No shelter has Apollo, nor sacred laurel leaves
The fountains are now silent; the voice is stilled.
It is finished."
Christian historiography traditionally holds Theodosius as a hero of the church and a glorious persecutor of paganism, and for a long time historians accepted that he was in fact the emperor who forcefully installed Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire and banned all other faiths. The fact that he was the third and final emperor born in Hispania, following the trend of Trajan and Hadrian, might evoke in the reader a foreshadowing of Spanish conquistadors toppling Huitzilopochtli statues many centuries later. However, those views are Dated History nowadays, as it is now known that, while he was certainly an ardent Christian of the Nicene Creed and a promoter of orthodoxy, Theodosius was quite tolerant towards non-Christians and made no move towards forceful conversions, being much more active against rival forms of Christianity like Arianism and Manichaeism. He was, alas, slow to act against those who favored harder measures; the last Olympic Games, as well as the last prophecies of Apollo in Delphi, were held under his mandate before being suppressed, although historians are unsure whether he personally ordered it.
Theodosius was born the son of Flavius Theodosius, a high-ranking general for Western Emperor Valentinian I. His early life remains obscure, but it seems that, like Trajan before him, he belonged to a sort of Hispanic family lobby and went on to have a successful military career before reaching the purple. He had his first great showing alongside his father, deployed in Britannia to help drown the Great Conspiracy, in which the garrison of Hadrian's Wall had revolted and supported an amphibious German and Celtic invasion of the isles. His career took a bump afterwards, as Theodosius Sr. was murdered and his family forced to exile themselves to Hispania by the political supporters of the new child emperor Valentinian II, but the Hispanics were eventually reinstated by Gratian, who went to share command of the Western Empire with the kid. When news reached Rome that the Eastern Emperor Valens had been disastrously defeated and killed in Adrianople against invading Goths, Theodosius became the best candidate to manage the crisis, so Gratian begrudgingly gave him the vacated throne.
The new Eastern Emperor did his best to reinforce the frontier and replenish the local military, but the state of things was so dire that he had to forcefully conscript random people and admit masses of allied barbarians as auxiliaries. With this makeshift army, Theodosius managed to scrape some minor victories, including a highly-publicized submission of the Goth chieftain Athanaric, but over time Theodosius realized Rome could not aspire to keep the barbarians outside forever, so he changed plans and sought out negotiations. These were concluded in the peace treaty of 382, in which Goths would be allowed to settle in the empire as semi-independent states in exchange for military help. Around this time, by the hand of Ascholius, the Bishop of Thessalonica, Theodosius converted to Christianity after a long disease, likely because the promise of a glorious afterlife became very attractive for someone seeing death up close so often. Furthermore, with the support of Gratian and Valentinian, he issued the appropriately named Edict of Thessalonica, establishing Nicene Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire and condemning all the other Christian denominations as heresies to be punished.note
The Edict is notable by being the first secular Roman law to positively enforce religious orthodoxy, although as noted above, despite its ominous presentation in regards to the varied faiths of the empire, it did not savagely compromise freedom of religion, as it only targeted Christians, who amounted to a meager, urban-focused 10% of the Roman Empire at the time. Theodosius would not persecute pagans, having many of them in his own circle, and at some points even acted to protect them and their patrimony from Christian abuse, although this policy was not always skilfully enforced and this allowed desecrations of monuments like the Serapeum of Alexandria, wrecked by Christian mobs. Similarly, sources have also credited him with the destruction of the Delphic Oracle and the closure of the Olympic Games, although again, it’s hard to tell whether he had a hand in it or it merely happened during his mandate. In the end, while Theodosius did progressively work to limit paganism and promote Christianity, he adhered more to a cautious, nuanced and tactical approach than to the image of a wild Bible-thumper.
Peace lasted over a year, after which a Britannian pretender to the western throne, Magnus Maximus, attacked the court and killed Gratian. Being busy with the usual barbarians and the additional threat of the Sassanid Empire, Theodosius helped to patch things up between Magnus and Valentinian II, ensuring peace among them for some years, whilst he invested in controlling the frontier, putting down some inner rebellions and signing another peace treaty with the Sassanids in Acilisene. This left the Hispanic with his hands free for the inevitable clash with Magnus, who declared war due to Valentinian's escape to the eastern court, but Theodosius made good use of his allied barbarians, including Goths, Alans and Huns, and defeated Magnus in the city of Poetovio, eventually capturing and executing him. The victory turned Theodosius into the practical ruler of all of the Roman Empire, the last to do so before dividing the empire between his sons.
390 was the year of the infamous Massacre of Thessalonica, during which an urban riot in the aforementioned city got out of hand and ended with the army butchering people on the streets left and right. The official story seems to be that a Goth commander executed a famous charioteer for sexual assault, which angered the population and caused all Hell to break loose, but chroniclers are unclear on what exactly happened, with Theodosius' personal implication being commonly entertained, although how much and exactly why remain open questions. In any case, St. Ambrosius of Milan gave the emperor a What the Hell, Hero? by letter, giving rise to a popular legend of the Saint personally barring the Emperor from entering the Cathedral in Milan and attending mass, and the incident became a black mark on Theodosius' reign, which only in modern times have historians begun to question.
Theodosius then got into yet another civil war when one of his barbarian loyalists, the Frankish general Arbogast, capitalized on Valentinian's suicide to seize power in his stead (it seems likely that Arbogast had the emperor assassinated and made it pass as a suicide) and proclaim another loyalist, the pagan revivalist Eugenius, as new emperor of the west. Theodosius answered by appointing his son Honorius as the true emperor of the Western Empire, gathering another of his multinational armies, and marching against the usurpers to terminate the affair with extreme prejudice. Atypically, Theodosius attacked them with human wave tactics, perhaps because he secretly expected to kill two birds with one stone and weaken untrustworthy allies, and at least one of his Gothic allies mutinied and escaped. However, the winds turned in their favor, literally speaking, when hurricanes disrupted Eugenius' army and allowed Theodosius to easily trump him. The pretender was executed and Arbogast killed himself, leaving Theodosius the victor again, only for him to suddenly die of edema a few days later. The empire was left divided between his sons, Honorius and Arcadius, who would have to deal with the Goth deserter - whose name, by the way, was Alaric.
