STILICHO, FLAVIUS. - Son of a Vandal who had served with great honor 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, on an embassy to the Great King of Persia he had demonstrated ability and firmness, succeeding in making Roman interests respected without committing the Empire to a war. For such merits he finally obtained the supreme command of the army ("magister utriusque militiae") and in marriage Serena, niece of the emperor Theodosius.
He followed the Emperor to Italy on the victorious expedition against the usurper Eugenius. Therefore, at the death of Theodosius (397), the protection of his young sons fell to S. - Arcadius, aged 17, and Honorius, aged 11 - whose dignity as Augusti he had already had recognized; but since S. resided in the West near Honorius, it was not difficult for jealous courtiers to persuade Arcadius, regent at Constantinople, to assume a position of independence with respect to his guardian. The discord manifested itself at once, when masses of Goths, already long since admitted within the frontiers of the Empire and employed in war, returning from the expedition in Italy, lingered to plunder the regions of Illyricum. S. brought his troops to Thessalonica, but at 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 the order for S. to return to Italy. S. wished to avoid a civil war, and obeyed. Moreover, S. was not without grave concerns also in the West: the rebellion of the Moor Gildo, comes of the diocese of Africa, serious because of the cessation of the sending of grain to Rome, which had already been left without the tribute of Egypt, passed to Constantinople. Employing for the repression African forces commanded by Gildo's brother, the usurper was defeated and killed. The merits that S. had acquired, celebrated in a poem by Claudian, were recognized with a more intimate 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 also in civil government was wise and useful. Unfortunate, on the other hand, was another intervention of S. in the East, invoked this time to combat the leader of the Goths, Alaric, who was ferociously plundering Greece, and this increased the suspicions and hostilities against S. to the point that the Court of Constantinople offered Alaric the rank of magister militum for Illyricum, unloading the Gothic danger onto Italy, which presented itself as more appetizing than the repeatedly plundered Greece. After Aquileia was taken by the Goths and Milan threatened, from which Honorius fled, S., having gathered troops from Gaul and Britain, succeeded in defeating Alaric at Pollentia and Verona (year 402) and in winning another victory at Fiesole over other hordes of barbarians who had penetrated into Italy under the leadership of a certain Radagaisus (year 405). But it seemed that neither the one nor the other victory was fully exploited, and it was insinuated that S. even aimed at preparing the succession to the throne for his own son Eucherius, betrothed to the sister of Honorius, Galla Placidia.
It does not appear that one can doubt the loyalty of S. toward the house of his great emperor Theodosius. And he gave a final proof of it when, after conflicts arose among the Roman troops, instead of accepting the offers of his soldiers ready to follow him anywhere, he preferred to present himself, alone, at Ravenna to the emperor Honorius. Received hostilely, lured by deceit out of a church where he had taken refuge, S. was condemned to death as a traitor (Apr. 408). Two years later the Goths of Alaric were freely traversing Italy, and plundering Rome.
Bibliography6 works
Roberto Paribeni