woodsdue

Gratianus ab exercitu suo proditus et ab obviis urbibus non receptus ludibrio hosti fuit, cruentaeque manus vestigia parietes tui, Lugdune, testantur.

Gratian, betrayed by his troops and denied admittance by the cities along the road, became an object of derision to the enemy; your walls, Lyons, attest the traces of that bloody hand.

So run the text and translation in Scourfield’s recent commentary on this letter.¹ He has translated manus to mean ‘hand’, following earlier translators of this oft-translated text.² But whose hand? Scourfield does not commit himself, but there are only two possibilities. The hand belonged either to Gratian or to the enemy to whom he had become an object of derision. One may adduce two arguments against the former interpretation. First, the description of the hand as bloody suggests that its owner was guilty of some violent crime. Not only do we know of no such crime in the case of Gratian, but it is doubtful whether Jerome would have alluded to it even if it had occurred. After all, Gratian had been a legitimate emperor, and an orthodox Catholic like Jerome himself. Second, no other source connects Gratian to the walls of Lyons. According to Socrates, Gratian’s assassin Andragathius met him near the city of Lyons, just as he had crossed a river, and killed him on the spot.³ Sozomen preserves a similar account of events, although he has Andragathius delay a short while after his capture of Gratian before he actually kills him.⁴ Zosimus preserves a tradition which mistakenly refers to the town as Singidunum rather than Lyons, but again the emphasis is on the capture and killing of Gratian on or near a bridge.⁵ Finally, John of Antioch also reports that Gratian was killed while crossing a river.⁶ So there is no evidence that Gratian was anywhere near the walls of Lyons when he was finally captured and killed. Obviously, this difficulty remains relevant also even if we prefer to interpret this hand as belonging to his enemy rather than to Gratian himself. More importantly, it is difficult to understand what it actually means to say that either Gratian or his enemy left the traces of his bloody hand upon the walls. On the face of it, this seems to require that the individual concerned left a bloody hand-print on the wall. Yet Gratian had been killed in 383, and Jerome wrote this letter in 396. It is hardly likely that he could really have believed that there remained bloody hand-prints on the walls of Lyons at the very moment he wrote. At best, Jerome seems to have been indulging in some rhetorical flight of fancy, but that still does not explain the reference to the walls rather than to a bridge.

I would like to propose an alternative translation and interpretation which pays due regard both to the grammar and the wider historical circumstances, that manus here means ‘band’ rather than ‘hand’, and does so in reference to the hosti ‘enemy’, used in a collective sense, to whom Gratian had become an object of derision. In brief, this passage refers to the ancient practice by which emperors placed the heads of those whom they had had executed as public enemies on public display.⁷ The fullest description of such a procedure relates to the treatment of the head of Dinzerich at Constantinople in 468:

Dinzerich son of Attila was slain by Anagnastes the magister militum per Thraciam and his head entered Constantinople while chariot races were being held; it was paraded along the Mese, and carried away to the Xylocircus and fixed on a pole. And all the city went out to view it for a number of days.⁸

We know that Theodosius I had Maximus beheaded shortly after his victory over him in 388, at a spot 3 miles from Aquileia, but we do not know what happened to the head subsequently.⁹ A corrupt fragment of Olympiodorus suggests that it ended up at Carthage in Africa. It claims that the emperor Honorius (395-423) placed the heads of the two western usurpers Jovinus (411-13) and Sebastian (412-13) on display outside Carthage at the same place where he had had the usurper Constantine (406-11) and his son Julian executed and where his father Theodosius had earlier set the heads of Maximus and Eugenius on display:

Against the wish of Ataulf Jovinus named his own brother, Sebastian, emperor and incurred Ataulf’s enmity. The latter sent an embassy to Honorius promising him both the heads of the usurpers and a peace treaty. The embassy returned, oaths were exchanged and the head of Sebastian was sent to the emperor. Jovinus was besieged by Ataulf and surrendered. He was sent to the emperor, but the prefect Dardanus, when he had him in his power, slew him.

Both of the heads were exposed outside Carthage (‘Karthagena’), in the same place where the heads of Constantine and Julian had been cut off earlier and where those of Maximinus (sic) and Eugenius, who had tried usurpation during the reign of Theodosius the Great, had met the same end.¹⁰

It is difficult to believe that the heads of any of these usurpers were sent to Carthage, let alone that the heads of as many as six usurpers should have ended up there, so that it has been suggested that ‘Karthagena’ should be emended to read ‘Ravenna’ instead.¹¹ This makes good sense in the case of the heads of Jovinus and Sebastian, as well as of Constantine and Julian, since Honorius had made Ravenna his capital since 402, but it constitutes no real improvement in the case of Maximus and Eugenius. For if one assumes that Theodosius had probably placed their heads on display outside his capital in the West at the time, then he ought to have put them on display outside Milan, not Ravenna.¹² This is a big assumption, of course, but the fact remains that there is no obvious reason why Theodosius should have wanted to put Maximus’ and Eugenius’ heads on display at Ravenna in particular. There is no evidence that he visited the city even once during his two stays in Italy in 388-91 and 394-5. Nor is there any evidence that either of Gratian or Valentinian II had ever visited the city. It is clear, therefore, that the problems posed by this fragment cannot be solved by the emendation of but one word alone. One suspects, in fact, that the epitomator, Photius, has misinterpreted a brief statement to the effect that Theodosius had treated the heads of Maximus and Eugenius in the same way earlier, i.e. that he also had used to put the heads of usurpers on display, to mean that he had put them on display in the same place also, which was not necessarily the case at all. Indeed, one doubts whether these two heads alone even need have been put on display in the same place. Whatever the case, this fragment does at least constitute proof that Theodosius put Maximus’ head on public display, even if we cannot agree on the location of its display.

It is my suggestion, therefore, that Theodosius sent the heads of Maximus and of some of his chief supporters to the city-walls of Lyons as their final resting-place, and that he did so in memory of Gratian whom they had allegedly had killed nearby and whose murder he claimed to be avenging.¹³ These were the vestigia to which Jerome refers here. One envisages a line of heads mounted upon stakes set upon the walls of Lyons much as the Sarmatians were alleged to have erected upon their walls in the face of Trajan’s attacks almost three centuries earlier.¹⁴ It may be objected, of course, that the passage in which this line occurs is highly rhetorical, and that this line is not meant to be interpreted literally, but it is not that rhetorical, and due consideration must be paid to a simple literal and historical interpretation where it offers itself. One should also note that this line occurs in the midst of a fairly detailed description of the misfortunes of seven legitimate emperors, three usurpers, and three former consuls. Yet there is no reason to doubt any of the details which Jerome furnishes concerning their misfortunes. Indeed, he ends his catalogue of the misfortunes of this period in the realisation that he was beginning to sound like a historian rather than the author of a letter of consolation.¹⁵ If one may allow some rhetoric on Jerome’s part here, it is to the extent that he could not have been sure that the heads remained on the walls still when he wrote this line, since he was in Palestine at the time and had been since 385. He is deliberately vague as to the identity of both the hosti and the manus only because he does not want to mention Maximus by name in his catalogue of the misfortunes of legitimate emperors, since he follows this with a brief description of the misfortunes of various usurpers, including Maximus.¹⁶ In the immediate context, therefore, this line is an aside, but one which serves to illustrate the larger theme of the passage, the transitoriness of human success.

Footnotes

1 J.H.D. Scourfield, Consoling Heliodorus: A Commentary on Jerome Letter 60 (Oxford, 1993) 66-67.

2 E.g. W.H. Fremantle, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers VI. St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works (New York, 1892) 129: ‘and your walls, Lyons, still bear the marks of that bloody hand’; F.A. Wright, Select Letters of St. Jerome (Cambridge, Mass. 1933) 299: ‘your walls, O Lyons, still bear the mark of that bloody hand’; J. Labourt, Saint Jérôme, Lettres Tome III (Paris, 1953) 105: ‘tes murs, ô Lyon, attestent des traces d’une main sanglante!’.

3 Soc. HE 5.11.

4 Soz. HE 7.13.

5 Zos. HN 4.35.6.

6 Joh. Ant. frg. 186 (Müller).

7 E.g. Septimius Severus had the head of his rival Albinus displayed on a pole at Rome (Dio 76.7.3; Hdn. 3.8.1); Arcadius had the head of the rebel Gainas paraded about Constantinople, on a pole presumably (Chron. Pasch. s.a.401). Strictly speaking, in November 395 the praetorian prefect of the East Rufinus was assassinated by the ‘general’ Gainas and his troops rather than formally executed, but no effort seems to have been made to prevent the public display of his remains also. As Jerome himself notes here, his head was carried into Constantinople on a javelin and his severed right hand was used to collect donations (Ep. 60.16.1; cf. Philost. HE 11.3, Zos. HN 5.7.5-6). So Jerome was certainly aware of the practice by which the head of a deceased enemy of the state was subjected to public display and abuse. Unfortunately, the evidence does not confirm one way or the other how long any these heads were left on display. Nor do we know what Valentinian I did at Paris in 366 upon receipt of the head of the usurper Procopius from Valens in Constantinople (Amm. 27.2.10). But it is consistent with the very purpose of such behaviour to assume that the heads were eventually set on semi-permanent display somewhere after the initial parades and festivities of abuse.

8 Chron. Pasch. s.a. 468. Tr. from M. and M. Whitby, Chronicon Paschale 284-628 AD (Liverpool, 1989) 90. The Mese was Constantinople’s main street, and the Xylocircus was a wooden circus outside its walls.

9 Claud. IV Cons. Hon. 85; Philost. HE 10.8; Cons. Constant. s.a. 388.

10 Phot. Bibl. Cod. 80, p. 173 = Olymp. frg. 20.1 in R.C. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire II (Liverpool, 1983) 183-5, whence the translation.

11 Blockley, op. cit., 216, favours this earlier suggestion, even though he retains the reading ‘Karthagena’ in his text and translation. The Annals of Ravenna state that the heads of Jovinus and Sebastian were brought there on 30 August 412. In contrast, Theophanes, Chron. AM 5904, states that they were brought to Rome in 412. J.F. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court AD364-425 (Oxford, 1975) 315, accepts the reading of Olympiodorus’ fragment at its face value and makes no attempt to evaluate its worth in the light either of its own internal problems or of the conflicting evidence of these other sources. Note his assumption, however, that these heads were displayed on the walls of Carthage, although the fragment actually states that they were displayed outside of Carthage: ‘the severed heads of Jovinus and his brother were before long embellishing the walls of Carthage, where they followed the gruesome precedents of other failed usurpers against the house of Theodosius.’

12 O. Seeck, Regesten der Kaiser und Päpste für die Jahre 341 bis 476 n. Chr. (Stuttgart, 1919) 275-85.

13 I say ‘allegedly’ because I do not believe that Maximus and his chief aides at the time did order the assassination of Gratian, even though it served Theodosian propaganda afterwards to claim that they had. Whatever the case, Pacatus says of Theodosius’ actions after the war that he executed ‘a few of the Moorish enemy, whom he [Maximus] had shut up with him like a hellish brigade when about to meet his doom, and two or three trainers of that raging gladiator’, but spared the rest (Pan. Lat. 2(12).45.5). It was these whose heads Theodosius set upon the walls of Lyons, I suggest.

14 See F. Lepper and S. Frere, Trajan’s Column: A New Edition of the Cichorius Plates (Gloucester, 1988) plate XX, or, for heads which the Roman troops erected upon stakes just outside a fort which they had captured, plate XLI.

15 Ep. 60.16.5: neque enim historiam proposui scribere, sed nostras breviter flere miserias.

16 Jer. Ep. 60.15.4.