Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  The military monarchy was falling apart, the state sinking into anarchy. The enemies of the empire were growing stronger. Current tax revenues were inadequate to support the size of army required to keep them out. Legions, in consequence, had to be constantly shifted to deal with one emergency after another. Such redeployments frequently created new openings that led to localized collapses and the devastation of Roman territory. This in turn undermined the cohesion of the imperial ruling class, which fragmented into regionally based factions, each eager to concentrate revenues and soldiers in defence of local territory. Centrifugalism become an inherent feature of the empire in decline, and the attempt of successive regimes to suppress it further undermined imperial defence by diverting troops to internal security.

  For the rich landowners of Roman Africa, the German tribes might as well have been on the moon. When the financial procurator threatened aristocratic estates in his efforts to fill the emperor’s war-chest, he provoked a property-owners’ revolt. A group of young bloods assassinated the procurator and declared emperor an octogenarian nobleman of impeccable pedigree and distinguished service currently serving as provincial governor. Gordian I (AD 238), acting with a vigour that belied his age, immediately dispatched a band of armed partisans to Rome to overthrow the government, while appealing to the rest of the empire for support. All save Spain, Dacia and Pannonia declared for Gordian – a measure of the fear for person and property engendered by the brutal Maximinus regime. But the property-owners’ revolt was a castle of sand. The civilians could not defeat the army. Just 22 days after it began, the revolt in Africa was over, and both Gordian I and his son – named co-emperor and therefore recorded by history as Gordian II – were dead.

  In Italy, at first, matters took a different turn. Here the Gordianic faction was headed by an energetic provisional government dominated by senators: the so-called Board of Twenty. Exploiting widespread hostility within the military to the dominance of the German faction, the Board had been busy turning paper support into armies. Undeterred by the setback in Africa, they now elevated two of their own number, Balbinus and Maximus, to the throne. Then, in response to protests from soldiers and the mob against the restoration of senatorial rule, they added a third: Gordian I’s 13-year-old grandson, who thus became Gordian III. Meantime, the regime prepared to meet the onslaught of Maximinus’s legions. The Board of Twenty’s show of force was promptly rewarded. Maximinus was held at the fortified city of Aquileia on the north-east coast of Italy. Unprepared for a long siege, he quickly ran out of food, at which his soldiers mutinied, murdered him in his bed, and transferred their allegiance to Gordian III (AD 238–244).

  For a moment it appeared that, against the odds, the civilians had won. A property-owners’ revolt against the demands of the military monarchy had produced a government of senators in Rome. It was an illusion. The military were the dominant partners in the victorious faction and they had no intention of sharing power: the Praetorian Guard murdered Balbinus and Maximus, dumped their bodies in the street, and declared Gordian III sole emperor – an event signalling the true collapse of the property-owners’ revolt. A military monarch – and his minders – again reigned supreme.

  The German and civil wars had weakened the frontier defences. In the East especially, from which the army had marched off to Germany in the winter of AD 233–234, the situation was dire. The Sassanids had invaded Syria and were within reach of Antioch. Though a Roman counter-attack mounted in AD 243 was spectacularly successful, the army’s logistics broke down, the troops went hungry, and an ambitious general, Philip the Arab, seized his opportunity to incite the troops against the boy-emperor and have him murdered. The fates of Maximinus Thrax and Gordian III revealed a new feature of the anarchy. The soldiers had grown accustomed to making and unmaking emperors. They expected their leaders to keep them well supplied, to lead them to victory, to safeguard the interests of the army. When they failed to do so – as they often did in the troubled times of the mid 3rd century AD – they found themselves at the mercy of serial mutineers.

  The reign of Philip the Arab (AD 244–249) exemplified the whole nexus of contradictions that had produced the anarchy. Peace was made with the Sassanids only to be followed by three years of war on the Lower Danube, where new enemies, peoples migrating from the depths of Eurasia, were pushing against the frontiers of the Empire. Then, while celebrating the apparent return of peace on Rome’s one-thousandth birthday in AD 248, the regime was hit simultaneously by three army revolts – on the Danube, in Cappodocia, and in Syria – and a new invasion by Carpi, Goths and Vandals on the Lower Danube. Lack of money was at the root of all these conflicts. The Danube revolt had been triggered by arrears of pay, the eastern revolts by ruthless tax-collecting, the barbarian incursions by failure to pay a promised subsidy. It was a classic ‘scissors’ crisis: in one place mutiny and invasion over payments not made, in another revolt against revenue collection. Here, in a sense, is written the whole history of the decline and fall of Rome.

  The man sent to restore order on the Danube drove out the barbarians and paid the soldiers their arrears. They responded by acclaiming him emperor, and though the general tried to decline and protested his innocence to Philip, he was hopelessly compromised and found himself propelled willy-nilly into a struggle for power. It was Philip, however, who was defeated and killed when the two armies clashed, and Decius Trajan (AD 249–251) became emperor. Decius was unusual among 3rd century emperors in being a distinguished senator linked by marriage with an old Italian aristocratic family. His relations with the Senate were therefore cordial. He could not, however, eschew military affairs; to base oneself in Rome and rule as a civilian politician was no longer an option. It was again the Goths on the Lower Danube who posed the principal threat. The barbarians had crossed the ice-bound river in force during the winter of AD 250–251. The city of Philippopolis had been captured and put to the sack. But when Decius engaged the Gothic host in a great battle in the marshes of the Danube Estuary, he was betrayed by one of his own subordinates. The details are obscure. It appears that two of the enemy’s battle-groups had been repulsed, and Decius was advancing to attack a third, expecting support from the force commanded by Gallus, Governor of Moesia. But Gallus made no move as Decius’s men marched into a bog and were destroyed by Gothic archery. The emperor’s body was never found. Gallus (AD 251–253) was proclaimed in his place. Had the traitor done a deal with the Goths? Or had he merely sensed an opportunity in the chaos of battle? Whatever, the incident seems evidence of deep rottenness within the Roman state. In the succeeding two decades, it would bring the Empire close to collapse.

  Gallus did not last long. He seems to have been paralyzed by indecision in the face of Gothic raiders, a new Sassanid offensive in the East, and a severe epidemic of plague. By the winter of AD 253–254 the frontier legions were in revolt. Gallus was defeated by Aemilianus and the Danube army, and then murdered by his own troops. But Aemilianus (AD 253) reigned for just three months before he was deserted and murdered in his turn, as the soldiers switched allegiance again, this time to the usurper Valerian, marching on Italy at the head of the Rhineland army. The anarchy was fast accelerating into a chaos of warring factions. The Roman imperial elite was imploding even as its enemies poured across crumbling frontier defences. The end of the empire seemed possible. In response to escalating crisis, a critical decision was taken by the new regime. The political order would be adapted to reflect the centrifugalism now endemic in the overextended empire. Valerian (AD 253–260) appointed his son Gallienus (AD 253–268) co-emperor, first with the junior rank of Caesar, later the more senior one of Augustus. Shortly afterwards the empire was effectively divided in two, with the East allocated to Valerian, the West to Gallienus. Henceforward there were two courts, two armies, two centres of power, one facing the Sassanids in the East, the other the barbarians in the North.

  Valerian went out to the East in AD 256 or 257. Establishing his headquarters at Antioch, he firs
t repelled a Sassanid incursion under Shapur I, then turned to deal with a new threat on the coasts of Asia Minor, where Borani and Goths were mounting seaborne raids. But the expedition had to be aborted when plague broke out in the army and, at the same time, news arrived that Shapur had returned to the offensive. Shifting front yet again, Valerian marched into Mesopotamia, hoping, by devastating his enemy’s territory, to force upon him a negotiated peace. Little else was possible, for the Roman forces were at their limit. Barbarian raiders threatened in the rear. The communication lines were long and exposed. The army was withered by plague, climate, battle casualties and garrison duty. Shapur agreed to negotiate, but then, treacherously, seized Valerian, who died soon afterwards in Sassanid captivity (AD 260). Though a victim of deceit, Valerian had been driven to destruction – driven to take the risk that led to his destruction – by military weakness.

  Gallienus could offer no assistance from the West. The Rhine defences had collapsed completely in AD 258. The Franks broke through in the north and overran much of Gaul and Spain. The Alamanni attacked in the south and invaded Italy over the Alpine passes. The following year, Carpi, Goths, Marcomanni, Quadi and Sarmatians assailed the Danube line, while rebel legions declared against Gallienus in the Balkans. Battling to restore control here – partly by ceding territory to King Attalus of the Marcomanni in return for his allegiance – Gallienus lost the western portion of his territory. The military collapse on the Rhine, at a time when the emperor, fully committed on the Danube, could offer no help, triggered a civil war. Officers and landowners in Germany, Gaul, Spain and Britain rallied around the usurper-emperor Postumus. Gallienus’s belated efforts to suppress the revolt were beaten off, and the rebels quickly consolidated their territory into a secessionist ‘Gallic Empire’, destined to endure for 15 years. A complex military crisis had thus exploded across the Western Empire in AD 258–259, destroying its political and military coherence. Simultaneous pressure at several points on his overextended lines had exhausted Gallienus’s diplomatic and military resources, leading to multiple breakthroughs on the frontier. This in turn had shattered the unity of the western ruling class as regional fragments abandoned allegiance to the central Empire and reorganized in their own defence.

  Meantime, with no support from the West, the eastern Roman generals were unable to save Antioch, the ancient capital of Syria and one of the greatest cities of the Empire. A makeshift emergency government was then constructed by the eastern generals around two young usurper-emperors. Gallienus opposed this move: he had lost the revenues and legions of half the West; now he was threatened with the loss of the whole East; he risked being reduced to a Balkan-based rump as he faced the barbarian hordes massed along the Danube. Macrianus, the leading Roman general in the East, and the two eastern emperors, who were his sons, marched west to confront Gallienus, but they were defeated and killed somewhere in the Balkans. Macrianus’s eastern colleagues, on the other hand, succeeded in defeating Shapur and driving the Sassanids back. This left the Eastern Roman Empire intact and, for the moment, relatively safe for the rebels, since Gallienus could hardly contemplate an invasion of Asia. Instead he sought an ally: a client-ruler rich and powerful enough to act as an effective counterweight to both the Sassanid Empire and the rebel regime: Odenath of Palmyra.

  A great trading city on the northern edge of the Arabian Desert, Palmyra had grown rich on the caravan trade passing from Mesopotamia to Syria; it was a vital link between the Mediterranean and the Orient bringing highly prized luxuries like perfume, spices and fine textiles to Roman markets. Palmyra, however, was a society under stress. The Sassanids coveted the wealth of the trade routes. Incessant warfare had disrupted the caravans. The Romans were no longer able to protect their allies. So the traditional caution of traders preoccupied with making money had given way to a brooding hawkishness in the city. The potentate of Palmyra had declared himself a king and built an army. Palmyrene gold, after all, could buy many soldiers. Odenath had already seen off a Sassanid army. The city had therefore become a player in the power-politics of the age – one important enough to be noticed and courted by a Roman emperor based in the distant Balkans. Gallienus, in return for an alliance, recognized Odenath as King of Palmyra and declared him Duke of the Roman East. Thus legitimized, Odenath went on to the offensive, winning over many Syrian cities, for whom he now appeared the most promising protector, and capturing Emesa, capital of the embryonic Eastern Roman Empire, whose leaders were promptly put to death. Soon the King of Palmyra was effective master of the Roman East.

  The Palmyrene Empire was no mere bubble. It had expanded to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Roman political and military power in the East, and it was now sustained by the tribute from a hundred fabulous cities. But it was rather less than the super-state that Odenath, dizzy with success, now took it to be. Like others before him who had possessed Syria, he could not resist the temptation of Oriental conquest, and now hurled his army into Mesopotamia. Though knocked back at first, the Sassanids later rallied and repelled the Palmyrene invaders, while far in Odenath’s rear Gothic raiders, seizing the moment, attacked Asia Minor and penetrated as far as Cappadocia. In the winter of AD 266–267, his royal prestige tarnished, Odenath was assassinated in a court plot by a Palmyrene nationalist faction eager to assert independence from Rome. Zenobia, Odenath’s former second wife, henceforward ruled as regent on behalf of her infant son Waballath. Gallienus refused to recognize the new regime, but his attempt to suppress it militarily was defeated. The embattled Balkan emperor had tried to prop up imperial authority by cultivating an eastern client-state. But Roman power was so hollowed out that nothing had remained in the East to contain the client-state’s expansion and hold its rulers in check. Now the Kingdom of Palmyra, like the Gallic Empire in the West, stood independent of Rome.

  The Gallic emperor, indeed, had played much the same role in the history of the West in the 260s AD as the Palmyrene king in that of the East. Gallienus’s forces had been kept at bay, and domestic usurpers suppressed. The Franks and Alamanni had been expelled, and the Rhine defences restored. The coasts had been secured against seaborne raiders. The currency had been improved and commerce revived. The property-owning classes and the cities of the West had been given good reason to remain loyal. Gallienus meantime remained hopelessly embroiled in the Balkan inferno. AD 262 was an especially black year, as a new wave of plague swept across the empire, and the Goths devastated Thrace, Macedonia and Greece. By forced marches the emperor crossed and recrossed his shrunken domain, plugging one gap only to find another had swung open in his rear. The Goths were no sooner expelled from the Balkans than they were attacking Asia Minor, where they captured and plundered the great city of Ephesus, already racked by earthquake and plague. In AD 268 the barbarians came again in massive force, both Heruli and Goths, attacking by land and sea, sweeping aside local Roman forces, plundering at will the cities of the Aegean. This time Gallienus caught and smashed them in pitched battle – but it was to be his last fight.

  The general Gallienus had left to guard Italy had risen in his rear. The emperor raced back to confront the rebels, putting Milan under siege, but some of his own officers too were traitors, and when the emperor rode out alone to reconnoitre a reported enemy sortie, he was assassinated. The empire he left behind seemed on the edge of the abyss. The West was controlled by Gallic emperor Victorinus, the East by the Palmyrene regent Zenobia, Italy by a third rebel regime. The North was threatened again by Alamanni and Goths. Earthquake, plague and war had devastated the empire. Taxation, requisitioning and compulsory services were crushing. The treasury was empty, the currency worthless. When the Balkan army chose Marcus Aurelius Claudius – Claudius Gothicus, as he would become known – to be the new emperor, many must have wondered whether he might not be the last. Yet, despite everything, this Balkan army, all that now survived of the once-mighty Roman imperial state, represented a kernel of military power that was uniquely strong – a nucleus about which the empi
re could still be reconstructed.

  The forces ranged against Rome were still highly disparate and localized. They lacked organizational coherence, transcontinental reach, any real vision of an alternative world. The Roman ruling class – or rather the high command of the military monarchy that formed its inner core – retained such resources of centralized political and military power that the greatest of disasters could still be set right. The barbarians could invade and raid while the emperor’s war-machine was distracted, but they could not hold ground when it returned. Equally, rebels could carve out a regional domain when the legitimate emperor was fully committed against foreign invaders, but he, needing the resources of a united empire, was bound to come for them sooner or later. That is why usurpers usually attacked the central empire: the political game they played was, in the long run at least, an all-or-nothing gamble. Unless destroyed by foreign enemies – and they were yet too diffuse – the empire, however much divided, tended to re-cohere. Regionalism was still counterbalanced by a yet more powerful centralism.

  The military monarchy, moreover, under the stress of war during Gallienus’s long reign, had become tougher. Senatorial generals had finally disappeared completely; all senior officers were now professional men of equestrian status promoted from the army’s ranks. The senators had also lost control of many provincial governorships, again to equestrians. The central state’s military-bureaucratic complex was expanding at the expense of an established civilian aristocracy that had once monopolized high office. An in-service staff college had emerged for promising centurions who were in training for higher (equestrian) commands. Many new mounted regiments were raised (called simply equites), and the old mounted detachments of the legions were reconstituted as independent units (called promoti). The idea was to create a field-army with an elite core of fast-moving, hard-hitting shock cavalry. The military dominance of the heavy-infantry legions, the basis of Roman military power since the 6th century BC, was over. To fund the reformed army, the state operated an emergency finance regime. As well as heavy – sometimes crippling – levels of taxation, requisitioning and labour services, deliberate debasement of the currency effected a direct transfer of wealth from civil society to the military-bureaucratic complex. In AD 235 the silver content of the denarius, the basic Roman monetary unit, had been 1.3 gm; by AD 253, it had fallen to 0.8 gm; by AD 268, it was reduced to 0.1 gm – the state, in other words, was melting down coins collected in taxation, increasing the base-metal content, and reissuing an increased number with the same nominal value.