The Great Illyrian Revolt

by Jason R Abdale

  The famed nineteenth-century German historian Theodor Mommsen described Tiberius’ Pannonian campaign as a small war with big consequences. Rome’s legions pushed north beyond the Sava River and Roman control over all of Illyricum had been attained, from the Adriatic coast to the Danube River. Rome could now look northwards to a possible conquest of southern Germania.110

  Chapter Three

  Outbreak

  The Myth of the ‘Pax Romana’

  Certain scholars of ancient history, beginning with the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon, have described Caesar Augustus’ reign as the beginning of the so-called Pax Romana, the ‘Roman Peace’. According to Gibbon and others, Rome underwent a transition during this period from civil wars and internal strife to a unified land of order and control, when the empire as a whole was largely in a state of peace and free of crisis. It’s a lie. Anyone who knows the history of what the newly-created Roman Empire was like under the reign of Rome’s first emperor will know that there was nothing ‘pax’ about the time that Caesar Augustus was in charge! Fire, blood, disaffection and insurrection were everywhere.

  Some have an image of Caesar Augustus as a mostly bureaucratic ruler who was busy trying to reorganize and manage the empire and had very little time for military activity. Again, this is false. The Roman Army was very busy during these years conquering new lands, expanding the empire’s domain and quelling uprisings. Take the following examples. In 19 BC, the Romans conquered the Cantabrians of northern Spain. In 17 BC, three Germanic tribes declared war upon the Romans, attacked a body of Roman soldiers led by Marcus Lollius and captured the 5th Legion’s eagle, the greatest of all dishonours. The following year, the Romans conquered Noricum, and the year after that they conquered Rhaetia and Vindelicia. In 11 BC, General Drusus Claudius Nero launched his famous conquest of western Germania. From 12-9 BC, the Romans fought in Pannonia, eventually conquering the territory and incorporating it into the province of Illyricum. In 4 BC, the Jews revolted against Roman domination of Judea. From 1 to 4 AD, several Germanic tribes revolted against Roman rule. Clearly, this was a busy and bloody time, hardly the image of the ‘Pax Romana’ that we think of.

  It isn’t just military expeditions, campaigns of conquest and foreign attacks and rebellions that give cause to scoff at the idea of the Pax Romana. During Augustus’ reign, things were tense on a social level as well as a military level. The Roman people were on edge and saw dire portents all around them. Cassius Dio reports that there were many evil omens that accompanied the reign of the recently-crowned Caesar. There was a partial eclipse of the sun, which was never a good sign. The bad omen proved, well, ominous. During the space of only one year, during the consulship of Cornelius and Valerius Messalla, Italy was struck by a series of devastating earthquakes and floods. The bridge that spanned the Tiber River was swept away by the flooding waters, the low-lying sections of the city were flooded (remember, Rome was famously built atop seven hills), and Cassius Dio states that for seven days, people travelled through those areas by boat, the streets having turned into Venetian canals.1

  Cassius Dio doesn’t go into details, but we can get some idea about the true human cost of these natural disasters by looking at other historical events. Katrina, which struck in 2005, was the largest and most devastating hurricane to have ever hit the United States. It was most famous for flooding and nearly destroying the city of New Orleans, but its effects went far beyond southern Louisiana. Damage was spread across the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida, it resulted in over $100 billion of damage and the death toll numbered more than 1,800.2 In 1908, the city of Messina, Sicily was struck by a massive earthquake, completely levelling large areas of the city, followed by enormous tidal waves that smashed into what was left. It is estimated that as many as 150,000 people died during that event. Many of the bodies were washed out to sea, and fishermen often found human remains inside the stomachs of sharks.3

  Not only was the Roman public anxious and worried, but there were also grumblings among the legions. During the BC-AD transition, there were seventeen legions stationed throughout the empire (this number was increased to twenty-five legions at the beginning of the year 6 AD). The big problem was that Augustus didn’t have enough money to pay and support all of the armed men that he possessed. As a result, the soldiers complained that their wages had not been paid to them in a very long time, and that many of them had been kept in the military long after their enlistment contracts had expired.4 So in the year 6 AD, Augustus proposed the creation of the aerarium militare, a permanent fund within the imperial treasury that would be used to pay the soldiers’ retirement pensions.5

  As if all this wasn’t bad enough, famine had broken out in Italy. Augustus was forced to institute food rationing, ordering that each person was to be given a fixed amount of grain and not a single crumb more. He furthermore forbade public banquets in order to preserve whatever food remained. Then, another disaster: a large fire broke out in Rome, destroying a significant portion of the city. There was little that Augustus could do to remedy that situation. He did, however, institute the ‘night watchmen’, a sort of combination of a city police department and a city fire department, who were organized into seven divisions and were overseen by a member of the Equestrian Order.6

  For those who were superstitious, I can imagine that they were having near-constant panic attacks. Ever since Augustus came to power, Rome had suffered through one calamity after another: earthquakes, floods, famine, fire, a distressed population, almost constant warfare and an army on the verge of mutiny. I’m not sure if there were such people as ‘doomsday preppers’ in those days, but if these things happened today, I’m sure that we would see a lot of people frantically building shelters in their back yards and stockpiling food, medicine and weapons.

  The fire that ravaged the city was the last straw. The ordinary people, distressed by the heavy taxes that they had to pay, by the famine and by the fire, were on the brink of violence. Cassius Dio states that they openly discussed plans for a revolution and flooded the city with seditious pamphlets urging people to rise up and overthrow the emperor. Augustus demanded that an investigation be made as to who was responsible for all this treasonous behaviour and issued rewards for the arrest of the ringleaders. This unrest ceased when the famine came to an end and large amounts of grain once again came back to the city’s markets.7

  Well, things might have been bad at home, but what about abroad? If the Pax Romana did not cover things happening within the Eternal City, did it at least cover the overall state of the empire? Surely, the empire as a whole was strong and secure, right? Not really. Cassius Dio states that during this period there were many wars. Firstly, pirates were causing havoc throughout the Mediterranean.8 Secondly, the island province of Sardinia had no governor administering it for several years and was being run by the Roman military. The Romans repeatedly treated the inhabitants of this island rather harshly, demanding large amounts of grain and tribute. Uprisings and revolts were numerous.9 Thirdly, several cities had rebelled against Roman authority, though Cassius Dio doesn’t state their names.10 Fourthly, the Isaurians of southern Turkey launched attacks on Rome (whether by land or sea isn’t stated). At first they launched only minor raids, but they soon became bolder and unleashed all the horrors of war, as Cassius Dio puts it, upon the Romans. The Isaurians probably played some part in the pirate epidemic during this time; they were notorious seafaring raiders. The Isaurians had been conquered in either 76 or 75 BC by Publius Servilius Vatia, who was later given the agnomen Isauricus. The region was incorporated into the province of Cilicia.11 Fifthly, the Gaetulians of Northern Africa revolted against their Roman puppet king Juba. Not content merely with revolution and perhaps out of further anger at Rome’s overlordship of their country, their warriors attacked the neighbouring Roman provinces. Cassius Dio states that when Roman troops were sent in to crush the rebellion, the Gaetulians killed many of them, until General Cornelius Cossus marched a second a
rmy in and at last subjugated them. So great was the effort in bringing this one tribe back into submission that General Cossus was awarded a triumph for his deed, something that was usually reserved only for major victories in major wars, and he was also awarded a title but it isn’t stated if it was an agnomen or some other title.12

  In the first years after the birth of Jesus Christ, Augustus would have to confront one of the biggest crises of his life, and one that would have severely tested any national leader in any age. It would force him to postpone one war in order to fight another. It would require Rome to muster one of the largest armies that it had ever dispatched. It would practically bankrupt the imperial treasury. It would be responsible for the destruction of countless villages, towns and cities, and would result in an incalculable number of dead. Yet in the end, after all that effort, pain, fire and blood, Rome had hardly anything to show for it.

  This is how it happened.

  The Stage is Set

  It appears from the records that the revolt in Illyria was not a planned or prearranged event, but was instead something that happened on the spur of the moment. According to the historian Gaius Paterculus, in the year 6 AD, Rome was preparing for war, but not against the Illyrians. They were about to begin a war against a Germanic tribe called the Marcomanni. The name means either ‘the border men’ or ‘the forest men’, since marc could be a variation of the Norse word mark meaning ‘woods’ or ‘forest’, but it could also mean march, meaning ‘borderlands’. The Marcomanni were the strongest and most powerful of all of the southern Germanic tribes during the age of Caesar Augustus, and might have been the mightiest of all of the Germanic tribes in general.13

  The Germans were nothing new to the Romans; they had been fighting against each other on and off since the late second century BC. The war against the Teutons and the Cimbri is especially infamous, for this massive horde of barbarians destroyed several Roman armies before they were destroyed and defeated in turn. During his war against the Gauls in the 50s BC, Julius Caesar fought against a large army of Germans led by Chief Ariovistus of the Sueves at the Battle of Vosges. After defeating them, Caesar crossed the Rhine and explored Germania for a couple of weeks before heading back into Gaul. Julius Caesar’s exploration of Germania is the first recorded instance of a Roman military presence in the area, and it wouldn’t be the last. During the reign of Caesar Augustus, the Romans and Germans were having an increasing number of problems with each other: Roman merchants and settlers were squatting on German territory, and the Germanic tribesmen were conducting raids and attacks on Roman settlements in Gaul. In 13 BC, Caesar Augustus’ nephew Drusus Claudius Nero was tasked with conquering the Germans. Throughout 12 BC, Drusus conducted pre-invasion reconnaissance missions, and from 11 to 8 BC, he and his legions slaughtered and burned their way from the Rhine to the Elbe, subjugating and re-subjugating one tribe after another, until Drusus suddenly died from an accident-related infection. His older brother Tiberius Claudius Nero, who had just finished conquering the Pannonians the year before, was now ordered by Caesar Augustus to hurry north to finish the job of conquering the Germans. However, rather than seizing new territory, Tiberius consolidated the lands that were currently in Rome’s possession, preferring to further strengthen the lands that the legions controlled rather than overreaching himself. After Tiberius made the western Germanic tribes agree to a peace treaty in 6 BC, the territory of ‘Germania Magna’ lay under the authority of a series of military commandants who were entrusted to maintain law and order in the region and to work on building up this occupied territory into a ‘proper’ province.14

  The Marcomanni tribe had been spared Drusus’ and Tiberius’ wrath during Rome’s invasion and conquest of western Germania because their chief had been friendly to Rome. The tribal leader was King Maroboduus (his name may have been pronounced as Maroboduwoz), who, as far as I can tell, is the only Germanic tribal leader that the Romans actually addressed as Rex, ‘King’, as a sign of both the man’s power as well as his close connections to the Roman Empire. According to the historian Strabo, he was a German who held Roman citizenship. When he was younger, he lived in the Eternal City, possibly as a peace hostage, and ‘enjoyed the favour of Augustus’.15 Paterculus wrote of him as ‘a man of noble family, strong in body and courageous in mind, a barbarian by birth but not in intelligence’.16 When he got older, he left Rome and returned to his lands to act as Rome’s vassal. The Marcomanni were originally much smaller in number and occupied lands that lay much further to the west, so when Maroboduus returned to assume his position of power, he ordered a mass relocation of the tribe into Bohemia (modern-day Czech Republic), a land previously occupied by the central European Celts called the Boii. In fact, the name Bohemia is a modernized version of the Germanic name Boiohaemum, ‘the home of the Boii’.17

  For a long time, relations between the Roman Empire and their Marcomannic vassal had been cordial, but when Maroboduus returned to his lands, things immediately began to turn sour. It started when he embarked on a campaign of conquest to bring his Germanic neighbours into subjugation. In order to do this, he needed an army. Using knowledge of military drill and tactics gained from the Romans, and possibly even using Roman mercenaries fighting under his banner (although I have absolutely no evidence to back up that claim), Maroboduus managed to forge a solid strong kingdom in the mountains of south-central Germania and forged an equally solid strong military force to defend it. In fact, the Marcomanni was the only Germanic tribe during this time that possessed a professional military modelled closely on the Roman army, numbering 74,000 warriors strong: 70,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry.18

  This scared the Roman imperial government, who may have considered that these heavily-armed well-trained men would come marching down out of the hills, but what worried them even more was King Maroboduus’ increasing disregard for his relationship towards Rome. Rome had allowed King Maroboduus to reign over the Marcomannic people and had allowed his kingdom to retain a certain degree of sovereignty, provided that he always acknowledged Rome, and more specifically the Roman emperor, as his master. Yet this master-subject relationship deteriorated rapidly. Roman criminals who were running from the law would cross the border and seek asylum within Marcomanni territory. Roman envoys who came to King Maroboduus’ court, presumably to ask for him to extradite criminals as well as other matters of business, were required to address him as if he was Caesar Augustus’ equal, not his vassal. Faced with the growing power of King Maroboduus’ army and his increasing uppity behaviour, the Romans had become more and more worried about their northern Germanic neighbour. King Maroboduus was becoming more assertive and was acting with a greater degree of pushiness towards the Romans. For a long time, the Romans had tolerated the Marcomanni as long as they didn’t cause any trouble, but now Caesar Augustus was becoming concerned that the Marcomanni were a looming threat. The Romans needed to launch a pre-emptive strike before the Marcomanni became too powerful to handle or before they could turn on their imperial master and launch an invasion and so, in the later stages of 5 AD, the Romans began planning for war.19

  And what a war it would be, too, if we look at how the Romans prepared for it. A massive number of troops were gathering for the expedition. Bohemia was a natural fortress, a massive ring of rugged jagged peaks and crags laced with thick pine forests. The Romans knew that this land would be a nightmare for military operations because they had fought in treacherous mountainous landscapes before: in central Italy, in Spain, in southern Gaul, in Rhaetia and in Illyria. They expected a hard fight against both the environment and against King Maroboduus’ 74,000 professionals.

  The general who was ordered to command this mass invasion of the Marcomanni kingdom was Tiberius Claudius Nero, who was not happy about being called into military service yet again. After he had finished the conquest of western Germania in 6 BC, Tiberius had given up the military life and went into a self-imposed exile on the island of Rhodes. However, when Caesar Augustus’ grandsons a
nd heirs Gaius and Lucius both died, Tiberius was regarded as the only one left into whose hands the emperor could place the difficult task of running things. In the year 4 AD, Tiberius returned to Rome, and was officially adopted by the emperor as his true son and heir.20

  Tiberius’ first job was to take command of the troops in Germania. A couple of years earlier, the tribes had risen in revolt and the incumbent military commandant Marcus Vinicius was struggling to put the rebellion down. Tiberius would immediately head north and take charge of things. Under Tiberius’ command, the Germanic uprising was crushed in less than a year and peace was made with the rebellious tribes. Marcus Vinicius was fired, Gaius Sentius Saturninus was appointed in his place as the new governor general of the territory and Tiberius returned to Rome. The Marcomanni had stayed neutral during this rebellion, which is telling. As Rome’s vassals in the region, they might have been expected or even ordered to lend a hand in suppressing the hostile tribes, but their obvious lack of involvement shows the increasing hostility that they themselves were showing to the Romans. It was around this time that Caesar Augustus began seriously thinking of conquering the Marcomanni.21

  Tiberius, now placed in charge of the planned conquest of Marcomannic Bohemia, devised a standard pincer offensive. While Tiberius himself led an army upwards from the south, a second army led by General Gaius Sentius Saturninus, the military commandant of Germania Magna who Tiberius had appointed as his second-incommand for the operation would advance downwards from the northwest. In late 5 AD, Tiberius finished setting up his winter headquarters on the Danube River and had brought up his legions to within five days’ march of the Marcomanni border. The invasion would begin the following year in 6 AD.22