The Emperors of Rome

by David Potter

  While this religious controversy was raging, turmoil also reigned within the emperor’s own domus. The imperial household was riven by factionalism, and relations between his mother Julia Soaemias and her sister Julia Mamaea were becoming increasingly strained. The matriarch of the clan, Julia Maesa, could do little to reconcile them. She may also have sensed that the emperor’s very public eccentricities were becoming intolerable, that violent change was in the offing and that she should position herself so as to be able to exploit that change. In AD 221, she convinced Elagabalus to name his cousin, Severus Alexander (AD 208–235), as his heir. Too late, Elagabalus realized that by adopting a refreshingly conventional young man, he had effectively signed his own death warrant. At the beginning of AD 222 he went to the praetorian camp, and ordered them to murder Alexander. Although the precise details of what then occurred are confused, the praetorians (probably bribed by Maesa and Mamaea) ended up killing both Elagabalus and Julia Soaemias, dumping their bodies in the Tiber and proclaiming Severus Alexander emperor. The senate confirmed the decision of the guard and banished the cult of the alien god Elagabal to Emesa. This would not, however, be the last time that a Roman emperor decided to favour a religion based upon the worship of what was originally a Semitic mountain god.

  The power behind the throne

  Severus Alexander, who was probably aged about 11 when he ascended the throne, was no more capable of running the empire than his cousin. What he did have, though, was a much smarter mother than his predecessor. Julia Mamaea moved quickly to secure the loyalty of members of the traditional aristocracy. Men who might reasonably have thought that their careers were over – including Cassius Dio – were brought back into positions of prominence, and the court ceased to be dominated by members of the royal household. In many ways, the new regime looked like a vision of the age of Marcus Aurelius, when experienced statesmen advised a young emperor, who then acted according to this wise counsel. The problem was that appearances were deceptive in this case; Severus Alexander was in fact incapable of acting as a chief executive, and the government defaulted into a deeply conservative, reactive mentality. Under ordinary circumstances this might not have been fatal. But circumstances were far from ordinary. In AD 225, Ardashir, ruler of a southern Iranian principality, overthrew the king of Parthia and founded a new dynasty – the Sassanids – which became renowned for its religious fundamentalism and military prowess. The Sassanid dynasty was to rule Persia for over 400 years until Muslim armies conquered the region in AD 651. Once again, Rome found itself under threat from a familiar quarter.

  Rome dithered as Ardashir consolidated his power. The emperor and his advisers had no coherent strategy and crucially failed to appreciate that the powerful driving force behind the Iranian revolution was a strict adherence to the principles of Zoroastrianism. Ardashir believed that he was doing the will of Ahura Mazda, the god of Light and Truth, by destroying the servants of Ahriman, the god of the Lie and Darkness. Instead, Rome continued to back the discredited old regime. It was only when Ardashir launched raids against the province of Mesopotamia, and the garrison there mutinied, that the central government decided to act. Alexander himself journeyed east with his mother to oversee the operations.

  The only positive thing that can be said about the Roman invasion of Parthia in AD 231 is that, unlike previous such ventures, it at least tried to show originality by not slavishly following Caesar’s superannuated battle plan. That said – given the complete lack of decent intelligence about Ardashir’s dispositions – it would have fared far better if it had. Caesar had been a past-master at bringing pressure to bear at decisive points against his enemy; by contrast, Severus’ generals did just the opposite. Splitting the army into three parts, they sent one into northwestern Iran, where forces hostile to Ardashir still held out in the kingdom of Media, another on the familiar route towards Ctesiphon from the north and a third down the River Euphrates in the direction of the kingdom of Mesene. These separate forces committed a cardinal military error by failing to advance in a coordinated fashion. No sooner had the southern column reached the vast marshlands that once extended north of the modern city of Basra than it was routed. The central column was stopped in its tracks, and only the northern expedition gained some measure of success.

  These humiliations badly damaged Alexander’s prestige, and he was desperate to try and recoup some success to offset the fiasco in Persia. Returning to Rome to celebrate a rather hollow triumph in AD 233, he departed the following year, again accompanied by his mother, for the German frontier. This effort to win back the loyalty of the army failed. In early March, AD 235, Alexander and Mamaea were murdered at Mainz in a mutiny led by a junior officer from Thrace called Julius Maximinus (c. AD 173–238).

  Maximinus seized the throne for himself and immediately tried to secure his position by launching a series of attacks against the tribes north of the Rhine and Danube. He never set foot in Rome, and offended the populace by cutting back on subsidizing the grain supply. The traditional aristocracy plainly resented an upstart, and in February, AD 238, the senate lent its support to an elderly senator, Gordian (c. AD 159–238), who declared himself emperor in North Africa.

  The year of the seven emperors

  The initial phases of the revolt of AD 238 were deeply depressing. Gordian I and his son Gordian II (c. AD 192–238), who had also been declared emperor, were killed by soldiers under the command of the governor of the neighbouring province of Numidia, a loyal supporter of Maximinus. Realizing that Maximinus was unlikely to be a merciful victor, the senate then elected a board of 20 men to uphold the defence of the realm against the emperor, whom it declared an enemy of the state. This action of the senate was eloquent testimony to the great store it set by the principle of collegial government. In accordance with this, not one but two men, Pupienus (c. AD 178–238) and Balbinus (d. AD 238), were promptly declared co-emperors. When friends of the deceased Gordians instigated a riot among the Roman people because that family had been cut out of the succession, Pupienus and Balbinus agreed to include the nephew of the younger Gordian, a youth of 13, in their new imperial college as heir apparent. It is a sign of the deep and growing discontent with Maximinus that declarations of loyalty to this unlikely coalition began to arrive from many parts of the empire, even as the emperor led his battle-hardened army from the Balkans into Italy.

  Even given this patent lack of enthusiasm for Maximinus, the events of the late winter and early spring of AD 238 must have astonished the contemporary world. When Maximinus entered Italy, his army came to a halt before the city of Aquileia, whose strong defences had once provided refuge for Marcus Aurelius in the early phase of his war against the northern tribes. Weeks passed while Maximinus tried unsuccessfully to capture the city. The army, which in all likelihood was not properly provisioned, grew restless, and, at the beginning of April, murdered its emperor.

  Pupienus and Balbinus did not enjoy their remarkable triumph for long. The Praetorian Guard, which feared that it would be replaced in this highly volatile situation of shifting political allegiances, murdered the co-emperors and declared for Gordian III (AD 225–244). Since Maximinus had made his own son co-emperor when he invaded Italy, the young Gordian officially became the seventh person to hold the position of Augustus in the course of AD 238. His reign, which was dominated by members of the equestrian bureaucracy, would last for nearly six years before he fell victim to the new power that had arisen in the east.

  Anarchy and Disorder:

  The Crisis of the Third Century

  (AD 239–270)

  Rome was so inherently unstable that it was AD 241 before the empire was able to mount a truly robust response to the challenge posed by the Sassanid empire. Gordian III made his father-in-law, an equestrian named Timesitheus, praetorian prefect. Timesitheus took a long time to muster Rome’s forces and get them into position to attack. Yet when the assault finally took place, in AD 243, the Persians under Ardashir’s son Shapur I (r. AD 241
–272) were roundly defeated, being pushed back over the Euphrates and routed at the Battle of Resaena.

  Timesitheus died suddenly, and his co-prefect, Julius Priscus, now the effective head of the government, elevated his own brother Marcus Julius Philippus (c. AD 204–249) to serve alongside him. They remained in office as the army, now with Gordian in titular command, launched an ill-advised invasion of Iraq in the winter of AD 244. As the Romans established a bridgehead on the Euphrates from which to advance on Ctesiphon, Shapur struck. The Roman army was defeated and Gordian was murdered in his camp. Philippus became emperor; he is known to history as Philip the Arab, since his family’s origins lay in Syria.

  A hands-on ruler

  The reign of Philip marks an interesting turning point in the history of the third century AD. He was the first equestrian emperor to govern from Rome – neither Macrinus nor Maximinus had gone near the capital – and he took a decidedly proactive approach to the empire’s more intractable problems. One of the major issues that he set out to tackle was imperial finance. The ignominious peace settlement he was forced to conclude with Persia after Gordian’s defeat entailed large reparations payments (and was soon violated anyway). A further huge drain on the state’s finances was the lavish celebrations held in AD 248 to mark the 1000th anniversary of the founding of Rome.

  Despite his concern over the state of the imperial coffers, Philip would have viewed the outlay on the millennial games as vital for proclaiming his prestige. Another expensive but indispensable vanity project was the reconstruction of his native city of Shahba in modern Syria. As an outsider from a part of the empire that had not yet produced a ruler, Philip would doubtless have felt the need to burnish his Roman credentials by equipping his home town with magnificent edifices befitting the birthplace of an emperor. Philippopolis – as the new city 56 miles (90 kilometres) south of Damascus was called – is remarkable for its many fine buildings, including temples, a theatre and bath houses, all in the Roman architectural style.

  To pay for all of this, Philip increased the number of people in each community who were responsible for making up any shortfall in annual tax payments from their own pockets. Regarding the overall administration of the empire, he realized that the Severan centralization of authority around the person of the emperor was deeply flawed. He counteracted this trend by appointing men to effectively serve as deputy emperors in various regions. His first two such appointments were family members – Julius Priscus in the east, and a relative named Severianus in the Balkans.

  Yet if this decentralization was at root a good idea, another of Philip’s money-saving measures – cutting subsidies to the tribes north of the Danube – turned out to be not such a prudent move. Since the chiefs who were loyal depended upon these payments to maintain their status, the effect of Philip’s cuts was either to undermine loyalists or turn them against Rome. Trouble flared almost immediately after he took office, and, in the wake of the millennial games, more serious revolts broke out in the regions of Moesia and Pannonia. Gaius Messius Quintus Decius (c. AD 201–251), a senator who had once served Maximinus in the civil war of AD 238, was sent to suppress the trouble on the Danube. However, no sooner had he succeeded in his mission than his troops persuaded him to proclaim himself emperor. He marched on Rome and defeated and killed Philip at Verona.

  Attempts to revive past glories

  Few emperors have left such a strong impression on the historical sources as Decius, who was passionately attached to a vision of the traditions of the imperial past, while utterly lacking the ability to secure those traditions. One of his most notable acts, almost as soon as he had defeated Philip, was to promulgate an edict ordering all citizens of the empire to sacrifice for the welfare of the state. Another was to issue coins commemorating the ‘good emperors’ of the past, as part of what appears to have been a concerted attempt to rewrite the history of the early third century. A third was to take for himself the name of Trajan, thus associating himself with a past golden age of imperial rule.

  Unfortunately for both Decius and the empire as a whole, he lacked the qualities of his namesake. None of his initiatives addressed the fundamental causes of unrest along the northern frontiers or in the eastern provinces, where rebellions had been smouldering since the later years of Philip’s reign. Of the two threats, the one from the northern tribes – this time ancestors of the later Gothic peoples – was the more urgent. A large invading force of Goths swept across the Danube in AD 250, ambushing Decius and destroying a large part of his army before laying waste to the great city of Philippopolis (the settlement named after Philip of Macedon; now the city of Plovdiv in Bulgaria). Although Decius finally caught up with the raiders, his army was lured into swampy terrain and destroyed at the Battle of Abrittus in June AD 251. The emperor and his son both fell in this engagement. Trebonianus Gallus (c. AD 206–253), one of the governors of the Danubian provinces, succeeded to the throne.

  Overwhelmed by enemies

  In AD 252, Shapur I invaded the eastern provinces by moving up the Euphrates rather than across northern Mesopotamia, the expected route for a Persian attack. He crushed a Roman army at Barbalissos, before ravaging Syria and sacking Antioch. At the same time, a group of tribesmen from the Black Sea coast launched seaborne attacks, bursting through the Dardanelles into the Aegean and sacking many cities there, including Ephesus, the greatest city of western Turkey.

  The years AD 251–252 rank as the worst in Roman imperial history: three major cities were sacked, two armies were destroyed and the emperor was seemingly powerless to prevent the carnage. When the Danubian army won a victory in AD 253, it proclaimed its own general, Aemilianus (c. AD 207–253), emperor. Aemilianus defeated Gallus in central Italy before falling prey to Valerian (AD 200–260), an ally of Gallus, who had arrived too late to help the former emperor.

  For the next several years Valerian and his son Gallienus (c. AD 218–268), then a man of mature years, whom he appointed as his co-ruler – while elevating various sons of Gallienus to the rank of Caesar – had only intermittent success in reversing the downward trend in Roman power. Still, the joint rule of Valerian and Gallienus, with designated successors, presaged more successful similar arrangements later in the century, and demonstrated a recognition that the empire could no longer be governed by a single ruler if there were serious threats on multiple fronts.

  For several years after the joint regime took effect, the Roman army was able to keep the tribes in check along the Rhine and Danube frontiers; and on the eastern frontier, a desperate action by the Roman garrison of Dura Europus, the fortress city on the banks of the Euphrates, prevented another major Persian invasion of Syria. Captured in AD 252, and retaken by the Romans shortly after that, the city’s defences had been massively reinforced against a future siege. One result of those defensive arrangements was that a synagogue and the earliest-known Christian church, both located near the city wall, were buried as the walls were being reinforced against battering-rams. The splendid paintings of the synagogue, preserved in the dry environment of the desert, are now housed in the Damascus Museum, while the paintings from the Christian church are in the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, where visitors may see the earliest Christian images of New Testament stories.

  It was not only art that archaeologists found at Dura: they also discovered signs of a vast Persian camp set up outside the city walls in AD 256, suggesting that a major invasion had been set in motion, but the city held long enough to prevent a further advance. Amongst the signs of desperate struggle it appears that we also have the earliest direct evidence for chemical warfare, as the Persians used what was essentially poison gas to kill a group of Roman soldiers who entered a tunnel to try and prevent the enemy from undermining the walls. They died, but the Persian’s mine failed to bring down the reinforced tower that was its target, and so the siege continued until finally the Persians poured into the town, slaughtering or enslaving the surviving defenders.

  Valerian, who had plainly
left the defenders of Dura to their fate, now took another tack in seeking to defend the existing frontiers. It appears that he now felt he could do this by eliminating those who did not subscribe to the cultural unity of the empire. It was he who, in AD 257, issued the first empire-wide edict ordering active persecution of the Christian Church, the seizure of Christians’ property and the execution of Christians who did not recant their beliefs. This too presaged later developments, as Roman emperors sought to enforce greater ideological unity amongst their subjects than had been the case in the past. As with all such efforts to enforce conformity through persecution, it was a sign that the state was losing its ability to provide for its subjects’ welfare in real terms.

  An emperor in chains

  In AD 259, after failing to defend western Turkey from yet another naval assault from the Black Sea, Valerian found himself threatened by a new Persian invasion. Shapur crossed into the Roman province of Mesopotamia in the spring of AD 260 to find a Roman army weakened by disease and on the verge of mutiny. When, after suffering a defeat south of Edessa, Valerian sued for peace, Shapur threw him in chains and sent him as a captive to Persia while his armies plundered the eastern provinces. He was the only Roman emperor ever to be taken prisoner. Later Roman tradition held that Shapur humiliated Valerian by using him as a human footstool when mounting his horse. Yet Persian sources claim that the exemperor ended his days in Bishapur, in south-central Iran, where he and some of his former troops were employed on engineering projects such as bridge-building.

  The disgrace of Valerian’s surrender precipitated a major crisis. In the east, as the Persian army overextended itself, the most senior official to survive the disaster, Fulvius Macrianus (d. AD 261), rallied what was left of the army and drove the Persians back. In this campaign, he was given invaluable military assistance by Septimius Odaenathus (d. AD 268), prince of Palmyra. The Palmyrenes had every reason to fear the rise of the Sassanian kingdom, as the Persians began to threaten Palmyra’s traditional dominance over key trade routes in the Middle East. Odaenathus had initially tried to counter the Persian threat through diplomacy, sending gifts to Shapur I. However, when his overtures were rebuffed, Odaenathus renounced Palmyra’s neutral stance, raised a large mounted army and threw in his lot with Rome.