens at Adianople in 378.
A secret chain of swift and trusty messengers informed him of the vicissitudes of the battle; and while the courtiers stood trembling round their affrighted master, Valens assured him that the Gallic legions gave way; and insinuated with some presence of mind, that the glorious event had been revealed to him by an angel.
The Pagan Emperor, Julian, and the Christian, Valens, alike tried in vain to resist the emigration into the desert. Thousands fled, in times of peril to the state, from their civil and military duties, but the emperors were powerless to prevent the exodus. That there were grounds for complaint against the monks we may know from the charges made even by those who favored the system.
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