Biography
Son of the magister Ardaburius, Aspar played a crucial role in his father's expedition in 424 to defeat the western usurper, Joannes of Ravenna, and to install Galla Placidia and her son, Valentinian III, in his place. He also helped to negotiate a peace treaty with Geiseric after the Vandal invasion of Africa.
Aspar attained the consulship in 434 after campaigning in Africa. However, Aspar could not become emperor because of his Arian religion. Instead, he played the role of kingmaker with his subordinate, Marcian, who became emperor by marrying Theodosius II's sister Pulcheria.
On 27 January 457 Marcian died, and the political and military characters of the Eastern court took eleven days to choose a successor. Despite the presence of a strong candidate to the purple, the magister militum and Marcian's son-in-law Anthemius, the choice was quite different. Aspar, who in this occasion was probably offered the throne by the Senate but refused, could have chosen his own son Ardabur, but instead selected an obscure tribune of one of his military units, Leo I.
In 470, in an episode of the struggle for power between Aspar and the Isaurian general Zeno, Aspar persuaded the emperor to appoint his second son, Julius Patricius, as caesar and give him in marriage his daughter Leontia. However, as for the clergy and people of Constantinople an Arian was not eligible to become an emperor, at the news of the appointment riots broke out in the city hippodrome, led by the head of the Sleepless Monks, Marcellus: Aspar and Leo had to promise to the bishops that Patricius would convert to Orthodoxy before becoming emperor, and only after the conversion he would have married Leontia.
In 471 an imperial conspiracy caused the death of Aspar and of his elder son Ardabur: it is possible that Patricius died on this occasion, although some sources report that he recovered from his wounds.
Aspar was the teacher of Theodoric the Great, who later became king of the Ostrogoths. Aspar had another son, Ermanaric, with the sister of Theodoric Strabo. Aspar's wife was an Ostrogoth, as the Ostrogoth King Theodoric was her nephew. A cistern attributed to him still exists today in Istanbul.
Read more about this topic: Aspar
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)