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Updated: June 27, 2025
The favorite eunuchs transferred the government of Honorius, and the empire, to Jovius, the Prætorian præfect; an unworthy servant, who did not atone, by the merit of personal attachment, for the errors and misfortunes of his administration.
A special commission was granted to Cynegius, the Prætorian præfect of the East, and afterwards to the counts Jovius and Gaudentius, two officers of distinguished rank in the West; by which they were directed to shut the temples, to seize or destroy the instruments of idolatry, to abolish the privileges of the priests, and to confiscate the consecrated property for the benefit of the emperor, of the church, or of the army.
Yet before they fell, Eusebius and Allobich had contributed their part to the ruin of the empire, by opposing the conclusion of a treaty which Jovius, from a selfish, and perhaps a criminal, motive, had negotiated with Alaric, in a personal interview under the walls of Rimini.
It was dangerous boasting, which sometimes led to the stake or the gallows, and therefore was thought to be not without foundation. Paulus Jovius, in his "Eulogia Doctorum Virorum," says, that the devil, in the shape of a large black dog, attended Agrippa wherever he went.
These rules, however, were not strictly adhered to, even by Jovius himself. The treatise is written in the form of a dialogue between the bishop and his secretary; its gossipping manner, quaint style, and the great importance attributed to the subject-matter, remind us exceedingly of the Complete Angler of our old English friend Izaak Walton.
Then Albert, the great Jacobin friar, Peter Tesmoin, alias Witness, Pope Pius the Second, Volaterranus, Paulus Jovius the valiant, Jemmy Cartier, Chaton the Armenian, Marco Polo the Venetian, Ludovico Romano, Pedro Aliares, and forty cartloads of other modern historians, lurking behind a piece of tapestry, where they were at it ding-dong, privately scribbling the Lord knows what, and making rare work of it; and all by hearsay.
If such an explanation may be hazarded, we may perhaps go further and suppose that Paulus Jovius may have been alluding to the Koro-puk-guru, when, as Pomponius Mela tells us, he taught that there were Pigmies beyond Japan.
The Palatine hill became the Palatium of the Cæsars, and Palatium was the name which was borne by the house of Cæsar by the Dalmatian shore. The house became a city; but its name still clave to it, and the house of Jovius still, at least in the mouths of its own inhabitants, keeps its name in the slightly altered form of Spalato....
So desperate indeed did the situation of the son of Theodosius appear, to those who were the best acquainted with his strength and resources, that Jovius and Valens, his minister and his general, betrayed their trust, infamously deserted the sinking cause of their benefactor, and devoted their treacherous allegiance to the service of his more fortunate rival.
In his life of Adrian VI., the successor of Leo X., Paulus Jovius, not indeed the most trustworthy of authorities, tells a story which, if not true, might well be so.
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