Gratian Murdered by the Usurper Maximus

At almost the same time as these synods were being held at Constantinople, the following events took place in the West. Maximus, coming from the island of Britain, rebelled against the Roman empire and attacked Gratian, who was then worn out and exhausted by a war with the Alemanni. In Italy, since Valentinian was still a minor, Probus, a man of consular rank, had the chief management of affairs and was at that time praetorian prefect. Justina, the young prince’s mother, held Arian views. As long as her husband lived she had been unable to harm the Homoousians. But when she went to Milan while her son was still young, she showed great hostility to Ambrose the bishop and ordered him banished. The people, out of their great devotion to Ambrose, were resisting those who had been charged with taking him into exile, when news arrived that Gratian had been murdered through the treachery of the usurper Maximus. [a]

What happened was this. Andragathius, a general under Maximus, hid himself in a litter shaped like a couch and carried by mules, and he ordered his guards to spread the report ahead of him that the litter carried the emperor Gratian’s wife. They met the emperor near the city of Lyons in Gaul, just as he had crossed the river. Believing it was his wife and suspecting no treachery, he fell into his enemy’s hands like a blind man into a ditch: Andragathius suddenly sprang out of the litter and killed him. So Gratian died in the consulship of Merobaudes and Saturninus, in the twenty-fourth year of his age and the fifteenth of his reign. When this happened, the empress Justina’s anger against Ambrose was held in check. Afterward Valentinian, very unwillingly but forced by the needs of the time, accepted Maximus as his colleague in the empire. Probus, alarmed at the power of Maximus, decided to withdraw to the regions of the East. So he left Italy, went to Illyricum, and settled at Thessalonica, a city of Macedonia.