Welsh Journals

MACSEN, MAXIMUS, AND CONSTANTINE FOR the historian of the Roman empire, the proclamation in Britain in A.D. 383 of its military commander, Magnus Maximus, and his subsequent reign in Gaul, Spain and, for a time, Italy, are events of more than casual importance. The rebellion is relatively well documented, interesting in itself, both in a political and in a cultural and religious dimension (Maximus was the first emperor to order the execution of a heretic), and as an example of something more widely relevant to the question of the political structure and survival of the Roman empire. At various times in the fourth century, as, more obviously, in the third, usurpation had met needs for local defence and financial and legal administration when legitimate emperors were too distant and too harassed to attend to them. It is, therefore, a sort of diagnostic test of the natural divisions of the empire at times when these did not coincide with the conventional ones. For, on the other side, that of the legitimate emperors, an overriding sense of the integrity of the imperial office had led to the determined suppression of usurpations, even to the apparent detriment of provincial communities which the pretenders, like the 'Gallic emperors' of the 260s and 270s, were better able to protect. Maximus established strong government over the regions under his control. Contemporary Gallic opinion appears favourable to his integrity of character and rigour of government-the more strikingly since Maximus met his downfall, in 388, at the hands of a legitimate emperor whom one would expect to have influenced the surviving sources against him.1 In all this, Maximus appears as a model of a wider phenomenon rather than a figure of consuming individual interest. That one should think of commemorating the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of his usurpation is the product of a rather different aspect of his reputation. In venturing his fortune on the Continent, Maximus, it was later believed, deprived Britain of its best fighting troops and exposed the province to the inroads of barbarian invaders. But there is not only this, one would have thought, rather negative achievement to consider. In the later tradition, Maximus is seen more simply as the last Roman emperor to rule in Britain and, as David Dumville 1 For the favourable view, Sulpicius Severus, Dialogus 11.6.2, vir omni vita merito praedicandus, and 111.11.2; 11, multis bonisque actibus praeditus, etc.; Orosius, Historia adversus paganos, VII.34.9: cf. J. Fontaine, Vie de Saint Martin, III (Sources chretiennes 135, 1969), p. 921. The hostile 'official' view, Pacatus, Panegyricus Theodosio dictus (ed. Galletier, Panegyriques Latins, Vol. Ill, 1955).