 Contemporary scholarship disagrees, and finds a variety of possible explanations, including an order from Arcadius directing him to evacuate the Eastern Empire, the unreliability of his mostly barbarian troops, the revolt of Gildo in Africa or the possibility that he simply was never as close to Alaric as Claudian suggests.Later that year, Gildo, the "comes et magister utriusque militiae per Africam" (the commander of all troops in Africa), revolted.He declared his intention to place the African provinces, the critical source of Rome's grain supply, under the control of the Eastern Empire.