The Death of Valens at Adrianople

The emperor Valens arrived at Constantinople on the thirtieth of May, in the year of his own sixth consulship and the second of Valentinian the Younger, and found the people very downcast. For the barbarians, who had already laid Thrace waste, were now plundering the very suburbs of Constantinople, and there was no adequate force at hand to resist them. But when they ventured to come close, even up to the walls of the city, the people were greatly troubled and began to murmur against the emperor. They accused him of having brought the enemy there and then lazily drawing out the struggle, instead of marching out against the barbarians at once. Moreover, at the games in the Hippodrome, everyone with one voice shouted against the emperor’s neglect of public affairs, crying out with great earnestness: “Give us arms, and we will fight ourselves!” [a]

The emperor, provoked by these seditious outcries, marched out of the city on the eleventh of June. He threatened that if he returned he would punish the citizens not only for their insolent taunts but also for having earlier favored the claims of the usurper Procopius, and he declared that he would raze their city to the ground and run the plow over its ruins. He advanced against the barbarians, routed them with great slaughter, and pursued them as far as Adrianople, a city of Thrace on the border of Macedonia. There he engaged the enemy again, who had by this time rallied, and he lost his life on the ninth of August, in the consulship just mentioned, in the fourth year of the two hundred and eighty-ninth Olympiad.

Some have said that he was burned to death in a village to which he had withdrawn, which the barbarians attacked and set on fire. Others claim that he took off his imperial robe and ran into the middle of the main body of infantry; that when the cavalry revolted and refused to fight, the infantry were surrounded by the barbarians and destroyed to a man; and that the emperor fell among them but could not be recognized, because he was not wearing his imperial dress. He died in the fiftieth year of his age, having reigned thirteen years together with his brother and three years after his brother’s death. This book, then, covers the events of sixteen years.