ABSTRACT
Among the extraordinary events capping the fourth century was that notorious episode of 390 CE known as the Thessalonian affair. Collectively, a riot in Thessalonica, the subsequent massacre, and the final confrontation between a bishop and his emperor strained and reinvented the methods of expressing grievance and remorse. Although key aspects of this sequence remain murky, the core events may be summarized as follows. In 390, as emperor Theodosius I sojourned in Rome, the people of Thessalonica revolted, killing at least one public official.1 For this infraction, the empire struck back with a punishment that, intentionally or not, ended in a massacre. The saga continued as Bishop Ambrose of Milan in a famous letter rebuked the Emperor Theodosius for his responsibility for the bloodshed. Additionally, Ambrose vowed to refuse him the Eucharist until the emperor exhibited proper remorse.2 The affair concluded when Theodosius accepted the bishop’s terms of repentance.3 Determining what exactly happened in the Thessalonian affair has vexed modern scholarship.4 The confusing character of the primary sources has led to two opposite poles of interpretation. Some scholars
1 While the precise date of this riot is unknown and disputable, general consensus places it in the spring or summer of 390 CE. See for example J. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court A.D. 364-425 (Oxford, 1975) 234. However, Vecchio dates the affair to 389 on the basis of calculations from near contemporary events: A. Vecchio, “La strage di Tessalonica,” Humanitas classica e sapientia Cristiana (Rome, 1992) 115-44. 2 Ambrose, Ep. 51. 3 For a summary, see F. Kolb, “Der Bußakt von Mailand,” in H. Boockmann, K. Jurgensen, and G. Stoltenberg (eds), Geschichte und Gegenwart Festschirft für Karl Dietrich Ermann (Neumunster, 1980) 41-64. 4 The most exasperated statement comes from Larson, who proposed that either the event made no sense or the surviving sources have no historical reliability: C.W.R. Larson,
show excessive trust in the sources by accepting them at face value.5 Others, recognizing the highly stylized quality of the later accounts, have rejected these sources in favor of a tentative reconstruction of events.6 This second approach has the advantage of common sense, yet it underutilizes the rich data contained in the fifth-century histories.
