Arcadius

Arcadius was the first emperor of the east after the empire divided permanently, and he was governed by everyone around him. Born in 377, he was the elder son of Theodosius I, was made Augustus at six, and inherited the eastern half in January 395 at seventeen when his father died at Milan. His brother Honorius, aged ten, took the west, and the two halves never had a single ruler again. He is described by contemporaries as small, dark, sleepy and slow of speech, and there is no act in his reign that anyone attributes to him. Power ran through his officials in succession. Rufinus, the praetorian prefect, was cut down by his own troops in November 395 in front of him. The eunuch chamberlain Eutropius replaced him, became the only eunuch ever to hold a consulship, and fell in 399. Then the empress Eudoxia, and after her death in 404 the prefect Anthemius, who governed competently and built the land walls of Constantinople that held for a thousand years. The eastern court spent these years working against Stilicho in the west, and refused every claim he made to authority over Arcadius. The great domestic quarrel was with John Chrysostom, the ascetic patriarch whose sermons against luxury the empress took personally, and who was deposed and exiled twice and died on the road in 407. He died in May 408, aged thirty-one, leaving a seven-year-old son. The east he left survived the west by a thousand years. Its survival owed a great deal to walls built by a minister he never chose.

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