When Valentinian had died in a fit of rage at Bregetio, Justina and her four-year-old boy, Valentinian the younger, were in the town of Murocincta, a hundred miles away. Justina hastened to the camp, and it was presently announced that the army had decided to associate the boy with Gratian in the rule of the West. Gratian, the most temperate and promising of the Emperors of the period, published his consent. A refusal to acknowledge the boy, and an attempt to punish the intrigue by which Justina retained her power, would have involved a civil war, and the whole of his forces were now needed to stem the flood of barbarism that surged against the northern frontier of the Empire. The last days of Rome were fast approaching. From the remote deserts of Asia a fierce and numerous people, the Huns, had entered Europe, and were sweeping the Goths and other Teutonic tribes southward. Gratian appointed an Emperor of the East, whom we shall meet presently, in the place of Valens, and spent his strength in heroic efforts to defend the threatened frontier. Justina returned with the boy-Emperor to Milan. As long as Gratian lived, Justina was restricted to the life of the palace, but in 383 the throne was usurped by Maximus, and Gratian was murdered by one of his emissaries. Gibbon generously traces the general dissatisfaction out of which this revolt emerged to a deterioration of the character of Gratian. This deterioration cannot be questioned, but one particular outcome of it, the active persecution of the pagans, was probably his most fatal error. Milan was now dominated by the imperious and zealous St. Ambrose, and the two young Emperors were expressly under his control. At the suggestion of Ambrose, Gratian abandoned Valentinian’s policy of toleration. He rejected the title of Pontifex Maximus, ordered the removal of the statue of Victory from the Roman Senate, and confiscated the estates of the temples. He even admitted the abusive epithet “pagans” (or “villagers”), which the more forward Christians were beginning to use, in his official decrees.[32] This must have inflamed the general discontent, and the army of Maximus marched peacefully over Gaul, and occupied the Empire as far as the Alps. The Emperor of the East, Theodosius, consented that Britain, Gaul, and Spain should remain under the rule of Maximus, and Justina continued to rule the curtailed dominions of her son.