On August 22, AD 392, an unlikely man was raised to the imperial purple of the Western Roman Empire. His name was Eugenius and for most of his career up to that point, he had been an academic serving the Western imperial court. The pagan historian Zosimus, writing in the early 6th century AD, describes Eugenius’s early career and his path to power: There was in the court a person named Eugenius, a man of learning, who was a professor and teacher of rhetoric. He had been recommended to the notice of Arbogastes by Rictomeris as a person of a...