JUSTINA  
THE splendour of Julian’s reign was soon overcast. In the summer of 363, as he was skilfully extricating his troops from a dangerous position in Persia, he was pierced with a javelin, and he expired, with dignity and serenity, amongst his saddened supporters. Amid the noisy intrigue for the succession that followed, the name of Jovian, a popular and handsome officer of no distinction, obtained the loudest support, and the mantle of the brilliant young Emperor was conferred on him. How he secured the retreat of his troops by humiliating concessions to the Persians, and the Roman soldiers and Roman settlers sadly evacuated the provinces on which the blood of their fathers had been freely spent, and the emblem of the cross was borne again at the head of the legions, need not be told here. Not only is the wife of Jovian, Charito, no more than a name to us, but Jovian himself died before he reached the luxury of the capital. His brief enjoyment of power had been adorned by neither courage nor temperance. Charito sank back into obscurity, with her infant son, and was years afterwards laid by the side of her husband in the Church of the Apostles at Byzantium.
 
The next reign will introduce us to the stronger and more prominent personality of the Empress Justina and other Empresses of some interest. The hum of intrigue had arisen again in the camp, and the struggle of Christian and pagan was resumed. The choice of the army at length307 fell once more on an officer whose chief distinction was that he had a large and handsome person, and had had an energetic father. Valentinian had been an officer in Julian’s guards, and had one day, as he attended the Emperor at sacrifice, cuffed the priest for dropping some of the lustral water on his coat. Julian banished him for this violent desecration of his cult, but, though the more lively writers of the time promptly dispatch him to remote and contradictory regions, even Tillemont doubts if the sentence was carried out. It is probable that Julian had merely dismissed him from the body-guard, as we find him in the army at the time of Julian’s death. With two other officers he was sent by Jovian to secure the allegiance of the troops in the West. One legion, devoted to the memory of Julian, rebelled, and Valentinian had to fly for his life. He returned to the East, and resumed his post in the army, as it trailed some miles in the rear of the retreating Emperor. And in the middle of February (364) he was amazed to learn that Jovian had died, after a too liberal supper, and he himself was called to the throne. He was compelled by the troops to share the power with his brother Valens, and, leaving the shorn Eastern provinces under the care of Valens, he went on to Milan to take possession of the Western throne.
Valeria Severa,29 the first wife of Valentinian, is one of those shadowy Empresses whose form can hardly be discerned in the records of the time. She had borne him a son, the future Emperor Gratian, five years before, but she does not seem to have secured his affection, and we shall find her retiring in disgrace as soon as the beautiful Justina appears at court. Albia Dominica, the wife of Valens, is not more interesting, but an Empress whom we have dismissed in a former chapter at once reappears at Constantinople in opposition to her.
Before they separated Valens and Valentinian had fallen308 ill together, and, under the pretence that Julian’s friends had attempted to poison them, they turned with some vindictiveness upon the pagan officials. The aged and respected Sallust firmly controlled the inquiry, and no blood was shed; but large numbers of Julian’s officials were displaced—in many cases quite rightly, as Julian’s zeal for paganism had had the same evil effect in encouraging hypocrisy as the zeal of other Emperors for Christianity—and driven into sullen discontent. Further, Dominica’s father, Petronius, a deformed and repulsive person, had risen to power with his daughter, and was grinding the faces of the citizens of the East with the most extortionate demands. A spark soon fell on this inflammable world. Procopius, a relative of Julian’s, had published a very hazy claim to the Empire after Julian’s death. He had hastily withdrawn and disowned it, but Valens sent men to apprehend him. Ingeniously escaping the soldiers, he fled to Constantinople, and seems there to have fallen into the hands of abler intriguers. Two legions were bought for him, and they made him Emperor. There was no purple mantle to be obtained, so they clothed him in a stagy tunic bespangled with gold, put purple shoes on his feet and a piece of purple cloth in his hand, and conducted him, amid the amazed and derisive spectators, to the Senate and the Palace.
His force grew so quickly that the weak and nervous Emperor of the East was disposed to yield him the throne, but his older officers urged him to resist. In the short struggle that followed we meet again the third wife, and widow, of Constantius. Faustina had been enceinte at the death of her husband, and she was living at Constantinople, with her four-year-old daughter, when Procopius made his romantic attempt on the throne. With some shrewdness he withdrew her from her retirement, and associated her with him in his claim. The legitimate dynasty seemed to be wresting the throne from usurpers when the widow and daughter of the son of Constantine appeared at the head of the troops. Even when they marched out to309 meet the forces of Valens, Faustina, in a litter, accompanied them. But the new hope of Faustina died away as quickly as it had been born. The soldiers were persuaded to return to their allegiance, and the power of Procopius swiftly melted away. Faustina sank again into obscurity, and the adventurous career of Constantia was postponed for some years.
Dominica returned to her position in the enervated and luxurious court, and the rest of her life offers little interest. The ecclesiastical historians describe her as egging her husband to persecute the Trinitarians, but we must read the charge with discretion. There is little positive trace of persecution. One day eighty Trinitarian priests came to plead their cause at the court, and Valens is said to have ordered them back to their ship. At some distance from port the vessel was found to be aflame, and the priests were burnt to death. The orthodox writers declare that the vessel was purposely fired, at the command of Valens, but it is impossible to adjust the conflicting statements of the rival schools of theology. Valens was an ardent Arian, but he upheld the principle of religious toleration, and confined theologians to the use of theological weapons. The only occasion on which he is known to have ordered or countenanced violent persecution was in the suppression of magic. In some obscure chamber of the capital a group of men resorted to this dark means of discovering who would be the successor of Valens. Some say that a ring dangling from a mystic tripod spelt out the name on painted letters; some that grains of corn were placed on letters of the alphabet, and, when a cock was admitted to peck them, the order of the letters which it first attacked was noticed. In either case, the result was to give the letters Th E O D. It would be a remarkable forecast, if the story did not belong to a generation after the accession of Theodosius. However, the attempt became known, and a searching inquiry and savage persecution followed. The despicable trade of the informer was encouraged, whole libraries of valuable books310 were destroyed, and numbers of innocent philosophers and matrons were included in the bloody lists of the condemned.
The name of Dominica occurs only in one authentic connexion during the reign of Valens. The Emperor passed the winter of 372–3 at C?sarea in Cappadocia, where he encountered the stern and uncompromising champion of orthodoxy, St. Basil. Strong no less in his personal haughtiness—St. Jerome calls it pride—than in his glowing zeal for his Church, Basil emphatically refused to obey him, and was threatened with banishment. At once Dominica and her boy fell ill. Besides two daughters, she had had a son in 366, and this boy fell into a dangerous illness. It is said that Dominica learned in a dream that the illness was a divine punishment, but it is not impossible that her waking intelligence could arrive at that conclusion. Basil was summoned to the palace once more. Theodoret would have it that the bishop courteously breathed on the boy, and declared that he would recover if he received Trinitarian baptism. The earlier ecclesiastical writers, however, ascribe to him a firmer attitude. He asked Valens if the boy would receive orthodox baptism, and was told that he would not. “Let him meet whatever fate God wills then,” said the bishop, quitting the palace. The boy was baptized by the Arians, and died during the following night. A power even greater than that of eunuchs, and more imperious than that of Emperors, was rapidly growing. When, some days later, one of the favourites of Valens, who had risen from the kitchen, attempted to intervene in a discussion between the bishop and the Emperor, Basil curtly told him to confine himself to sauces and not interfere in Church matters.
Five or six years later Valens perished in the war with the Goths, and Dominica passed to the fitting obscurity of private life. The one indication of spirit that is recorded of her is that, when the victorious Goths pressed on to Constantinople and invested it, she paid the citizens out of the public treasury to arm themselves against the barbarians.311 We turn from her vague and retiring personality to the more interesting figure of Justina, who had some years before begun to share the throne of Valentinian.
Valentinian was as fierce and choleric as his brother was timid. A tall and powerful man, with stern blue eyes, a brilliant complexion, and light hair, he enlisted and encouraged his native cruelty in the service of what he regarded as the interest of the State. The pagans he refused to persecute, and he did much to promote the higher culture of Rome, which was so closely connected with the pagan beliefs. But, like his brother, he fell with truculence upon all who could be brought under a comprehensive charge of magic and divination, and the blood of Italy flowed very freely. His hard, covetous, and brutal officers enriched themselves in the work of torture, spoliation, and execution, and—though the statement recalls rather the savagery of Nero or Domitian—we are assured by the contemporary Ammianus that he kept two monstrous bears in cages near his chamber, and fed them on human victims. The slightest offence might incur sentence of death. “You had better change his head,” he is said to have ordered, in brutal playfulness, when some official desired to change to another province.
It is, perhaps, a circumstance of credit to Severa that she failed to retain the affection of Valentinian, though a less flattering reason is assigned by some of the authorities. The truth is that, since Valentinian is described as most chaste and most Christian, the accession of Justina to his palace has caused the ecclesiastical historians no little perplexity. The Church was peremptorily opposed to divorce, and regarded as adultery a second marriage contracted while the first wife lived. Baronius conveniently removes Severa by death, but Ammianus informs us that Severa was living long afterwards at the court of her son,30 and the Alexandrian Chronicle expressly312 says that Gratian recalled his mother to court. Tillemont acknowledges this, and can only blush for the guilty connivance of the clergy of the period.
If we could believe the ecclesiastical historian Socrates, Valentinian avoided the sin of divorce and adultery by promulgating a decree to the effect that it was lawful to have two wives, and promptly marrying Justina in addition to Severa. Of such a law, however, we have no trace, and most writers follow the alternative theory of the authorities.
Aviana Justina was the widow of the usurper Magnentius, who had so dramatically stolen the throne of the worthless Constans, and had been crushed by Constantius in the year 353. She was a woman of great beauty, the daughter of a high provincial official, a spirited and ambitious young woman. She would be in her later twenties, at least, in 368, when she entered the suite of Severa in some capacity. She was soon associated so intimately with the Empress that they bathed together, and Severa made the fatal mistake of describing what Socrates curiously calls her “virginal beauty” to the sensual Valentinian. Before long it was announced that Severa was divorced, and Justina occupied her bed. A late authority throws a thin mantle over the action of Valentinian. Severa, he says, used her Imperial position to compel a lady of Milan to sell her an estate at a most inadequate price, and Valentinian was unable to endure her avarice. The vague description we have of Justina’s dazzling beauty will, perhaps, suffice.
This remarkable conduct on the part of Valentinian and Justina is put in the year 368.31 The succeeding years of war and religious controversy throw no light on the character of Justina, and we need not describe them.313 Valentinian died in 375. Some delegates of the barbarians had come, with deep humility, to implore his clemency for their invasion of his dominions, and Valentinian burst into one of his appalling storms of rage. So violent was his fury in addressing them that he burst a blood-vessel, and left the Western Empire to his son Gratian. Gratian had married in the previous year. His Empress was the daughter of Faustina, who had been borne in her mother’s arms at the head of the troops of Procopius. In crossing the provinces to meet Gratian, Constantia had had a singular adventure. While she was dining at an inn, some twenty-six miles from Sirmium, the tribes broke across the Danube and occupied the village. There was just time for the Governor of Illyrium to snatch up the thirteen-year-old princess and make a dash for Sirmium. She married Gratian in 374, and became Empress of the West in the following year. But Flavia Maxima Constantia has left only the faint impress of her early adventures on the chronicles of the time, and the few years of her Imperial life have no interest for us. The next mention of her is that she died some time before her husband, who was assassinated in 383. He had married again, but his widow, L?ta, is a mere name in history. Theodosius gave a comfortable income to L?ta and her mother Pissamena, and they were distinguished for their charity in the later misfortunes of Rome.
When Valentinian had died in a fit of rage at Bregetio, Justina and her four-year-old boy, Valentinian the younger, were in the town of Murocincta, a hundred miles away. Justina hastened to the camp, and it was presently announced that the army had decided to associate the boy with Gratian in the rule of the West. Gratian, the most temperate and promising of the Emperors of the period, published his consent. A refusal to acknowledge the boy, and an attempt to punish the intrigue by which Justina retained her power, would have involved a civil war, and the whole of his forces were now needed to stem the flood of barbarism that surged against the northern frontier314 of the Empire. The last days of Rome were fast approaching. From the remote deserts of Asia a fierce and numerous people, the Huns, had entered Europe, and were sweeping the Goths and other Teutonic tribes southward. Gratian appointed an Emperor of the East, whom we shall meet presently, in the place of Valens, and spent his strength in heroic efforts to defend the threatened frontier.
Justina returned with the boy-Emperor to Mi............