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| Of the expedition of Valens against the Goths and how he paid the penalty of his impiety. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter XXXII.—Of the expedition of Valens against the Goths and
how he paid the penalty of his impiety.
Valens,
however, spurned these excellent counsellors, and sent out his troops
to join battle while he himself sat waiting in a hamlet for the
victory. His troops could not stand against the barbarians’
charge, turned tail and were slain one after another as they fled, the
Romans fleeing at full speed and the barbarians chasing them with all
their might. When Valens heard of the defeat he strove to conceal
himself in the village where he lay, but when the barbarians came up
they set the place on fire and together with it burnt the enemy of
piety. Thus
in this present life Valens paid the penalty of his errors.807
807 “On the 9th August, 378, a day long and fatally memorable in
the annals of the empire, the legions of Valens moved forth from their
entrenched camp under the walls of Hadrianople, and after a march of
eight miles under the hot sun of August came in sight of the barbarian
vanguard, behind which stretched the circling line of the waggons that
guarded the Gothic host. The soldiers of the empire, hot, thirsty,
wearied out with hours of waiting under the blaze of an August sun, and
only half understanding that the negotiations were ended and the battle
begun, fought at a terrible disadvantage but fought not ill. The
infantry on the left wing seem even to have pushed back their enemies
and penetrated to the Gothic waggons. But they were for some reason not
covered as usual by a force of cavalry and they were jammed into a too
narrow space of ground where they could not use their spears with
effect, yet presented a terribly easy mark to the Gothic arrows. They
fell in dense masses as they had stood. Then the whole weight of the
enemy’s attack was directed against the centre and right. When
the evening began to close in, the utterly routed Roman soldiers were
rushing in disorderly flight from the fatal field. The night, dark and
moonless, may have protected some, but more met their death rushing
blindly over a rugged and unknown country.
“Meanwhile Valens had
sought shelter with a little knot of soldiers (the two regiments of
“Lancearii and Mattiarii”), who still remained unmoved
amidst the surging sea of ruin. When their ranks too were broken, and
when some of his bravest officers had fallen around him, he joined the
common soldiers in their headlong flight. Struck by a Gothic arrow he
fell to the ground, but was carried off by some of the eunuchs and
life-guardsmen who still accompanied him, to a peasant’s cottage
hard by. The Goths, ignorant of his rank, but eager to strip the
gaily-clothed guardsmen, surrounded the cottage and attempted in vain
to burst in the doors. Then mounting to the roof they tried to smoke
out the imprisoned inmates, but succeeding beyond their desires, set
fire to the cottage, and emperor, eunuchs, and life-guardsmen perished
in the flames. Only one of the body-guard escaped, who climbed out
through one of the blazing windows and fell into the hands of the
barbarians. He told them when it was too late what a prize they had
missed in their cruel eagerness, nothing less than the emperor of
Rome.
Ecclesiastical
historians for generations delighted to point the moral of the story of
Valens, that he who had seduced the whole Gothic nation into the heresy
of Arius, and thus caused them to suffer the punishment of everlasting
fire, was himself by those very Goths burned alive on the terrible 9th
of August. Thomas Hodgkin—“The Dynasty of
Theodosius,” page 97. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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