The Rise of Stilicho: The Half-Vandal Who Would Rule Rome
- Adam Lofthouse
- Jul 6
- 4 min read
If you've read the previous blogs I've written in the past couple of weeks, ore indeed have read the first three books in the Shadow of Rome series, you'll know that the story is shifting. The old guard — Victorinus, Felicius — are stepping back, and a new figure is moving to the centre of the stage. Videricus is his name. A young Greuthungi warrior who could have been a king, but is instead a soldier in the employ of Rome.
Although it is not really Rome that Videricus serves. Not an empire that has his loyalty. But Stilicho, the great general who tried to hold it all together when the empire crumbled around him. The next three books follow his rise and fall. So I thought I'd start at the beginning — with how a soldier of barbarian blood climbed to become the most powerful man in the Western Roman Empire.
A Barbarian's Son
Stilicho was born around AD 360, the son of a Vandal cavalry officer serving in the Roman army and a Roman provincial mother. In the eyes of Rome's old aristocracy, that made him a barbarian — half of one, at least. It's a label his enemies would throw at him for the rest of his life, and eventually it would help destroy him.
But here's the thing that I find so compelling about him: there's almost nothing to suggest Stilicho ever thought of himself as anything other than a Roman. He served Rome, he worshipped as a Nicene Christian like the emperor he followed, and he spent his career trying to hold the Roman world together. He was, in every way that mattered to him, a son of the empire. The blood in his veins simply gave other men a weapon to use against him.
This is exactly the kind of tension I love writing about — the gap between what a man is and how the world insists on seeing him. The late empire is full of these people, caught between two worlds and fully at home in neither.
The embassy to Persia
Stilicho's first real appearance in the record comes in 383, when the young officer was sent east on a diplomatic mission — part of an embassy to the court of the Persian king Shapur III at Ctesiphon, to hammer out a settlement over the divided kingdom of Armenia.
It's a small thing on the face of it. He wasn't even leading the embassy; he was a junior member. But something happened on that journey, or shortly after it, that changed the course of his life. When he returned to Constantinople, Stilicho married Serena — the niece and adopted daughter of the emperor Theodosius himself.
Marrying into the imperial family
How exactly a junior officer of Vandal descent ended up marrying into the imperial house is one of history's lovely little mysteries. The poet Claudian, ever eager to flatter, claimed Theodosius handed Serena to Stilicho as a reward for his brilliance. But since Stilicho hadn't actually done anything brilliant yet, that's almost certainly polished nonsense.
The more likely truth is quieter and, to me, more human. Perhaps his duties simply brought him inside the imperial residence, where he and Serena met and settled the matter themselves. Or perhaps Theodosius, always thinking three moves ahead, saw the wisdom in binding a promising young general to his own family — tying a rising soldier's fortunes permanently to his dynasty.
Whatever the reason, it was the making of him. From that moment, Stilicho was no longer just an able officer. He was the emperor's kinsman.
The emperor's right hand
The rise that followed was steep. Around AD 385 he was made Count of the Domestics, commanding the emperor's own household troops. Then, in or shortly before AD 393, Theodosius appointed him magister utriusque militiae — commander-in-chief of both the infantry and the cavalry. It was the highest military office in the empire, and Stilicho would hold it until the day he died.
So when Theodosius marched west in AD 394 to crush the usurper Eugenius, it was Stilicho who stood among his most trusted commanders at the Battle of the Frigidus. And when Theodosius died just four months later, in January 395, it was Stilicho he left in charge — guardian of his young son Honorius, and effective ruler of the entire Western Roman Empire.
In a single generation, the son of a Vandal cavalryman had become the man holding the West together with his bare hands.
The tragedy to come
That's where the rise ends and the harder story begins — because holding the West together turned out to be an impossible task. Stilicho would spend the rest of his life fighting Alaric and the Goths, managing a weak and suspicious emperor, and battling the whispers of a court that never let him forget his barbarian blood. In the end, those whispers won. But that's a story for another post (and future books!).
For now, I just wanted to introduce him properly. Because whatever the histories say about how his story ended, the rise of Stilicho is one of the great "against all odds" climbs of the ancient world — and getting to write it has been one of the great pleasures of this series.
Stilicho takes centre stage in Barbarian and the Throne, book four of the Shadow of Rome series, out on 24th August. If you enjoy Roman historical fiction in the vein of Simon Scarrow, Ben Kane, Conn Iggulden or Harry Sidebottom, you can pre-order it now.
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