Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume II/Socrates/Book IV/Chapter 38
Chapter XXXVIII.—The Emperor Valens is ridiculed by the People on Account of the Goths; undertakes an Expedition against them and is slain in an Engagement near Adrianople.
The Emperor Valens arrived at Constantinople on the 30th of May, in the sixth year of his own consulate,[1]
and the second of Valentinian the Younger, and found the people in a
very dejected state of mind: for the barbarians, who had already
desolated Thrace, were now laying waste the very suburbs of
Constantinople, there being no adequate force at hand to resist them.
But when they undertook to make near approaches, even to the walls of
the city, the people became exceedingly troubled, and began to murmur
against the emperor; accusing him of having brought on the enemy
thither, and then indolently prolonging the struggle there, instead of
at once marching out against the barbarians. Moreover at the exhibition
of the sports of the Hippodrome, all with one voice clamored against
the emperor’s negligence of the public affairs, crying out with
great earnestness, ‘Give us arms, and we ourselves will
fight.’ The emperor provoked at these seditious clamors, marched
out of the city, on the 11th of June; threatening that if he returned,
he would punish the citizens not only for their insolent reproaches,
but for having previously favored the pretensions of the usurper
Procopius; declaring also that he would utterly demolish their city,
and cause the plough to pass over its ruins, he advanced against the
barbarians, whom he routed with great slaughter, and pursued as far as
Adrianople, a city of Thrace, situated on the frontiers of Macedonia.
Having at that place again engaged the enemy, who had by this time
rallied, he lost his life on the 9th of August, under the consulate
just mentioned, and in the fourth year of the 289th Olympiad. Some have
asserted that he was burnt to death in a village whither he had
retired, which the barbarians assaulted and set on fire. But others
affirm that having put off his imperial robe he ran into the midst of
the main body of infantry; and that when the cavalry revolted and
refused to engage, the infantry were surrounded by the barbarians, and
completely destroyed in a body. Among these it is said the emperor
fell, but could not be distinguished, in consequence of his not having
on his imperial habit. He died in the fiftieth year of his age, having
reigned in conjunction with his brother thirteen years, and three years
after the death of the brother. This book therefore contains [the
course of events during] the space of sixteen years.
Footnotes
[edit]- ↑ 378 a.d.