Flavius Gaudentius

Who was Flavius Gaudentius?

Flavius Gaudentius was the father of the Roman magister militum Flavius Aetius and married to an Italian noblewoman. He was of Scythian extraction.

Gaudentius served under the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius I against the usurper Eugenius. Later, when his son Flavius Aetius was born in 396, Gaudentius served as magister equitum, or Master of Cavalry, under the Emperor Honorius. In 399, he served as the Comes Africae. Presumably he was Christian, as Augustine of Hippo claimed that he destroyed pagan temples in Carthage. According to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gaudentius was still serving the Western Empire in the 420s as magister militum of the Western Roman Empire. He served under the usurper Ioannes until his death in a military uprising in Gaul in 425.