Thessalonica, Ambrose, and the Penance of an Emperor

In 390 a Gothic garrison commander was lynched by a crowd in Thessalonica after arresting a popular charioteer. The reprisal was carried out in the hippodrome: the population was invited to the games and then attacked by soldiers, and the sources report thousands dead. The order came from the emperor, and the accounts say he tried to countermand it too late.

Ambrose, bishop of Milan, where the court then was, withdrew from the emperor's presence and wrote him a private letter saying that he could not offer the eucharist in his presence until he had done penance, and that he wrote as one who did not wish to shame him publicly. Theodosius submitted. He laid aside the imperial insignia, did public penance in the church at Milan over a period of months, and was restored to communion.

The episode became one of the most cited events in the whole medieval argument about the two powers, and it is worth handling carefully, because the version everyone knows is not the earliest. Ambrose's own letter survives and is restrained. The dramatic scene of a bishop barring an emperor at the church door and confronting him in front of a crowd comes from Theodoret, writing decades later, and reads as an improvement. What is not in doubt is the substance: a bishop imposed a penance on a reigning emperor for an act of state, and the emperor accepted it, which had not happened before.