Flavia Serena

This article deals with Serena, the niece of the Roman Emperor Theodosius I. For more meanings see Serena .

Serena with her husband Stilicho (right) and their son Eucherius (left)

Flavia Serena (* around 365 ; † 408 in Rome ) was the daughter of Honorius, the brother of the Roman emperor Theodosius I.

The educated Serena was Theodosius' favorite niece. In 384 he married her to his magister militum Stilicho , who gained great influence at court and with whom Serena had three children ( Maria , Eucherius and Thermantia ). After Theodosius' death in 395 she followed him to Milan , where Stilicho became the guardian of the young emperor of the Western Roman Empire , her nephew Flavius ​​Augustus Honorius , and his sister Galla Placidia . In 398 she and Stilicho married their older daughter Maria at the age of about ten to the 14-year-old Kaiser. Maria died very young and probably still a virgin between 404 and 407, after which Serena Honorius married Thermantia in early 408.

When the dispute over the very rich and very pious senator's daughter Melania shook relations between Christians and pagans in 404 , the pious Christian Serena encouraged the emperor to allow the underage young Christian woman and her also underage husband to own their property against the will of her family give away. In the dispute over John Chrysostom , Honorius followed her advice rather than Stilichos. According to Zosimos , she later tried to prevent the rift between the western and eastern rivers. When Alaric threatened to invade with his Visigoths , they urged the emperor to retreat to the safer Ravenna .

After Stilicho, who, despite rumors to the contrary, had been loyal to the emperor, was murdered as an alleged traitor, Serena was in Rome. There she was already unpopular because of her commitment to Melania and because of an iniquity committed in 395 on the statue of Rhea Silvia . According to Zosimos, she was executed by the Roman Senate in late 408 because it was feared that she would betray the city to the Goths under Alaric , who were besieging Rome for the first time.

literature

See also the information in the articles Theodosius I and Stilicho .

• Otto Seeck : Serena 2. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume II A, 2, Stuttgart 1923, column 1672 f.
• Arnold Hugh Martin Jones , John Robert Martindale, John Morris : Serena. In: The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (PLRE). Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1971, ISBN 0-521-07233-6 , p. 824.
• Alexander Demandt , Guntram Brummer: The trial against Serena in the year 408 AD In: Historia . tape 26 , 1977, pp. 479-502 .
  • Reprint in: Alexander Demandt: Zeitwende. Essays on late antiquity (=  contributions to antiquity . Volume 311 ). de Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-029461-3 , pp. 1-27 .
• Kirsten Groß-Albenhausen: Serena. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 11, Metzler, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-476-01481-9 , column 450 f.
• Anja Busch: The women of the Theodosian dynasty. Power and representation of imperial women in the 5th century (=  Historia - individual writings . Volume 237 ). Steiner, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-515-11044-0 , pp. 40–52 ( specialist review by H-Soz-Kult ).