What shall it profit a man, if he shall win a kingdom, and lose his son?
By any public measure, the life of Arkadios must be considered a success. Under his rule the theme of Antioch had expanded north and south, forming a barrier between the infidel and the Mediterranean behind which the Roman Empire could fight its civil wars without interruption. His eldest son, beneficiary of the Antiochene Intrigue, ruled a Caucasian princedom; and due partly to the reputation for ruthlessness Arkadios had acquired during that affair, even the most Byzantine intriguer at the court of Constantinople feared to climb a ladder of daggers stuck in Komnenoi backs. And to crown his achievements, after making the Loyal Peace with the Emperor Dukas by cleaning his court and making him master in his own house, he had cemented the alliance by marrying the Emperor's daughter, Pulcheria.
And yet public achievement was balanced by private tragedy. At this distance in time it is hard to untangle cause and effect even for the great matters of the day, much less for the internal affairs of families; we cannot say why Ioannes, alone of Arkadios's sons, should have been the cause of so much grief. Did he feel neglected during his father's long campaigns? Jealous of his elder brother's inheritance? For much of his childhood he was attended mainly by servants; was there some darker secret, some unloyal corrupter of youth? We do not know. But where motivation is murky, the facts remain. We know that Ioannes pushed the undoubted privileges of upper-class Roman males well beyond the accepted limits. To the usual moneys paid to dower no-longer-chaste female servants, an expected expense, were added large sums in compensation for actual beatings. Men in Ioannes's position did not need to use force merely to fill their beds; although dowries were by convention listed in family accounts as "compensation for rape", this was understood by all to be a polite fiction, avoiding the charge of adultery against the women. Something other than the ordinary randiness of teenaged humans must have been involved.
Arkadios, juggling his many other commitments, nonetheless found time to respond to his son's crimes - as we may rightly call them at this distance, though at the time they were often referred to, even by enemies of the Komnenoi, as 'antics'. The recorded public rebukes followed, no doubt, private admonishments; and as Arkadios, like his father, was a conscious reviver of Roman traditions, including the custom of
patria potestas, we need not believe that Ioannes's punishments were limited to hard words. Nor can Arkadios be accused of having used only the stick; as soon as he was of age, Ioannes was allowed to accompany his father on campaign, and given high rank in the army. Indeed this was the most successful of Arkadios's dealings with his son; on campaign they appear to have found a natural camaraderie, and we hear nothing of ill discipline on Ioannes's part (although it may be pointed out that rape of enemy women was not considered bad discipline at the time), and much of his military achievements.
But Antioch could not remain forever at war, and in peacetime Ioannes appears to have had all the vices of the combat soldier confined to a big-city garrison. Even if we discount a large part of the stories of drunken brawling as slanders by Komnenoi enemies, we are left with the fact that, in 1119, the city apparently became too hot for him and he left for an extended tour of the provinces. Why Arkadios chose not to simply suppress the mobs baying for his son's life we cannot know. It is possible that he feared such an order would not be obeyed; but as his soldiers were recruited largely from estates outside the city, rather than from the citymen they would be suppressing, it does not seem likely. Did he feel there was justice in the complaints? Or did he hope that his son could be shocked into reform? Or perhaps he was, for once in his life, battered by events into an uncharacteristic vacillation? We do not know; but it is certain that Ioannes's bachelor villa, separate from the palace, was put to the torch, that he himself only barely escaped with his life, and that he then left the city for a year, until things had cooled down.
Even so, Ioannes remained sufficiently unpopular in Antioch that Arkadios thought it wise to get him out of the way for a further period; to this end, he made his son military governor of distant Monreal, with the task of converting the heathens there. At this point, it appears that Arkadios had given up on reforming his scapegrace son, and limited himself to damage control; let Ioannes work out his urges, if he must, on poverty-stricken infidel women rather than the daughters of wealthy merchants with connections at court.
Alas, the likes of Ioannes are not so easily disposed of; whatever else one may say of him, he had the Komnenoi genius and strength of will in full measure, and applied it unceasingly to getting into trouble. Arkadios had exiled him to rule the shepherders of dusty Monreal in order to save him from the Antiochene mob; Ioannes took it as a personal insult. Knowing that he could not hope to win an insurrection with the surly militia of his Moslem province, he instead turned - the apple does not fall far from the tree - to thoughts of assassination; but he lacked his father's subtle hand, or perhaps the money to buy the best. His brother Zenobios survived the ambush he had arranged, and the surviving assassins confessed under torture who had hired them.
This was, perhaps, the one thing that could have roused Arkadios to his full measure of ruthlessness. Any other crime he could have condoned; against any outside foe, he would have fought to protect his son, even the black sheep of the family. But for Komnenoi to plot against Komnenoi was unforgivable; and in a letter to Zenobios, Arkadios took upon himself the full responsibility of a
paterfamilias, of keeping order within the family. Nor was this an empty phrase; Arkadios raised no armies and sent no agents. Instead he himself travelled to Monreal, and was welcomed by his son; and as they sat at meat, Arkadios drew his dagger, and with his own hands killed Ioannes. Thus he maintained the unity of the Komnenoi, and their reputation for utter ruthlessness when roused to anger; but it is reported, and we may well believe, that he wept as he struck.
Such is the tragedy of Ioannes; and the judgement of Arkadios has stood the test of time. "My son Ioannes", he says in his Memoirs, "was not a good man. But a father cannot cease to love his child, merely because the child is in the wrong. And it is not right that parents should bury their children."
O my son Ioannes, o Ioannes, my son, my son!