Friday, February 26, 2010

Today In History: ...but you can't choose your family.

On this date in 364AD, one Flavius Valentinianus, age 42, was proclaimed emperor on the death of the short-lived emperor Jovian.

Valentinian I, as he became known, had impeccable military chops; his dad was a general and he grew up an army brat. He'd been in since he was eighteen and worked his way up through the officer ranks, serving everywhere from Britannia to Africa to Mesopotamia. A senior commander in the armies of Julian the Apostate, he'd been mentored by the best, and when he took the reins of empire, he immediately set about aggressively beating back the barbarian threats on the Rhine and Danube frontiers.

The problem was that the tradition of using co-rulers to help manage the sprawling empire was well underway, and Valentinian needed one to keep an eye on the east while thumped barbarian hordes in the west. He picked his brother, Valens.

While Valentinianus had been off covering himself in blood and glory as a man among men, commanding the legions of Rome, his brother had been... Well, tending the family estates is honest work, nobody's saying it's not, but it probably didn't adequately prepare young Valens for the challenges he was going to face as Official Eastern Imperial Sidekick.

10 comments:

  1. Valentinian I, as he became known, had impeccable military chops; his dad was a general and he grew up an army brat.

    Not always a good thing, as I'm (genuinely) sure you knew.

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  2. Phil,

    The difference, of course, being that Valentinianus followed in dad's career footsteps, while Little Boots' dad was assassinated and he was raised in a plastic bubble by a crazy great grandma.

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  3. Ayup, that be so.

    If I'm not mistaken, by the International Treaty on Comment Threads, we now have to fall out and call each other Nazis.

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  4. And I thought he died in an airplane crash...

    CV word

    QUISIN- a series of dishes prepared using ingredients on their sell by dates.

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  5. Speaking of Caligula, I think the Senate today would work better if we had the entire horse in there instead of just its ass.

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  6. And if Presidents and Senators had nicknames like Michael minus-a quarter.

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  7. Wait- Little Boots was referenced in the song "Big Boots" - a tune on Elvis's "GI Blues." The King was stationed in Germany.... the Army of the Rhine... Germanicus... wheels within wheels, I tell you.

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  8. Simple answer is A) Don't have an incompetent, egomaniacal twit as headman, and B) Don't field an army composed of many different groups, all with different styles of fighting and lacking cohesive command and control.

    Oops, I'm sorry. You were talking Adrianople. I was thinking contemporary Afganistan.

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  9. You know what Ms. Tam? In light of recent conversations, I would love to see the persona, intrigue, drama, and comedy that you breathe into these vignettes of the great rise and fall, applied to our own ancient (a whole hundred fifty years ago) history. A short series even? AT

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