GRATIAN (Flavius Gratianus), Roman Emperor. - Son of Valentinian I and his first wife Marina, b. at Sirmium on 23 May 359, d. near Lyon on 25 Aug. 383. Elected consul for the first time in 366, he was named Augustus in Aug. 367. He received a careful education under the guidance of the rhetor Ausonius; in 374 he married Constantia, daughter of Constantius II. In Nov. 375 he succeeded his father in the government of the Western Empire, but had to share it with his half-brother Valentinian II, acclaimed Augustus by the army when barely four years old, at the instigation of Justina, second wife of Valentinian I. A cultured, gentle youth of good morals, G. showed himself generous and clement. In 378 he went to the East to help his uncle Valens in the struggle against the Goths, and, Valens having been killed in Aug. of the same year, he remained master of the East as well for some months. In Jan. 379 he associated in the Empire the valiant Spanish general Theodosius, to whom he left the government of the East. In 383, while he was marching against the Alamanni, the general of Britain, Magnus Maximus, rebelled; G. marched against him, but, abandoned by the army, he was taken prisoner and murdered.
Although he was a convinced Christian, G. showed himself in the first years of his government indifferent to the religious questions that were then troubling the Church. Beginning instead from 378, under the influence and direction of St. Ambrose, he inaugurated an active religious policy wholly devoted to Catholicism and against paganism and Arianism. The first act of this new activity was the Council held at Sirmium (378) during the expedition to the East, in which attempts were made at rapprochement between the Eastern and Western bishops in order to combat together the Macedonian error, then arising, and to heal the schism that was afflicting the Church of Antioch; six heretical bishops of Illyricum were also deposed. Having returned to Gaul, where he had settled at Trier, he showed himself an increasingly open supporter of Nicene orthodoxy against every sort of heretic. In Aug. 379 and in Apr. 380 he issued two decrees of proscription against Arianism. Having settled at Milan, in 381 he convoked there, in Sept., at the suggestion of St. Ambrose, a Council attended by 35 Italo-Illyrian bishops, to judge the position of the two Arian bishops, Palladius of Ratiaria and Secundianus of Singidunum. The two heretics were deposed and G. ratified the sentence by driving them into exile. At the request of the same Council he also forbade the religious assemblies of the Photinians at Sirmium and of the Ursinians at Rome. In 382, again through his intervention, the Council of Rome was convoked to settle the questions of the Churches of Antioch and Constantinople torn by internal strife, but because of the absence of the Eastern bishops nothing was achieved. From the same year dates the decree of exile against the Priscillianists.
While G. labored for the restoration of Catholicism and the suppression of Arianism, he did not neglect to depress ever further also paganism; he abstained from persecuting the persons who still adhered to it, but he was radical and energetic in principles, taking decisive measures to separate the State completely from paganism. In 382 in fact he refused the title of Pontifex maximus, held until then even by Christian emperors; he had the altar of Victory removed from the hall of the Senate; he deprived the priestly colleges and the Vestals of the state subsidies and immunities they enjoyed and assigned their property to the public treasury; he forbade apostates from Christianity to make wills, proscribed divinatory superstitions and forbade public worship in the temples.
The religious policy of G. in the West, flanked by that of Theodosius in the East, certainly accelerated the end of paganism and the triumph of Catholic orthodoxy against Arianism.
Bibliography6 works
Agostino Amore