Festive coin types in the same mintage celebrate Trajan’s father, onetime holder of triumphal honors, ornamenta triumphalia, over the Parthians when he governed Syria, and deified by his son. Another shows Trajan himself with the curious legend “May fortune return him safely,” fort[una] red[ux]. This signified that the emperor was planning a profectio, an imperial expedition, of some kind; combined with a tribute to the last Roman to have beaten the Parthians, it could be interpeted by the Roman equivalent of Kremlinologists as a hint that battle was to recommence. Other coins of the period have a markedly martial flavor—with images of Mars, the god of war, of the emperor on horseback trampling on his fallen enemies, and of legionary eagles and standards.
The Historia Augusta remarks, but infuriatingly fails to date the event precisely, that Hadrian was appointed legatus to the emperor “at the time of the Parthian expedition.” Dio reports that he “had been assigned to Syria for the Parthian war.” This may mean that he traveled on from Athens sometime during 113 to Syria, the province that shares a frontier with the Parthian empire, and began to assemble an invasion army. In that case it would seem likely that he received the emperor’s confidential instructions before setting off for Greece in early 112, and made preliminary preparations during his stay there.
So such particular evidence as there is suggests a long-planned intention only awaiting an opportunity. More generally, though, there was a traditional pattern in the relations between the two powers. The Parthians were usually too preoccupied with their internecine court politics to plot aggressive war; and their statesmen must have recognized that their system of governance would not readily permit them to manage a larger territory. However, from the perspective of a Roman general ambitious for glory (for example, Crassus, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony), they were a tempting if often indigestible prey. It is reasonable to regard Trajan as the inheritor of this tradition.
The longed-for casus belli eventually presented itself in Armenia, a bone of contention for more than a century. Both parties saw the kingdom as falling within their legitimate sphere of interest. Long ago Augustus had negotiated a face-saving arrangement, confirmed by Nero: the Parthians nominated a Parthian prince to the throne of Armenia, but the Romans confirmed the choice and conducted a coronation in Rome. By and large this double-lock system had assured an uneasy but durable stalemate.
For some years, though, Parthia had been divided by two rival kings. During the second half of 113, the leading contender for the throne, Chosroes, self-confidently deposed the Armenian ruler, a nephew of his, and replaced him with the king’s older brother, a certain Parthamasiris. Nothing particularly unusual here—except that Chosroes foolishly failed to consult Trajan. This certainly meant a loss of face for Rome, but no fundamental imperial interest was at risk. A rational response would have been to follow in Augustus’ footsteps and send out a high official (say, Hadrian) to negotiate an acceptable settlement.
Trajan made it clear, though, that negotiation was the last thing on his mind. Public opinion was enthusiastically behind him and, amici cheering crowds, he set out from Rome for the east, accompanied (according to a late source) by a “large force of soldiers and senators.” He probably chose for his departure the date of his adoption by Nerva, October 25. Chosroes panicked and sent an embassy, which met the emperor at Athens; it presented gifts and begged Trajan not to make war on him. Trying to make up for his earlier mistake, the king of kings asked that Armenia be given to Parthamasiris and requested that Rome send him the royal diadem as a token of endorsement. He had deposed his nephew, he claimed, for being “satisfactory neither to the Romans nor to the Parthians.”
Trajan was unrelenting. He refused to accept the gifts and did not respond to Chosroes’ requests, either orally or in writing. He merely stated, forbiddingly: “Friendship is decided by actions and not by words. When I have reached Syria, I will do everything that is proper.”
So what were Trajan’s true motives? What did he have in mind if not in word? We can only speculate, but one thing is certain—he was obedient to the long-established rhetoric of imperial expansion. As he was an admirer of Alexander the Great, an invasion of Parthia would be a happy echo for him of the Macedonian king’s conquests. Now in his mid-fifties, this was Trajan’s last chance to live a dream of youthful adventure.
Hadrian waited in Antioch (today’s Antakya), then capital of Syria, for Trajan to take command of the legions he had assembled. Founded by Seleucus in the fourth century B.C., the city was squeezed in between the river Orontes (the modern Asi or Nehri) to the west and Mount Silpius to the east. It was laid out in imitation of the grid plan of Alexandria; two long colonnaded streets met in the center. With a population of about half a million, Antioch was the empire’s third largest city after Rome and Alexandria.
About four miles away was Daphne, a large paradeisos, or walled park around a gorge with groves of laurel and cypress. There were formal gardens and cascades. A spring called the Castalian fount was believed to have prophetic properties; it was perhaps on this occasion that the superstitious Hadrian consulted it and was informed that he was to become emperor.
However, Daphne had a reputation less for religious observance than as a haunt for sexual promiscuity, as more generally did Antioch itself. This was the city that inspired the stereotype of the slippery, treacherous, and untrustworthy Asiatic—perhaps the closest Romans came to anything approaching contemporary racism. But it was also nicknamed the “Athens of the East” and its great wealth attracted artists, philosophers, poets, and orators from across the Mediterranean, and financed a luxurious and permissive lifestyle. Although he was busy, Antioch would have been an entertaining billet for a man like Hadrian, with an inquisitive mind and an openness to experience.
Toward the end of December he greeted the emperor when he disembarked at Antioch’s port, Seleucia Pieria (near today’s Samandağ). They made their way at once to the neighboring Mount Casius (Jebel Akra) for a religious ceremony at a temple of Zeus Casius. At nearly six thousand feet, this was the highest landmark in northern Syria, with views of Cyprus and the Taurus range in Cilicia.
The imperial pair presented an array of gifts for the god; more was promised if the Romans were victorious in the impending campaign. Hadrian composed a short poem in Greek (of course) elegiac couplets for the occasion.
To Zeus Kasios has Trajan, son of Aeneas, dedicated this gift,
the ruler of men to the ruler of the immortals:
two artistically wrought cups and from a large ox
the horn adorned with all-gleaming gold,
chosen from his former spoils when, unyielding,
he has wasted the Getae with his spear.
But you, lord of the dark clouds, grant him the power
gloriously to complete this Achaemenian conflict,
so that your heart may be twice warmed by the sight
of two spoils, those of the Getae and those of the Arsacids.
Aeneas was the prince who escaped the blazing ruins of Troy and settled in Italy, and whose descendants founded Rome; so Trajan is represented as the millennial inheritor of this great tradition. The Achaemenids (literally the name of the dynasty Alexander overthrew) and the Getae were poetic terms for the Parthians and the Dacians. Hadrian was associating past victories with an assured future one. But would the god smile on the enterprise?
XIII
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The emperor was in no hurry. He proceeded, by way of the pleasant gardens at Daphne, to Antioch, where he passed the winter of 113. His first destination was Armenia, the ostensible cause of the war, and he was obliged to wait until the winter snows had melted from the passes leading into that remote and high kingdom.
Trajan had promoted Hadrian to something like a modern chief of the general staff and so given him a key role in the management of the Parthian expedition. His ambivalent feelings had apparently firmed into wholehearted approval. Hadrian was for the moment the second man in th
e empire. However, despite the fact that he was well qualified for the purple, his position remained insecure. Despite his six decades, the emperor still showed no interest in securing the succession.
How are we to explain what looks like a dereliction of duty on the part of a levelheaded ruler? Perhaps Trajan obstinately refused to acknowledge the approach of old age, part of the same mind-set that encouraged him to emulate the ever-youthful Alexander. But just as powerful a factor may have been disagreements at court. Among the emperor’s comites opinions were sharply divided. The Historia Augusta has a passage on the subject, typically condensed to the point of obscurity:
At this same time [Hadrian] enjoyed … the friendship of Quintus Sosius Senecio, Marcus Aemilius Papus, and Aulus Platorius Nepos, both of the senatorial order, and also of Publius Acilius Attianus, his former guardian, of Livianus, and of Turbo, all of equestrian rank.
These men were the leaders of a meritocracy, for they had all reached the top through talent and endurance. Senecio held high command in Dacia and had twice been consul; a cultivated man, he was a friend of Pliny, who gossiped to him about the difficulty of getting audiences for literary readings, and of Plutarch. Hadrian became a friend of his, probably as early as 101, at the beginning of his career. Papus and Platorius Nepos had Spanish connections and were members of the Baetican “mafia,” with villas in and around Tibur. We have already met the now aging Attianus, when he and Trajan took responsibility for the child Hadrian when he was orphaned nearly three decades previously. He was now praetorian prefect and, as cocommander of the Guard, a guarantor of the stability of the regime. Titus Claudius Livianus had been one of his predecessors as prefect, and was perhaps of special interest to Hadrian as the owner of twin boys celebrated for their beauty.
Turbo we have also already met: he had been a centurion at Aquincum, where he probably first got to know the youthful Hadrian and join his circle, and rose swiftly from the ranks; he was now admiral of the fleet at Misenum (modern Miseno, at the northwestern end of the Bay of Naples). He was Hadrian’s kind of soldier, hardworking and without airs and graces. Dio Cassius writes of him: “He displayed neither effeminacy nor haughtiness in anything he did, but lived like an ordinary person.” (The fact that his character was the complete opposite of the not-long-dead Licinius Sura’s illustrates the wide range of Hadrian’s affections.)
On the debit side, the Historia Augusta pointed to Aulus Cornelius Palma and Lucius Publilius Celsus, “always his enemies.” Palma was a younger friend of Trajan; trusted and trustworthy, he had twice been consul, and in 105 or 106 he had conquered the Nabataean Arabs, hardy nomads on the southern border of Syria who traded in frankincense and myrrh, and brought them within the empire. Celsus was consul for the second time in 113 and stood high in Trajan’s favor. According to Dio, he and a colleague were awarded the signal distinction of public statues. In the shadows, other critics of Hadrian are to be suspected, among them his elderly brother-in-law, Servianus.
Grounds for the distrust of Hadrian are hard to determine. He was obviously competent and intelligent, and no reports have come down to us of serious disloyalty to Trajan. History shows that factions tend to gather around close relatives of a monarch and criticize official policy. So one might speculate that Hadrian opposed the Parthian war, but if he did he surely held his tongue. Otherwise, as he played a large part in preparing the expedition and was working closely with the emperor, he would have been open to charges of subversion or hypocrisy.
There may have been objections to Hadrian’s personality. A picture does emerge of a hardworking but cocksure man—a combination often irritating to colleagues. Not suffering fools gladly is insufferable to the fools.
Whatever the explanation, Trajan would have been rational to conclude that the eve of a major expedition was the wrong moment to alienate one side or the other by coming to a firm decision about his former ward. The question of the succession would have to wait.
In the spring Trajan marched with his army northward from Antioch to the town of Satala in Lesser Armenia, on the Roman bank of the river Euphrates. It was a long trudge—some 475 miles—across awkward terrain, and the Romans probably arrived toward the end of May. The advance precipitated a line of embassies from client kings and minor rulers, all wishing to make their peace with the emperor. One who stayed away was Abgarus, king of Osrhoene, a tiny kingdom on the far side of the Euphrates that he had purchased from the king of kings. “Afraid of Trajan and the Parthians alike,” he sent gifts and kind words, but not himself.
At Satala the seven eastern legions, gathered by Hadrian, joined others dispatched from the Danube provinces (a risky step, one might have thought, to denude an unsettled region of its troops). Some of them were not at full strength, but Trajan now commanded the equivalent of eight full legions with the same number of auxiliaries—in other words, about eighty thousand men.
He also deployed his towering prestige. He marched into Armenia and then, before an arrow had been released or a spear cast, paused at a place called Elegeia. Here he staged a splendid ceremony—like the durbars of the British Raj—at which local satraps and princes came to meet him and offer their fealty. One of them presented Hadrian with a horse that had been trained to prostrate itself as if it were a subject in the presence of an eastern monarch. It knelt down on its forelegs and placed its head beneath the feet of anyone who stood by it.
The culminating event saw the arrival of the Parthian pretender, Parthamasiris. This should have been a significant propaganda coup, but it went badly, and mysteriously, wrong.
The emperor sat on a tribunal set up in the Roman camp and was forced to wait for his visitor. In a surprising breach of protocol, Parthamasiris turned up late, pleading as excuse the need to evade roaming supporters of his deposed rival, Exedares. He laid his diadem before Trajan, expecting to receive it back. The soldiers shouted in delight at this “victory.” But the emperor refused to crown Parthamasiris, who protested loudly. Trajan replied that he would surrender Armenia to no one, and declared that it was now a Roman province. He gave Parthamasiris permission to leave.
This is a very odd incident. Parthamasiris had been in communication with Trajan and presumably agreed terms for the encounter in advance. He was to be recognized as king of Armenia provided that he accepted Rome’s right of confirmation and coronation. Are we to suppose that events got out of hand by some mischance—or that Trajan had decided in advance to break the negotiated deal and trick Parthamasiris out of his throne? The accounts we have seem to imply confusion rather than conspiracy, except that it is unlikely that Trajan would announce out of the blue the annexation of Armenia. This was a strategic decision of some importance, and the humiliation of Parthamasiris was a striking means of dramatizing it. The Romans were well aware of the propaganda opportunity, as shown by several coin issues that depict the rex Parthus as a supplicant in front of Trajan.
But why let him leave the Roman camp? Surely the prince would be dangerous if set at large? Indeed. The Romans had thought of that. Parthamasiris and his entourage were given a cavalry escort to see them on their way, presumably to Parthia. Soon news arrived of the prince’s death; apparently he had been cut down while trying to escape his guard—an explanation deployed by ruthless captors throughout the ages.
Over the centuries Rome placed great weight on honest and straightforward dealing; treaties were sacred. The episode damaged the good name of the optimus princeps. He must have known it would do so, and we can only assume that Parthamasiris could call on very powerful support in Armenia for it to be worth Rome’s while to tolerate the moral cost of removing him.
Armenia was soon reduced. Various commanders, among them Lusius Quietus, the Moorish chieftain with his fierce horsemen, were dispatched to various parts of the kingdom to subdue resistance. The fighting seems to have gone on into the winter, for there are reports of soldiers making themselves snowshoes. But victory was complete, and previously hesitant local kings decided it was time to jo
in the winning side.
Among them was Abgarus, who had the luck to have an extremely good-looking son, a certain Arbandes, who wore gold earrings and caught the emperor’s roving eye. Thanks in part to the young man’s intercession, his father’s early reluctance to meet the emperor was pardoned. Dio Cassius remarks that the king “became Trajan’s friend and entertained him at a banquet. During the meal he brought in his boy to perform some barbaric dance or other.” History fails to record how the evening concluded.
It would have been difficult to retain control of Armenia without annexing a large slice of the Parthian empire to its south, Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), the fertile land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. That was to be the business of next year’s campaign.
Entry into Parthian territory in 115 was an event of historic proportions, and Trajan led his troops in the field. Despite his age he made a point, as he always had done, of marching on foot with the rank and file, fording rivers with them and so forth. According to Dio, he paid special attention to training. “Sometimes he even made his scouts circulate false reports, so that the soldiers might at one and the same time practice military maneuvers and become fearless and ready for any dangers.”
The campaign went well, and it appears that Mesopotamia was entrapped in a pincer movement with Lusius Quietus moving into eastern and Trajan into western Mesopotamia (taking care to march around the lovely Arbandes’ Osrhoene).
The emperor returned to Antioch for the winter, and before the end of the year Trajan sent dispatches to Rome—a “laureled letter” betokening victory. He probably announced the creation of Armenia and Mesopotamia as two new Roman provinces. The Senate received the news on February 21 to loud acclaim. It awarded Trajan the title of Parthicus, despite the fact that much of the Parthian empire remained to conquer.
Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome Page 19
