ABSTRACT
The elevation of the senator Priscus Attalus to the throne in the winter of 409, while Alaric threatened to besiege Rome for the second time, arrived at the end of a tormented period. Between 401 and 408, a succession of troubles and a first, dramatic, siege of Rome gradually changed the relationship between the Court of Honorius and the Roman aristocracy. Honorius was again in Rome in the winter of 407, and it is believed that while there he celebrated his second marriage with Thermantia, daughter of Stilicho and Serena and sister of Eucherius and Maria. In the Roman Senate, as well as in government circles in Ravenna, the death at Constantinople of Honorius’s brother Arcadius, which the emperor learned of while still in Rome, increased the fear of a general upheaval.
