Legions of Rome

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  So, with Dacian ambassadors being treated cordially at Rome, few among Trajan’s own officers would have known precisely what their emperor was planning. “Communicate the plans you intend to put into execution to few, and those only of the most assured loyalty,” was the advice to generals from Vegetius, adviser to the imperial court of Late Antiquity. “Or better still,” he added, “trust no one but yourself.” [Vege., DRM, III]

  Many of Trajan’s subordinates were probably still in the dark when the emperor rode out of Rome on March 25, AD 101, accompanied by Praetorian Guard prefect Claudius Livianus. The date fell immediately after the four-day Quatranalia Festival, during which Roman military standards were blessed prior to the annual campaigning season, and ending with the anointing of trumpets on March 23.

  The legionaries who were to invade Dacia would do so wearing Roman helmets which had been modified by the addition of cruciform iron or bronze reinforcement over the crown. This measure had been designed as a counter to the fearsome curved Dacian short-sword, called the falx by the Romans, the sica by the Dacians. It had an exceptionally long wooden or bone handle, while the blade was straight for much of its length, only curving at the end. Just the concave underside was sharpened, so that when the weapon was wielded the curved end projected toward the target. For maximum destructive effect, the user crashed his falx down on to the target doublehanded, then drew the blade back toward himself in a sawing motion.

  As the sword-makers of Japan were to discover centuries later, a curved blade is a much more efficient cutting edge than one that is straight. In modern tests, a two-handed downward strike by a falx has cut through a wooden Roman shield with comparative ease. While the falx could be used one-handed, allowing the user still to carry a shield on his left arm, it was this doublehanded strike that could be lethal. Conversely, doublehanded use meant that the user had to discard his shield, making him more vulnerable to attack.

  To prevent the overhead blow from a falx, it was essential that Roman legionaries came close to their Dacian opponents, and quickly so, to jab horizontally with the pointed end of their straight gladius. A scene on the Roman monument at Adamclisi, later erected by Trajan beside the Danube, shows a Dacian warrior stripped to the waist and poised to crash his falx down two-handed on a Roman legionary’s head. But at the same time, the legionary, too quick for the Dacian, thrusts his gladius into the man’s exposed midriff, killing him first. In the months leading up to the invasion of Dacia, the men of the legions involved would have undergone intensive training to close swiftly with the enemy in this manner.

  Another tactic used by Dacian swordsmen was to aim blows at a Roman adversary’s lower right arm—the exposed sword arm. Dacians didn’t have to kill their opponents to neutralize them; by chopping off or shattering the sword arm, a Dacian could take a Roman out of the fight. As shown by a metope on the Trajan monument at Adamclisi, to counter that tactic many of the Roman legionaries going into Dacia wore segmented metal arm protectors on their lower right arms.

  Now, the operation was about to begin. The very first scene on Trajan’s Column shows serene farmland beside the River Danube, with farmhouses dotted here and there, surrounded by protective circular wooden palisades. Next, we see auxiliaries setting off from Moesian forts, waving goodbye to the comrades who were remaining behind. Meanwhile, from watchtowers, long thin beacons project with their ends burning, a signal for the auxiliary units to march. The spring of AD 101 had begun, and so too had the First Dacian War.

  In northwestern Moesia, auxiliary units and legions converged on the Danube town of Viminacium, today’s Kostolac in Serbia. Here too, says Trajan’s Column, fleets of transport ships were busy unloading supplies for the operation. Trajan and senior officers joined the assembling troops. Apart from Praetorian prefect Livianus, Trajan’s deputies for this campaign included the wealthy ex-consul Lucius Licinius Sura, Trajan’s trusted confidant. The elderly Sura, close to the previous emperor Nerva, had been influential in Nerva’s decision to adopt Trajan and make him his heir. Trajan also took along another consular general, Lucius Appius Maximus, as well as a general named Longinus, another of the emperor’s good friends. This Longinus may have been the Pompeius Longinus who, as a tribune in AD 68–69, had been a solid supporter of the emperor Galba at Rome. If so, he was now in his fifties. Dio indicates that Longinus had previously fought the Dacians, serving under Julianus during the Roman victory at Tapae in AD 88. [Dio, LXVIII, 12]

  One of Trajan’s staff officers was the 25-year-old quaestor Publius Aelius Hadrianus, the future emperor Hadrian, and Trajan’s nephew and ward. Like Trajan, Hadrian had been born in Spain. By the age of 19 he had served his six-month junior tribuneship with the 2nd Adiutrix Legion in Upper Moesia. In AD 96, apparently after just one season commanding an auxiliary unit, Nerva had promoted him, at the age of just 20, to senior tribune with the 5th Macedonica Legion in Lower Moesia. Hadrian’s meteoric rise was clearly designed by old Nerva to please Trajan. In AD 100, the year that Trajan had made him a quaestor, Hadrian had married Trajan’s grand-niece Vibia Sabina. Now on Trajan’s staff, Hadrian had the opportunity to put his eye for detail and talent for organization to good use.

  Trajan’s legionaries had constructed the components for two boat bridges, and in the late spring, as soon as the spring floods on the Danube subsided, these temporary bridges were thrown across the river. Trajan’s Column shows two lines of troops crossing the bridges into Dacia, with the standards of legions and cohorts bunched together in front. One line is clearly made up of the men of a legion. The troops wear full segmented armor and are led by an officer wearing the insignia of a commander, followed by a bareheaded eagle-bearer and a manipular standard-bearer wearing a bearskin headdress and cape. The legionaries crossing the bridge carry their shields on their left arms and have their helmets around their necks. From the poles over their left shoulders are suspended their bedrolls, entrenching tools, and mess kit. The second line of troops is similarly equipped to those in the foreground, but they are led by bunched eagle-bearers, standard-bearers of legion maniples and the lion-caped standard-bearers of at least four cohorts of the Praetorian Guard.

  Trajan’s army of 100,000 men arrived in Dacia without meeting any initial resistance. As Trajan had planned, surprise was complete. Dacians farmers fled ahead of them as the Roman troops marched quickly north through rugged, heavily forested Transylvania. Auxiliary light infantry and cavalry pushed on ahead, followed by road-making detachments from the legions which cleared the way for the main body and the baggage trains. Trajan himself rode in the vanguard.

  At his mountain capital of Sarmizegethusa in the center of today’s Romania, King Decebalus received word of the Roman invasion. Decebalus was shaken by the news, because, as Dio observed, “he knew that on the previous occasion it was not the Romans that he had defeated, but Domitian.” [Dio, LXVIII, 15] Nothing in the demeanor of the Romans prior to this had indicated Trajan’s military intentions north of the Danube, but Decebalus knew that “now he would be fighting both Romans and Trajan.” [Ibid.]

  Calling his fighting men to arms and summoning help from his Sarmatian allies to the east and north, Decebalus dispatched ambassadors to meet the Roman army on the march and seek a conference with Trajan. Decebalus only deigned to send junior officers, long-haired warriors, to meet with the Roman emperor, not pileati, or “capwearers,” as Dacian nobles were called after the close-fitting leather skull caps they wore as a sign of their rank. Decebalus was playing for time.

  Trajan’s legions were soon building strong marching camps. Trajan’s Column shows legionaries hard at work building exterior walls from turf bricks. Three hundred years later, the Roman army was still using the same technique. In their kit, legionaries carried turf cutters. “The sods are cut with [these] iron instruments,” said Vegetius. “If the earth is held strongly together by the roots of the grass, they are cut in the form of a brick a foot and a half high, a foot [30 centimeters] across, and a foot and a half [45
centimeters] long.” [Vege., III] On top of the turf wall went a palisade of wooden stakes carried on the march by the infantry. Meanwhile, legion carpenters were building gateways, gates and watchtowers.

  Even as a camp was being built, Trajan and his senior officers were conducting a souvetaurilia ceremony, a sacred sacrifice of bulls to earn the blessings of the gods for the new campaign. With all the pomp of official robes, chants, the burning of incense and the blaring of trumpets and horns of the legions, animals were sacrificed, and the augurs found auspicious omens in their entrails. The Dacian envoys now reached the Roman emperor’s camp, but Trajan was not interested in parleying, especially not with junior ambassadors. The Dacians were sent away. Shortly after, the Roman advance parties met the first resistance from the locals; a party of auxiliaries crossing a river came under heavy attack from Dacian warriors before the attackers withdrew into the forest.

  By now, with summer warming the mountain valleys, the numbers of Dacian fighters had begun to swell. As many as 140,000 Dacians would confront the Romans in this war, supported by some 20,000 allies from north of the Danube. Few Dacians went to war fearing death; they worshipped the god Zamolxis, whose high priest told them that in dying they went to a better life. Said to have been a follower of Greek mystic, mathematician and philosopher Pythagorus 800 years before, Zamolxis had gone to Egypt before settling in Dacia, where he died in a mountain cave. Three years later, Zamolxis had reputedly risen from the dead to guide his people. The Dacian capital Sarmizegethusa and a number of other Dacian cities and citadels were located in the hills around Cogaionon, Zamolxis’ holy mountain—from which the enemy had to be kept at all costs.

  With their faith in Zamolxis, the Dacian warriors who went off to fight the Romans now did so almost welcoming death, yet made confident of victory by the remembrance of the way they had slaughtered the Romans in Domitian’s reign. Behind their dragon standards they marched—metal wolves’ heads and snake-like bodies in the form of windsocks which, when filled with air on the run, trailed majestically behind their standard-bearers while a mournful moan was emitted from the head.

  Tens of thousands of bearded, long-haired Dacians came streaming down from the Transylvanian Alps and launched stinging attacks on Roman marching camps. In one scene on Trajan’s Column, Dacian bowmen attack a Roman camp. In another, Dacians employ a battering ram against the gate of a camp. But the attacks on the Roman camps were repulsed, and the Roman advance continued. Using small boats brought up in a baggage train, the advance guard crossed the river, then began the climb into the mountains.

  Decebalus’ plea to allies paid dividends, for Roman auxiliary cavalry was met by Sarmatian cavalry in pointed helmets and fish-scale armor covering their entire bodies, arms and legs. Even the Sarmatians’ horses were covered by scale armor. But the heavy armor made Sarmatian horses and riders slow and unwieldy, while the nature of the ground favored lighter, more nimble riders. The Roman cavalry prevailed—the Sarmatians were thrown back with heavy losses.

  The Roman advance continued, with two columns working their way north via different routes. Ahead of them, Dacians carrying their children on their shoulders fled from their villages. It was well into summer as the legions pressed further north, building marching camps as they went. At a forward Roman camp, fresh envoys arrived from Decebalus; this time, three of “the noblest among the capwearers.” [Dio, LXVIII, 9] And this time Trajan gave the ambassadors a hearing.

  Discarding their arms and prostrating themselves before the emperor, the bearded Dacian nobles begged Trajan to meet personally with Decebalus, who would, they swore, do whatever Trajan commanded. But, Dio was to write, Trajan was not interested in a meeting with Decebalus. The envoys then asked him at least to send representatives to agree peace terms with the Dacian king, so Trajan sent two of his most senior advisers to Decebalus, Lucius Sura and Praetorian prefect Livianus. [Ibid.]

  Decebalus was moving his army west to intercept the Roman invaders as Trajan and the legions crossed the Transylvanian Alps then swung east. Scouts informed the emperor that Decebalus and his army had arrived at Tapae, scene of the bloody AD 88 battle when Tettius Julianus had been victorious for Rome. When Trajan’s two envoys reached the Dacian camp, Decebalus refused to see them personally, sending subordinates to speak with them. When it was obvious to Sura and Livianus that the Dacian king was only playing for time, they returned to Trajan.

  Trajan’s army and the second column now linked up, and pushed east through the mountains. Finding Dacian watchtowers and forts on hilltops overlooking the passes and river valleys, the Romans attacked them and quickly overwhelmed their defenders. At several fortresses Trajan’s troops found artillery and personal weapons taken from the 5th Alaudae Legion in Moesia in AD 85. Most importantly, to Trajan and his men, they also recovered the eagle of the destroyed legion. [Dio, LXVIII, 9]

  The fifty-five Scorpio catapults, like this one, of the obliterated 5th Alaudae Legion, along with its eagle standard, were recaptured by Trajan in AD 101.

  The Roman advance reached Tapae and the sprawling camp of the Dacian army. As Roman catapults of the cheiroballistra type were brought up in carts for the assault on the Dacian defenses, Trajan received a message from Germanic tribes of the region which were allied to Rome, beseeching Trajan to “turn back and keep the peace.” [Dio, LXVIII, 8] But, despite the fact that autumn had arrived and the days were becoming shorter and colder, Trajan was not going to turn back.

  There outside Tapae, in the middle of a thunderstorm, the two armies came together to do battle. Over 200,000 men fought there in the mountain valley at Tapae, in the pouring rain and amid flashes of lightning and crashing thunder. The Dacians did not have the Romans’ organization, but they did have superior numbers and physical superiority, with their scraggy warriors being taller than the average Roman legionary. And at this latest Battle of Tapae, the curved Dacian falx again did great damage to the Romans, as the auxiliaries in the front line took the brunt of the wild enemy charge. The legions also felt the effect of the curved Dacian blades.

  So many Romans were wounded in this battle and carried off to the medical attendants working in field dressing stations that the Romans ran out of bandages, and Trajan even had his own linen clothing cut into strips to make bandages for his troops. [Dio, LXVIII, 8] But the legions held firm, and won the day. Decebalus’ bloodied army fell back to Sarmizegethusa, leaving large numbers of their countrymen lifeless on the muddy battlefield. Ignoring the atrocious weather, the victorious Roman army stripped the enemy dead of their weapons, valuables and clothing.

  Trajan, after honoring his own dead, ordered an altar to be raised on the site of the battle, where funeral rites were to be performed annually in memory of the Romans who had perished there. Despite his victory, Trajan realized that it was pointless to proceed any further. He could see from the deteriorating weather that winter would set in early here in the mountains, and that further military operations would soon become bogged down in mud, snow and ice. The campaign would have to be suspended until the following spring.

  In an assembly during which Trajan praised his troops, he doled out rewards to many of them. Trajan’s Column shows auxiliaries bowing to the seated emperor, kissing his hand, and going away bent double with weighty sacks on their backs—filled with captured Dacian gold perhaps, or even salt, which the Dacians mined in this area and which was a valuable trade item. One of the auxiliary units which is known to have performed well for Trajan in Dacia was the 1st Brittonum Ulpian Cohort, raised by Trajan in Britain in AD 98. All its surviving members would be given honorable discharges by Trajan thirteen years ahead of their prescribed discharge time—for valiant service in the Dacian Wars, their discharge diplomas record. Perhaps this was the very unit seen on the Column being rewarded in AD 101.

  The Roman army now upped stakes and withdrew via a direct route almost due south to the Danube. According to Trajan’s Column, as the Romans were pulling out of the Dacian interior, Roman prisone
rs in Dacian hands in the mountains, stripped naked, were being tortured by Dacian women.

  Trajan, leaving auxiliary units to spend the winter in forts along the northern side of the river, crossed the Danube at the gorge called the Iron Gate. The emperor and his staff were transported in ships of the Moesian Fleet, which also ferried many troops and their equipment to the southern bank. The boat bridges were also used once again. Opposite Drobeta, the legions built winter camps along the Moesian bank of the Danube, storing away their weapons, not expecting to use them again until the new year. But King Decebalus was not waiting for the Romans to return.

  As the winter set in, Decebalus brought together a revitalized coalition of Dacian and Sarmatian fighters. Early in the new year, as the winter weather improved, Decebalus seized the initiative. Without warning, Dacians launched attacks on Roman auxiliary forts on Dacian soil along the lower Danube. At the same time, thousands of Sarmatian cavalry crossed the frozen Danube to the east and entered Moesia behind the backs of the legions.

  At the forts in Dacia, fighting desperately, using anything that came to hand as ammunition, auxiliary units were close to being overrun when reinforcements arrived—infantry coming down the river by boat, and cavalry led by Trajan himself which crossed the river by the two boat bridges. A series of carved metopes on the Trajanic monument at Adamclisi tells what happened next. While the infantry fought off the attacks on the Danube forts, Trajan led his cavalry inland, cutting off and surrounding a Dacian baggage train in the hills. In what came to be called the Battle of the Carts, most of the Dacians accompanying the train as escorts or animal handlers were killed, but among the prisoners taken by Trajan were a number of capwearing Dacian nobles.