Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  Gallienus had pared the military monarchy down to its essence. After him, a succession of three great soldier-emperors from the Balkan army – Claudius Gothicus (AD 268–270), Aurelian (AD 270–275) and Probus (AD 276–282) – used this streamlined instrument to restore, stone by stone, the edifice of imperial power. First, Claudius Gothicus re-established control over the empire’s central zone by overthrowing the usurper regime in Rome, ejecting Alemannic invaders from northern Italy, and breaking up a massive Gothic onslaught by land and sea against the cities of the Aegean. The emperor then succumbed to plague. He was succeeded by his second-in-command. Aurelian maintained the momentum of the counter-offensive in the West. Having finished with the Goths on the lower Danube, the emperor turned his attention to the upper Danube, under attack from several Germanic confederations. Taken by surprise, the emperor suffered defeat at Placentia in northern Italy, a setback which immediately prompted revolt in Rome by senators opposed to the rule of the soldier-emperors. The rebels had moved too soon. The Germans were crushed in two big battles, and few of the raiders escaped home. Aurelian then marched on Rome and smashed the revolt. While there in AD 271, convinced of the imperial capital’s chronic vulnerability, he ordered the construction of one of Late Antiquity’s greatest monuments. The Aurelian Wall around ancient Rome was 19 km long, 3.6 m thick, and 6 m high. It had 18 gateways, the four main ones double-arched, and both here and at regular intervals around the circumference there were square projecting towers. The work, which continued for years, was carried out by slaves and conscripts. The monument symbolized the empire’s insecurity, its great reserves of strength, and the subordination of its once pampered citizens to the dictates of a war-economy.

  Zenobia meantime had openly thrown off Palmyra’s formal subordination to Rome. Aurelian anyway wanted to restore the flow of eastern tax revenues to the central treasury. Shifting the bulk of his Balkan army to the East, he planned a two-stage offensive to collapse the Palmyrene Empire: first the outlying territories of Egypt and Asia Minor, only loosely held in thrall by Palmyra, were to be wrested back; then the Syrian heartland would be stormed. The plan was sound. The presence of the emperor with a strong army restored the confidence of the eastern cities in Roman power. A lenient policy towards reformed rebels encouraged rapid realignment. The professional skill of Roman generals in combined-arms operations soon gave them mastery of the battlefield. The Palmyrenes depended for success on the charge of elite units of super-heavy cavalry – so-called ‘cataphracts’, where the rider was encased in armour, and sometimes his horse as well. Lighter, faster and highly trained, Aurelian’s Danubian and Moorish cavalry would fall back before the cataphracts, drawing them forwards, wearing them out under the heat of a Syrian sun, breaking up their close-order formation. The Roman infantry provided a solid defensive line. The Roman cavalry would then launch decisive counter-attacks when their opponents’ exhaustion and disorganization were at a peak. Antioch fell. Then Emesa. Zenobia withdrew to Palmyra itself. The Romans closed in, bribing local tribes to desert, beating back a Sassanid relief force. Famine broke out in the city. As her empire disintegrated, Zenobia fled. Palmyra then surrendered on terms. Zenobia’s leading counsellors were tried and executed. She was caught, spared, and kept for display in a later Roman triumph. The Palmyrene Empire had collapsed in a year (AD 271–272). Though a fresh nationalist revolt brought Aurelian racing back the following year, it was easily crushed; and this time the city was put to the sack.

  Then Aurelian turned to deal with the western secession. The Gallic Empire had, in fact, entered its terminal crisis some years before. The succession to Postumus had been contested, and Victorinus had soon been killed. Tetricus reigned as the third Gallic emperor in just three years. Spain had returned to its former allegiance. Provence had also been lost. Now the Germans were on the offensive, and Tetricus was unable to keep them out. The Gallic Empire thus lost its raison d’être – its superior ability to defend property – and local support fell away. Aurelian, momentarily free of commitments elsewhere, chose this moment to attack, and he emerged victorious from a long and bloody battle at Châlons when Tetricus himself deserted to the enemy and his army broke up in confusion (AD 273).

  When Aurelian returned to Rome in early AD 275 to celebrate a double triumph over the Palmyrene and Gallic Empires, he took the title ‘Restorer of the World’ (Restitutor Orbis). It seemed no exaggeration. Aurelian’s were the greatest victories since the time of Septimius Severus. They had achieved one of the most complete turnarounds in Roman history: from the brink of complete disintegration in AD 268 to an empire reunited behind secure frontiers in AD 274. More than that. The financial crisis was eased as the army returned to barracks and tax revenues flowed in again from East and West. The currency was reformed. Debts were cancelled. Corn doles resumed. The Tiber was dredged and its banks restored. The cult of Sol, the Roman Sun-god, was promoted as a supreme state religion, the divine embodiment of the resurrected empire. Aurelian, the soldier-emperor risen from the ranks of Gallienus’s Balkan army, was now father of his country, an old-style Caesar, a true popularis.

  Ambition lured Aurelian back to the East in AD 275, this time to launch an aggressive war to recover Mesopotamia. He never had his chance. A petty palace squabble exploded like a bomb and blew Aurelian’s court to pieces. An official accused of lying tried to protect himself by fabricating a capital prosecution list that included several leading officers. They in turn murdered Aurelian in self-defence. The conspiracy had no wider basis, and the army high command, having no desire to upset the Aurelianic system, deferred the decision about a successor to the Senate. The latter, equally wary, prevaricated. Renewed pressure on the frontiers soon forced an appointment, but the reigns of Tacitus (AD 275–276), an elderly senator, and Florianus (AD 276), a close relative, were messy and short. The army quickly reasserted its authority when the Aurelianic frontier settlement came under threat, and Probus, formerly Aurelian’s right-hand man, succeeded.

  Probus (AD 276–282), third and last of the great Balkan soldier-emperors, successfully defended the restored Aurelianic Empire. He, like his predecessors, spent almost the whole of his reign on campaign, fighting Germans in the Rhineland, Vandals on the Danube, Nubians at the southern limits of Egypt, bandits in rural Turkey, and new usurper-emperors in the former Gallic Empire.

  Despite his energy – perhaps, in a sense, because of it – Probus was brought down by a mutiny in the Balkan army in AD 282. The soldiers assassinated their emperor in protest against being put to work on land reclamation and other public works. The leader of the coup, Praetorian Prefect Marcus Aurelius Carus, was destined to reign only briefly, however. Having made his two sons Caesars, he left Carinus in charge of the West, and himself headed east in company with Numerianus. Yet again, the allure of eastern glory drew a Roman emperor to Mesopotamia; for the Balkan soldier-emperors of the 270s and 280s AD that allure was a curse. Probus, like Aurelian, had been planning a great eastern war when he was killed, and now Carus, though his army captured the Sassanid capital at Ctesiphon, was suddenly struck down, perhaps by a freak accident, perhaps by foul play. His son was murdered soon after. So the Balkan generals, as they had done so often before, convened an army council to decide the future of the empire. Again they chose one of their own to lead them: an Illyrian soldier of modest birth who had risen through the ranks to the command of the household troops: Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus. We know him as Diocletian. He was one of Rome’s greatest emperors. Elevated on 17 November AD 284, he reigned for over 20 years, after which he voluntarily stepped down, later to die peacefully in his bed. Though no one could have known this at the outset, his accession marked the end of Rome’s long crisis, its decades of anarchy, and inaugurated a period of concentrated reform and political consolidation which amounted, in effect, to a Late Roman counter-revolution.

  The Late Roman counter-revolution: Diocletian, the Tetrarchy and Constantine the Great, AD 284–337

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ican and Early Imperial Rome had been subsidized by the profits of war. New conquests sustained the expansion of the system. But the cost of empire and civilization was high, and only plough-agriculture could generate sufficient surplus. Therefore, the Roman Empire reached natural limits once it had conquered the plough-lands and its frontiers came to rest on untamed wilderness. The profits of war then ceased to flow, and the shortfall was made up in higher taxes, labour corvées, and military requisitioning. The empire became a finely balanced military-supply economy in which a base of peasant labour-services and tribute-payments supported an imperial infrastructure of army, forts, towns, villas, propaganda monuments, and ‘bread and circuses’. The balance was repeatedly upset by military pressure on the frontiers. Simultaneous threats on different fronts frequently overstretched the empire’s military resources to breaking point. This destroyed the unity of the imperial ruling class, leading to usurpation, secession and civil war as regionally based factions attempted to organize their own defence. The resource crisis also increased the pressure on civil society, as the embattled state struggled to supply itself through taxation, conscription, requisitioning, and currency debasement. The 3rd century anarchy was, in essence, the crisis of a system of ancient military imperialism that was unable to expand and therefore unable to sustain itself without eroding its own socio-economic base. The Late Roman counter-revolution – which began under the Balkan soldier-emperors and was completed under Diocletian and Constantine – was the response of the military monarchy, representing the core section of the imperial ruling class, to this crisis. And in the absence of forces capable of destroying the military monarchy in the late 3rd century AD, whether foreign invaders or internal rebels, the counterrevolution allowed the Western Roman Empire to survive for another century and a half – though in a distorted and crisis-racked form, and at enormous cost to its people.

  The counter-revolution was not a planned programme of reform, but a series of radical ad hoc changes imposed from above in response to successive crises. The effect was cumulative as the changes were consolidated into a new system, and the pace of change gathered momentum, especially after AD 284. The pattern under Diocletian and Constantine was similar to that under Octavian-Augustus: in both cases, improvisation under the stress of war and revolution was subsequently consolidated into a new political order. The term ‘Principate’ is commonly used to describe the Augustan system; some historians favour the term ‘Dominate’ for that of Diocletian. Peter Brown has highlighted the importance of the latter transition by dubbing it the ‘Late Roman Revolution’, and this term, despite recent revisionist emphasis on ‘continuity’, is embedded in the literature. But the implication is wrong: the Roman imperial ruling class was not overthrown; on the contrary, the essence of the change was for its power to increase substantially at the expense of subordinate social groups. Such was the gravity of the 3rd century crisis that revolution may indeed have occurred had there been a revolutionary class capable of carrying one out. But there was none. The gentry were scattered across a thousand cities, the peasants across a hundred thousand villages. Whatever discontent there was – and all the evidence suggests there was much – it was not organized into a political force capable of overthrowing the imperial ruling class and remodelling society. Instead of revolution, the state – centralized, bureaucratic, militaristic – grabbed a higher proportion of the available surplus to support its core activity (defence) and to cement together its power-base (the imperial aristocracy, the state bureaucracy, the army high command, the Church hierarchy, and key client-groups like the soldiers and the populations of major cities).

  The result was the relative impoverishment of towns and villas, provinces and countryside, gentry and peasants. The military aristocracy was the winner, civil society the loser: a non-revolutionary outcome to the crisis of the 3rd century best described as ‘counter-revolution’. But as such, it left the contradictions that had produced the crisis unresolved. The intensified accumulation of surplus by the state – a process driven by military competition – was irrational in so far as it undermined the ability of the Late Roman economy to reproduce itself. Civil society was overtaxed, eroding its ability to sustain the military-bureaucratic complex in the long run. Indeed, not only could the Late Roman counterrevolution not resolve the contradictions of imperial decline, the victory of the state over civil society intensified them by increasing the amount of surplus that was siphoned upwards. The military-bureaucratic complex expanded by consuming its socio-economic capital. Increased state power may have suppressed the political symptoms of decay that had been so evident in the 3rd century, but beneath superficial calm the rate of decay accelerated and eventual collapse became more certain.

  For most of the first 14 years of his reign, Diocletian was busy on campaign, facing the usual combination of frontier incursions and usurper emperors. But by AD 298, he and his colleagues (for by then he had been joined by three co-emperors) had succeeded in suppressing resistance in Britain, Gaul, the Rhineland, the Balkans, Egypt, and the East. The hardest struggle had been in the West, where a combination of peasant revolt, seaborne raiding, and fighting along the Rhine had produced a powerful usurper regime based in Britain and northern Gaul, headed first by Carausius, then Allectus. This regime was established in AD 286, and though it soon lost northern Gaul, it successfully repelled an invasion of Britain in AD 293; the rebels did not finally succumb until AD 296. By this time Diocletian had reorganized his government into a ‘Tetrarchy’ (Rule of Four). In AD 285 he had made Maximian – also, like his patron, an Illyrian soldier – his adoptive son and co-emperor with the rank of Caesar. The following year Maximian was promoted to the higher rank of Augustus, thereby becoming Diocletian’s equal, and the empire was divided into two zones of responsibility: Maximian took the West (with his capital at Milan), Diocletian the East (Nicomedia). In AD 293 a Caesar was appointed to assist each of the Augusti, Constantius in the West under Maximian, Galerius in the East under Diocletian. The arrangements were sealed by dynastic marriages and appropriate titles, the empire was sub-divided into four zones of responsibility, and it was proclaimed that in due course the senior emperors would resign and their juniors succeed and appoint new subordinates. In place of regional usurpers, there were to be regional emperors. Instead of wars of succession, there was to be a seamless sequence of Caesars becoming Augusti and raising up new Caesars.

  But the Tetrarchy’s stability depended on the consent of a small group of top men who knew each other, worked well together, and had combined to defeat a series of common enemies. The centrifugalism inherent in the empire could not be dissolved by a constitutional gimmick. Nor could the realities of power be altered by a change of titles. The tetrarchs claimed divine origins and took the title Dominus (master). Everything associated with an emperor became sacrus (sacred) or divinus (divine). Prostration before the ruler became a feature of court etiquette – a practice traditionally disparaged by Greeks as proskynesis, by Romans as adoratio. The ruler became distinguished by special dress, by a decorum associated with his person, and by maintaining a symbolic separation and distance between him and others. The men of his inner household – the freedmen, slaves and eunuchs of the Bedchamber (cubiculum) – became powerful figures at court. This was the style of true monarchy, of absolute rule, of ‘divine right’; a style wholly at odds with the Graeco-Roman tradition of personal familiarity and Republican dignity. Yet it reflected not strength, but weakness; it was an exaggerated assertion of power against the odds. It reflected also the relative independence of the state, which had been raised up above society and lacked any real accountability to those it dominated. Yet emperors could not become gods simply by claiming themselves to be them. Names and titles are simply that: only power can give them substance. In fact, the Tetrarchy was doomed to fail at its first test, when Diocletian and Maximian retired in AD 306, and their Caesars’ right to succeed was immediately contested by rival candidates and liquidated in civil war.


  Other reforms were more durable. To one of Julius Caesar’s centurions, the Late Roman army would have been unrecognizable. Old units were divided and many new ones formed, and a plethora of regimental titles reflected the diversity of origins. Scholae palatinae were elite household troops. Protectores domestici were the officer cadets of in-service training units. Cunei equitum or plain equites were newly raised elite cavalry, and auxilia their infantry counterparts. Legiones, alae and cohortes, on the other hand, indicated regiments that had evolved out of old-army units of that name, while vexillationes had been formed from detachments of these. There were also units entitled simply milites (soldiers), numeri (numbers of men), or even just gens (perhaps best translated ‘friendlies’). To these type-designations were added regimental names: the Cornuti were the horn-blowers, the Bracchiati armlet-wearers, the Lanciarii lancers, the Herculiani followers of Hercules (and therefore Maximian’s Own), and the Ioviani followers of Jupiter (Diocletian’s Own).