148- The Cousin's Cousin

This holiday season, reach for the one butter that never disappoints, Kerrygold. Made with milk from grass fed cows on Irish family farms, it's rich, creamy, and perfect for baking. Whether browning butter for cookies or crafting the flakiest pie crust, Kerrygold's high butter fat content makes all the difference in flavor and texture. Holiday treats will taste extraordinary. Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome. Episode one forty eight, the cousin's cousin. In March, the recently elected emperor Valentinian promoted his brother Valens to the rank of co Augustus. Though this was not the first time blood brothers would share control of the empire. It was the first time that blood brothers would share control of the empire without also wanting to tear each other's throats out. Caracalla and Geta, the sons of Constantine, these men were bitter, murderous rivals. Valentinian and Valens, on the other hand, would prove to be partners. The new emperors were, of course, not without their faults, but constantly trying to take each other out at the knees wasn't one of them. Their example not only built the foundations of the fairly stable Valentinian Theodosian dynasty, but it also firmly entrenched an East West division of the empire as the permanent form of imperial administration. Aside from the few years that Theodosius will stand as the sole ruler of the empire at the end of the century, this was it. This was when East really started to become east and West really started to become west. It didn't have to happen like it did. And at any number of points, the growing gulf between the two halves of the empire could have been narrowed rather than widened, but it didn't happen like that. And so the reign of Valentinian and Valens retroactively become something of a milestone. At the time, of course, it was just another day in the life of the Roman empire. Imperial power sharing was a well established practice. And so the fact that Valentinian and Valens were about to divide up the empire did not look to contemporaries like much of a milestone at all. After the promotion of Valence, the two new coagustai traveled west together on a brief tour of the Danube provinces. When they arrived at Sirmium, just 50 miles from where they had been born, they called a conference of all the senior court officials to hash out who was going to get what. As the senior Augustus, Valentinian had first dibs on territory, and he elected to take the Western provinces and govern from Milan, leaving Valens to take the Eastern provinces and govern from Constantinople. This seems like an odd choice for Valentinian to make, not just because Constantinople was the central capital of the empire, but because at the moment, the biggest issue facing Rome by far was how to properly manage the eastern border following Jovian's peace treaty with Shippur. You would think that as senior emperor, he would want to …