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Updated: May 6, 2025
Arcadius, who was eighteen, had the East, and was under the charge of a Roman officer called Rufinus; Honorius who was only eleven, reigned at Rome under the care of Stilicho, who was by birth a Vandal, that is to say, of one of those Teutonic nations who were living all round the northern bounds of the empire, and whose sons came to serve in the Roman armies and learn Roman habits.
Arcadius died in May 408, and was succeeded by his supposed son, Theodosius, then a boy of seven, the reins of power being first held by the prefect Anthemius, and afterwards by his sister Pulcheria, who governed the eastern empire in fact, for nearly forty years. The wisdom of Honorius, emperor of the West, in removing his capital to Ravenna, was soon justified by events.
He was the lieutenant of Honorius, who had espoused his daughter, but summoned by the dangers of Arcadius, he advanced to repulse the invaders of Greece, who had not met with any resistance from Thermopylae to Corinth. A desperate campaign followed in the woody country where Pan and the Dryads were fabled to reside in the olden times.
The apprehension of a civil war compelled Stilicho to retire, at the haughty mandate of his rivals, from the dominions of Arcadius; and he respected, in the enemy of Rome, the honorable character of the ally and servant of the emperor of the East.
The relics of Samuel were received by the people with the same joy and reverence which they would have shown to the living prophet; the highways, from Palestine to the gates of Constantinople, were filled with an uninterrupted procession; and the emperor Arcadius himself, at the head of the most illustrious members of the clergy and senate, advanced to meet his extraordinary guest, who had always deserved and claimed the homage of kings.
His wishes were that his younger son, Honorius, then a boy of ten years, should reign in the West, where he had already installed him, and that his eldest son, Arcadius, whom he had left as regent in Constantinople when he set out against Eugenius, should continue to reign in the East.
Theodosius died at Milan in the arms of Ambrose, A.D. 395, and with his death the real drama of the fall of Rome begins. His empire was divided between his two sons, Honorius and Arcadius, who were unworthy or unequal to maintain their great inheritance.
Anxious, however, and impatient, to relieve Italy from the presence of this formidable host, which could be useful only on the frontiers of the empire, he listened to the just requisition of the minister of Arcadius, declared his intention of reconducting in person the troops of the East, and dexterously employed the rumor of a Gothic tumult to conceal his private designs of ambition and revenge.
After this, discontented at the holding back their pay, and irritated by Rufinus, who was then at the head of the government of the emperor Arcadius, they laid waste the Illyrian provinces down to the Peloponnesus, and made repeated irruptions into Italy, in 400 and 402, under their valiant leader Alarich. In 408 he besieged Rome, and exacted considerable sums from it.
On the death of Theodosius, his sons Arcadius and Honorius, succeeded to the empire, but not to the talents and fortune of their father; and the times became changed with the princes. Theodosius had appointed a governor to each of the three divisions of the empire, Ruffinus to the eastern, to the western Stilicho, and Gildo to the African.
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