STILICONE, FLAVIO. — Son of a Vandal who had served with great distinction under the emperor Valens, he had entered the military and had not failed to distinguish himself and to obtain commands and political missions of great importance. In particular, in an embassy to the Great King of Persia he had demonstrated skill and firmness, succeeding in ensuring that Roman interests were respected without involving the Empire in a war. For these merits he finally received supreme command of the army (“magister utriusque militiae”) and married Serena, niece of the emperor Theodosius.
He followed the Emperor to Italy in the victorious expedition against the usurper Eugenius. Consequently, upon the death of Theodosius (397), the protection of his young sons Arcadius, aged 17, and Honorius, aged 11, fell to S.; he had already had them recognized as Augusti. But since S. resided in the West with Honorius, it was not difficult for jealous courtiers to persuade Arcadius, regent at Constantinople, to adopt an independent position with respect to his guardian. The disagreement immediately manifested itself when masses of Goths, who had long since been admitted within the borders of the Empire and employed in war, lingered on their return from the expedition to Italy to plunder the regions of Illyricum. S. brought his troops to Thessalonica, but in Constantinople it was desired that the prefecture of Illyricum should not depend on the West, and Flavius Rufinus, praetorian prefect at Constantinople, obtained from Arcadius an order for S. to return to Italy. S. wished to avoid an internal war and obeyed. In any case, S. also faced serious concerns in the West: the rebellion of the Moor Gildo, comes of the diocese of Africa, which was grave because of the cessation of the shipment of grain to Rome, already deprived of the Egyptian tribute that had passed to Constantinople. Employing African forces commanded by Gildo’s brother to suppress the revolt, the usurper was defeated and killed. The merits S. had acquired, celebrated in a poem by Claudian, were recognized by a still closer bond of kinship with the imperial family through the marriage of the fourteen-year-old Honorius to S.’s daughter, Maria. S. was therefore arbiter of the Empire, and his work in the civil government as well was wise and beneficial. Less fortunate, however, was another intervention by S. in the East, this time requested in order to combat the leader of the Goths, Alaric, who was savagely plundering Greece; this increased suspicions and hostility toward S. to such an extent that the Court of Constantinople offered Alaric the rank of magister militum for Illyricum, shifting the Gothic danger onto Italy, which appeared more attractive than Greece, repeatedly plundered as it was. After the Goths had taken Aquileia and Milan was threatened, from which Honorius fled, S., having gathered troops from Gaul and Britain, succeeded in defeating Alaric at Pollentia and Verona (402) and in winning another victory at Fiesole over other hordes of barbarians who had entered Italy under the leadership of a certain Radagaisus (405). But it seemed that neither victory had been fully exploited, and it was insinuated that S. was even aiming to prepare the succession to the throne for his own son Eucherius, betrothed to Honorius’s sister, Galla Placidia.
There appears to be no reason to doubt S.’s loyalty to the house of his great emperor Theodosius. He provided a final proof of it when, after conflicts had arisen among the Roman troops, instead of accepting the offers of his soldiers, who were ready to follow him anywhere, he preferred to present himself alone at Ravenna before the emperor Honorius. Received with hostility and deceitfully lured out of a church where he had taken refuge, S. was condemned to death as a traitor (April 408). Two years later Alaric’s Goths moved freely throughout Italy and sacked Rome.