One day in the summer of AD 390, the gates around the packed horse arena of Thessalonica - the Eastern Roman Empire's second city - slammed shut. Armed legionaries spilled out through the tunnels and waded into the stands, to cut down the crowds like ears of wheat. The stands ran red with blood as between seven thousand and fifteen thousand civilians were butchered that day. 

What madness drove the soldiers of the empire to such depths of brutality? The madness, it seems, of Emperor Theodosius I, master of the Roman world.

The imperial hall in Milan - the effective capital of the Western Roman Empire at the time - was abuzz with chatter, the scrip-scrape of scribe's pens on vellum, the hasty coming and going of messengers and administrators. Presiding over it all was Theosdosius I - Emperor of the entire Roman world, East and West. Milan was his temporary home, and had been ever since winning the civil war against Magnus Maximus. That campaign had been so brutal (with the Battle of the River Save being particularly bloody) that he had been unable to extricate himself from the aftermath and return to his true seat of power - the city of Constantinople, jewel of the Eastern Empire for two years and counting.

Understandably, Theodosius would have been preoccupied, stressed and anxious with the burden of repairing the war-damaged West. So when yet another messenger from the East arrived, he probably thought it was to ask again when he would be returning to the East. After all, the hasty framework of deputies he had left behind there before marching on Maximus' West had been assembled to rule in his stead for a few months, not years.

Come spring AD 391, he finally began the long journey home to Constantinople. By all accounts he was a broken, tormented figure, driven mad by guilt and convinced that the best means of atonement was a furious new tide of Christian zeal.
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It began with a spate of increasingly-brutal anti-pagan edicts.

But pagans were fiercely protective of their ancient ways, and took to worshipping in private houses. It became almost the reverse of the situation a century before, when Christians had to worship in secret, fearing persecution.

In June 391, Theodosius explicitly forbade apostasy (conversion to paganism), and fiercely underlined his earlier rulings that pagan temples were a thing of the past.

Christian monks took this as permission to go and smash up pagan shrines. Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, oversaw the violent destruction of the Serapeum - the statue of Nile god that for eons had brought about the yearly and life-giving inundation of Egypt's grain fields. During the violence, the attached library was also destroyed and its riches looted.

The following year, Christians were jubilant when the Nile rose again in the normal way regardless of the statue's demolition.

On 8th November 391, the darkest decree was issued: that any and all acts of sacrifice would result in death for the perpetrator, regardless of rank or class.

In 393 he declared that the Olympic Games were a symbol of paganism, and that they would no longer take place.

Then in 394, the eternal fire in the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum was extinguished, and the Vestal Virgins were disbanded.

Now seems an apt. moment to quote the poet, Horace:

​Theodosius did at least issue one law that stood out amidst this tide of violent persecution: all capital sentences were to have a 30 day delay. This might have been down to his unshakeable guilt about the Thessalonica massacre that had triggered all this. We don't know how many were spared thanks to this 'month of mercy'.

​The furious Christian zeal destabilised the regime in Eastern Empire, and deeply unsettled the Western Empire, pitting the largely pagan Senatorial families of Rome and the populace of the land against the reforms that were being pushed upon them. They and the people of the West were ripe for mobilisation, for an emperor of their own. And it just so happened that there was a power-hungry warlord at the head of the Western legions who had been waiting for an opportunity like this...

Why not step into that ancient time, and live out the adventures of the legions caught up in all this chaos? My novel, LEGIONARY: DEVOTIO, will take you there!

On 24th August AD 410, Rome's starving inhabitants threw open the Salarian Gate, allowing the besieging Visigothic horde to flood in. Thus fell the Eternal City, for the first time in nearly eight hundred years.

​Alaric was born around AD 370, on Peuce, a large, arrowhead-shaped island in the delta of the River Danube - the fault line between the Eastern Roman Empire and Gothic 'barbaricum' (modern Romania and beyond).

​The Goths of this era were a collection of tribes and tribal confederations, the largest of which were the Thervingi and the Greuthingi. So close to the empire, one can imagine his tribal elders holding court around the fires, telling the Gothic young of the might of the Romans, and of their great city of gold and marble one thousand miles distant: Rome - eternal, invincible.

For generations before Alaric's time, the Goths had what can best be described as an awkward relationship with the empire. They traded with the Romans, and sometimes they served alongside the legions as foederati (allies). But they also raided south of the Danube, and so too the legions waded north of the Danube to violently punish this Gothic aggression.

Despite all this, their world was stable. Then everything changed in the mid-370s with the arrival from the eastern steppelands of a ravening nomadic people. When the Huns came, Alaric's world was shattered.

The Gothic warriors could not cope with the Huns' unorthodox and deadly way of horse combat. Arrow showers and rapid, false retreats was a skill no European people could counter. One by one, the Gothic and other Germanic tribes were destroyed or subjugated by the Huns. Desperate, the Greuthingi and Thervingi amassed at the Danube's northern banks opposite the Roman river frontier fortress town of Durostorum (modern Silistra, Bulgaria) and begged the Roman officials there to permit them to cross, to escape the fury of the Huns. Alaric would have been with them - a boy, confused and frightened by the sight of his elders gripped by terror like this.

The emperor of the time - Valens - realised he had no option. If he said no, the Goths would likely break across the river anyway - with the Huns at their backs and in fear for their lives. So he allowed them entry, thinking he might perhaps recruit their many warriors into his depleted legions.

​Vast refugee camps were thrown up on the imperial side of the river. But the Roman officers who presided over them were greedy, and began profiteering when food supplies ran short. A certain Count Lupicinus began selling the starving Goths dog meat in return for their children, whom he then sold into slavery for personal profit. Whatever kind of impression Alaric had of the Roman Empire prior to this, it was surely blackened almost irredeemably by Lupicinus' actions.

Understandably, the Goths rose up in revolt. A revolt borne of anger, of insult. They rampaged around Thrace, breaking and pillaging imperial cities. They also dealt the empire probably its greatest defeat in centuries at the Battle of Adrianople, where they crushed the legions and killed Emperor Valens himself.

This 'Gothic War' gripped all of Thrace for six years. No Roman or Goth ever felt safe during these times. The war finally ended in AD 382 when both sides, exhausted, and realising that this was an unwinnable conflict, agreed a peace treaty. The new emperor, Theodosius I, granted the Goths a series of arable settlements on Roman land (around northern Thrace), known as the 'Haims'. A tense co-existence followed.

Many Goths were recruited into the legions and the ambitious amongst them forged careers in the emperor's service, some even rising to serve in his sacred council. 

After only a few years, the peace deal began to fray. The treaty had never 'fixed' the Goths' anti-Roman sentiment, and Alaric himself had never been able to reconcile the things he had witnessed and experienced in his youth or seen since. He, like many like-minded Goths, felt angered that his people's sovereignty had been sold by those who had agreed the 382 deal - a deal he had had no say in personally. Around this time - reaching his late teens - he cemented a position of prominence amongst the Goths, and became the figurehead for his people's underground disquiet.

Come AD 388, the warriors of the Gothic Haims were mustered for the coming war between the Eastern Empire and the usurper who had seized the Western throne, Magnus Maximus. While encamped one night during the westwards march with the Eastern legions, Alaric led a desertion of a significant portion of the Gothic allies. They melted into the woods and marshes. The campaign Alaric then waged against the empire was much more shrewd than the Gothic War of 376-382. It was a guerrilla campaign, targeted at the empire's weaknesses.

For three years, he proved a deadly thorn in Emperor Theodosius I's side, hiding in Thracia's vast expanse of hills and woods, gathering in more and more followers - men of the Bastarnae tribe, Hun mercenaries, even Romans who were disaffected by the emperor's spiraling and violent pro-Nicene Christian zeal.

The Roman poet Claudian wrote disparagingly of Alaric as "a little-known menace", but he and his force dealt the empire some serious blows, including blockading and almost capturing Emperor Theodosius at the Hebrus River during his journey home from the Western Empire in the spring of AD 391.

Finally in AD 391, Stilicho - an Eastern general of the highest repute - cornered Alaric and his forces on the baking hot plains of Thrace. The soldiers braced for battle, but there was one last chance: talks, terms, a way to end the day without blood being spilled.

Stilicho stepped forward from his legionary lines. Alaric strode from the Gothic front to meet him. A cloud of emissaries and diplomats followed both. Details of the parley that took place are sketchy. We know only that Roman political rivals present served to almost spurn this chance of agreeing terms. But terms were agreed.

Alaric agreed to stand his rebel army down. He also conceded to make his forces available to the emperor, to fight alongside the legions whenever they were needed. In return, he demanded that his wandering nation - a nation that would come to be known as the Visigoths* - should be exempt from all other imperial tethers, including taxes. And that the Romans recognise him as their leader - leader of all those Goths and others who had flocked to support his cause.

​The King of All had arrived in earnest.

And his Visigothic army was called upon soon, for the Eastern and Western Empires were at loggerheads once more, thanks to a disputed succession in the West. A second civil war was brewing. This time, Alaric stayed true to the terms he had personally agreed in the 391 treaty. He and his Visigothic army fought like lions in the climactic and ruinous Battle of the Frigidus River in AD 394 - a clash that ended in the favour of the Eastern Empire and settled the civil war. This should, one would think, have calcified the bond between the Romans and the Visigoths? Alas, no.

The aftermath changed the Roman world forever. Emperor Theodosius died of dropsy, leaving a realm of broken legions, a bankrupt economy, and his two idiot sons on the thrones of East and West. Power, as they say, abhors a vacuum. So it was that the ambitious men of the empire began wrestling to control the boy emperors. Some sought to use Alaric and his Visigoths in their political games, and this quickly destroyed the bonds that had been forged in the civil war campaign.

Alaric was made promises of a position of authority in the imperial military - promises that were reneged upon. Also, the Visigothic people themselves began to reflect on what had happened at the River Frigidus: some ten thousand of them had been slain. Spiteful gossip arose: that they had been used as expendable spear fodder in the front lines of that conflict. The accord of 391 dissolved, and the Visigoths became hostile to the empire once more.

For the next decade and a half, Alaric and his wandering nation roved across the Roman Empire from West to East and back again, raiding and plundering, taking on new followers, and making battle with the legions - most often with his old nemesis, Stilicho.

​In time, Stilicho came to respect Alaric, and understood that the Visigoths were simply too powerful to destroy or subjugate. He worked hard to educate the Western Emperor, Honorius, and the Roman Senate on this reality. Eventually, they realised he was right, and so they loathingly accepted the Visigoths' presence in Gaul. They even accepted high-ranking Visigothic families into their Italian cities and into their halls of government.

When, in AD 408, a coup was launched upon Stilicho by a political rival, these Visigothic families were seen as Stilicho's allies. Stilicho was beheaded, and the Gothic families were massacred. Enraged once again by the empire's bloody duplicity, Alaric marched upon Italy, surrounding Emperor Honorius' capital of Ravenna. Promised vast sums of gold and silver in tribute, along with some 40,000 freed Gothic slaves, and offered the high command of the Roman army, he withdrew. When these terms were then reneged upon, Alaric knew he had to make the biggest statement of all, and so he marched on Rome herself - the city of legend that his elders had once talked of around the Peuce Island campfires.

The so-called 'sack' of Rome was not the frenzy of flames and looting that one might imagine. Despite all Alaric had suffered at the empire's hands, he understood - just as Stilicho had - that his people and the Romans had to find a way to live together. Damage to the city was limited to senate house (which was burnt down) and the Salarian Gate. Pillage was limited to easily movable objects. More, the Visigoths respected Rome's Christian temples as places of sanctuary.

​The above words, set down in Livy's 'The history of Rome since the foundation of the city', were uttered in 295 BC at Sentinum in southern Italy by the Roman cavalry commander, Publius Decius Mus, in a desperate moment of battle against an overwhelming force of invading Gauls and their Samnite allies. As the legions retreated around him, he climbed into the saddle of his horse and charged the mass of enemy warriors… and to his death. Livy goes on to report that this moment saw the scales of victory tilt in favour of the Romans. 

One can only imagine the profound effect of those who witnessed their commander - during the panicked moments of almost certain defeat - lay down his life to stir the hearts of his comrades. What more can a person give to a cause, than their very existence? And this is the essence of the ancient Roman oath of 'Devotio' - the word from which the modern term 'devotion' is derived.

Ultimately, the Romans won the Battle of Sentinum, leaving about 8,700 fallen legionaries on the battlefield, obliterating 25,000 enemies and enslaving another 8,000.

Publius' decision was not born in the eye of disaster. In fact he was following the example of his father, named also Publius Decius Mus, who, some forty years prior, while losing against a horde of Latins at the Battle of Veseris (near Mt. Vesuvius), threw himself against the enemy lines in a frenzy, causing them great panic. The Latins thought he was mad, and none wanted to clash swords with him. They were so disturbed by his mindless bravery, that they backed off and threw their spears at him instead, killing him. This was enough to break the Latins' momentum, to fragment their lines. Publius' Roman cohorts - inspired by their commander's self-sacrifice, roared back against the enemy, crushing them.

There are many other recorded instances of 'Devotio' in moments of near-disaster during battle - perhaps most famously by King Leonidas of Sparta during the darkest moments of his clash with the overwhelming Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 BC. 

For the Romans, where time permitted - for example, the night before a battle where the odds were not looking good - there was a ritual to accompany the oath of Devotio.

The oath giver would don a white toga with a purple hem, known as the toga praetexta, then step onto a spear lying on the ground. A pontifex (priest) would then chant the words of the vow, which the oath giver would repeat. Livy records the words of the Devotio oath as:

As well as meaning life-for-victory in battle, Devotio could also take another, more personal form - that of sacrificing your own life in exchange for saving another person. ​

It is this second type of Devotio that underpins my eponymous new novel, set in the Late Roman Empire's most chaotic years. A story that asks the question: 

What lengths would you go to, to save the ones you love?