Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  The rain miracle of Marcus Aurelius, as this moment of deliverance has been known ever since, was taken in antiquity as yet another proof that divine power sustained the Roman Empire. It was also squabbled over. Dio Cassius, our main source, attributes the divine intervention to the efforts of Arnuphis, an Egyptian mage, but Christian writers claimed that the prayers of a Christian legion from Syria had worked the trick. Whoever was responsible, the thunderstorm got the Emperor out of jail, and he was duly grateful. He went on to win the war and restore order on Rome’s European frontiers, though it did take pretty much the rest of the decade. The rain miracle, along with other events of the war, was immortalized on the carvings of the celebratory column raised by the Emperor in the imperial capital (Plate 5).1 But why did Marcus Aurelius find himself locked in this death struggle in the first place?

  FROM THE BALTIC TO THE BLACK SEA

  Rome’s expansion into largely Germanic-dominated temperate Europe ground to a halt in the first century AD more or less along a line marked by the Rivers Rhine and Danube, but this did not mean that the Empire had moved into purely defensive mode. As we saw in the last chapter, Rome’s general military superiority was backed by an aggressive diplomacy, which turned the political entities closest to the frontier into Roman client states. Raiding, threats, military demonstrations and barbarian submissions were standard items in the repertoire, but head-on confrontation highly unusual. Harsh experience reinforced the lesson that open conflict with technically superior Roman armies usually ended in disaster. By the mid-second century, the Marcomanni and Quadi had both belonged to this class of frontier clients for over a century, which makes the war in which Marcus Aurelius so nearly lost his life all the more puzzling. Why were longstanding clients, after a hundred years of fairly minor squabbling, now trying to destroy the Emperor and his army in a full-scale military encounter?

  The rain miracle occurred in the middle of a sequence of disturbances which are collectively known as the Marcomannic War. But they involved many groups other than the Marcomanni of Bohemia, even if the latter did star in some of the war’s most notorious episodes. Reconstructing the war is also far from straightforward. The historian Dio Cassius originally wrote a full account of the action, including a considerable amount of circumstantial detail, but his narrative survives only in fragments, and our other sources are very limited. The result is a series of episodic moments of action, whose relationship to one another is often unclear. Above all, the related issues of the scale of these wars and their underlying causation are particularly puzzling. Our Roman sources naturally concentrate on violence in the frontier zone and the ways in which it spilled over into the Empire itself. Historical and archaeological sources make it clear, however, that one of the factors destabilizing the frontier zone was the arrival there of new groups of Germanic outsiders.

  The Marcomannic War

  Marcus Aurelius came to power in 161 AD, and the early years of his reign were spent dealing with the Parthian menace on Rome’s Mesopotamian frontier. Amongst other measures, during these years he had to transfer to the east three full legions – notionally 18,000 men – from the Rhine and Danube, but by the middle of the decade trouble was brewing in the west. In winter 166/7, reportedly six thousand Langobardi and Ubii raided the Roman province of Pannonia – modern Hungary, south of the River Danube, and south and west of the Carpathian Mountains. These raiders were defeated, but trouble continued in this same Middle Danubian region. In 168 the Marcomanni and the Victuali, long-time Roman clients on this part of the frontier, demanded admission into the Empire. As we saw in the last chapter, it was not unheard-of for outside groups to ask to be admitted into the Empire, and sometimes these requests were granted. This time, however, Marcus refused. Perhaps he was not militarily in control of the situation. He was determined, however, to become so.

  In 170, the Emperor gathered his forces in Pannonia. There are hints in the sources that he had it in mind formally to annex the territories of the Marcomanni and Quadi at this point. But the resulting campaign was disastrous. The Roman army was outflanked by the Marcomanni and, since many intermediate strongpoints had been stripped of troops for the projected assault, the rampant barbarians were able to break through into Italy itself. Uderzo was sacked and Aquileia besieged. Roman Italy suffered its worst disaster since the third century BC, and the invaders were not fully repelled until the end of 171. Meanwhile, unrest spread the full length of the Danube. Nomadic Sarmatian Iazyges and the Germanic Quadi were causing trouble on the Middle Danube plain west of the Carpathians, while two Vandal groups, the Astingi and the Lacringi, menaced the northern frontiers of Transylvanian Dacia (Map 4). The Costoboci, from the north-east of Dacia, also raided Thrace, Macedonia and Greece, having presumably moved south along the eastern rather than the western slopes of the Carpathians. At the same time, serious raiding was affecting the northern Rhine frontier. Countering all these different threats delayed the Emperor’s plans for retribution, and it was not until 172 that Marcus could return to the offensive. Two years of intense campaigning on the Middle Danube, punctuated by the rain miracle, brought the Marcomanni, the Quadi and the Iazyges to heel. Bohemia, Slovakia and the Great Hungarian Plain had been pacified, but much of the rest of the decade was taken up with a complex mix of military and diplomatic countermeasures, designed, as ever, to turn immediate military victory into a longer-lasting peace.2

  The surviving fragments of Dio give something of their flavour, but are not comprehensive. Nonetheless, the parallels with the stratagems pursued in the same region two centuries later by Constantius II are striking. Hostile kings were replaced with more pliant ones, particularly among the Quadi and Sarmatians, where the removal of the Emperor’s previous nominees (Furtius and Zanticus, respectively) had marked the adoption of an openly hostile policy towards the Empire. The Marcomanni and Quadi were forced to accept the stationing of twenty thousand Roman soldiers in a series of forts upon their lands. All this, of course, is a further reminder that, for all the subsidies and blandishments that might accompany the status, becoming a Roman client was often not a freely chosen position. Some groups were allowed to move into new territories (the Asdingi), others prevented from doing so (the Quadi), and some were even received into the Empire (the 3,000-strong Naristi). All this was done according to the Emperor’s wishes and his assessment of what would best serve the Empire’s interests. The Naristi were a much smaller group than the Marcomanni, and Marcus Aurelius was now dictating terms on the back of a military victory, so that, this time, he was happy enough to receive them. Trading privileges, likewise, were granted or removed according to the Emperor’s estimation of a group’s loyalty, and neutral zones of differing sizes re-established. The dangerous Sarmatian Iazyges, like the Limigantes in 358, for instance, were forced to move twice as far away from the river as before. Where the Emperor was particularly suspicious, Roman garrisons were established and the normal assemblies by which tribes conducted political business were banned. As order was restored, and more pliant kings firmed up their authority, conditions were relaxed. The Iazyges were eventually allowed to return to the old neutral zone and to pass through the province of Roman Dacia to resume their normal relations with their fellow Sarmatians, the Roxolani. The far-reaching military campaigns of Marcus Aurelius thus underpinned a complex web of diplomatic settlements and alliances, which resonated to long-established rhythms of Roman client management. As Dio commented, such had been the scale of the problem – much greater than that faced by Constantius in 358 – that the work was still not finished on the emperor’s death in 181.3

  But we are still left with the most fundamental question of all. What caused the trouble in the first place?

  According to one of our major sources, the underlying cause was a bout of expansionary activity – involving some migration – on the part of several Germanic groups from north-central Europe:

  Not only were the Victuali and Marcomanni throwing everything into confusion, but other
tribes, who had been driven on by the more distant barbarians and had retreated before them, were ready to attack Italy if not peaceably received.

  In the old Grand Narrative, this passage was naturally seized on as evidence that the Marcommanic War marked the first stage of a largescale migration out of Germania that would eventually destroy the Roman Empire. But the extract is from the Historia Augusta, whose testimony is always problematic. Although it contains much historical information, particularly when dealing with the more distant, second-century, past, the text is in overall terms a fake: a creation of c.400 AD, written in Rome probably by someone of senatorial rank, masquerading as one of c.300. It is impossible to know how much weight to give its testimony at any particular point, since it is difficult to tell what is based on authentic information and what the author has just made up. And an author writing at that time, as we shall see in the next chapter, would have had in front of him an excellent contemporary example of Gothic barbarian immigrants who had entered the Empire in large numbers, on the run from ‘more distant barbarians’ in the form of the Huns. It is entirely reasonable, therefore, to be highly sceptical of the Historia Augusta’s account of the origins of Marcus’ difficulties, and one recent commentator has argued that its large-scale vision of the causes and broader significance of the war needs to be rejected entirely. In this view, all thoughts of the fourth century should be put to one side. The Marcomannic War should not be seen as the first onrush of a rising Germanic tsunami which would eventually deluge the Roman world. On the contrary, having just wrapped up the Parthian War, Marcus Aurelius wanted to re-establish Rome’s authority on its European frontiers, where the removal of troops to the east had allowed some increase in raiding, but nothing beyond the spectrum of the ordinary. In this view, it was the ferocious nature of the Emperor’s projected counterstroke – Roman aggression, in other words – that inflamed the frontier. Panic caused the Marcomanni and Quadi to get their retaliation in first.4

  Some aspects of this reconstruction are fair enough. It is necessary to be wary of possible anachronisms, but fear of Roman aggression would certainly have been an element in barbarian calculations. Rome expected to dictate matters on its frontiers on the back of military domination, and its barbarian clients can have been under few illusions that the Empire’s take on any deserved retribution would be ‘fair’ or ‘proportionate’. Emperors needed to be seen to be tough on barbarians and tough on the causes of barbarism. But, all that said, I do not find at all convincing the argument that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on in the 160s and 170s. It is important not to veer from one simple vision of the war – that it was the start of the great Germanic counterstroke against Roman imperialism – to another: namely, that it was just a normal frontier tiff. Even putting possibly misleading parallels with the fourth century aside, the war involved frontier conflict on an unprecedented scale, and what we can reconstruct of its causation does suggest that major forces were at play.

  First of all: scale. The geographical range of the attacks was extraordinary. By the early 170s, there was serious trouble afoot on the northern Rhine frontier, the Middle Danubian plain, and both the northern and eastern fringes of Dacia – pretty much the entire length of Rome’s European frontiers. Even the most serious of first-century revolts had never simultaneously disturbed more than the Rhine and Middle Danube, and this is obviously a very different kind of crisis, again, from that generated by Chnodomarius’ ambitions in the fourth century, which, as we saw in the last chapter, disturbed only one sector of the frontier. Also, the war lasted the best part of fifteen years. In the fourth century, most of the well documented frontier conflicts never took longer than two or three years to work themselves out, and even that involving Chnodomarius no more than about five. Geography and chronology are both enough, then, to indicate that something serious was under way.

  The hardest aspect of the war to grasp is its numerical scale. Just how many people became involved in it over this decade and a half? The direct evidence is minimal. The only figure we have is Dio’s report that six thousand Langobardi and Ubii were involved in the initial attack on Pannonia. If at all correct, this would represent a large but not massive force (judged, say, against the numbers mustered by the Alamanni at Strasbourg). Otherwise the evidence is implicit and/or impressionistic. The number of Roman troops involved in some at least of the Middle Danubian campaigns was clearly substantial; for the start of his major counteroffensive, for instance, Marcus Aurelius raised two entirely new legions (twelve thousand men).

  Some of the damage done was serious, too, not only in Italy but also west of the Lower Rhine frontier, from the Belgian coast to the Somme, where Roman cities such as Tarvenna (Thérouanne), Bagacum (Bavay) and Samarobriva (Amiens) were reduced to ashes. The involvement of enough Marcomanni and Quadi to kill a prefect and pose a serious threat to the Emperor’s life, likewise, indicates major warfare, as does the fact that Marcus Aurelius could plausibly put up a huge monument to himself in Rome as its victor. The self-aggrandizing propaganda of the column is unmistakable, but previous columns, such as Trajan’s, had been used to publicize victories in major wars (in his case, the conquest of Dacia). The fact that Marcus could put up such a major monument to himself without attracting ridicule is again significant. If you are really determined to play down the scale of the action, it is possible to explain your way past these pieces of evidence individually, but collectively they do make the conclusion inescapable that the Marcomannic War represented something entirely out of the ordinary in relations between Rome and its barbarian neighbours.5

  The same is also suggested by the element of geographical displacement – sometimes clearly in the form of migration – that forms such a striking sub-theme of the war. Here again, it differs markedly from frontier conflicts of the first century. The Langobardi and Ubii whose attack on Pannonia opened proceedings, for instance, apparently moved about eight hundred kilometres south from the Lower Elbe, where both are located by Tacitus at the end of the first century and by Ptolemy in the middle of the second, only half a generation before the war began. Their journey south is undocumented, but the most natural route would have taken them down the Elbe, one of central Europe’s main north–south arteries, to Bohemia, before passing through the Morava valley and on to the Middle Danube plain (Map 4). If so, they followed one of central Europe’s great thoroughfares, and the same path trodden two hundred and fifty years earlier by the Cimbri and Teutones. We don’t know whether these Langobardi and Ubii were raiders who always intended to return home with their booty, or whether they intended to resettle more permanently in the frontier region. For some other groups, the desire for a permanent move is much clearer. This is certainly true of the Vandal groups who also moved south in the course of the war, in this case over a shorter distance from central Poland, and who attempted, with a degree of Roman collusion this time, to seize the territory of the Costoboci on the fringes of Dacia. As a move towards defusing the crisis, as we have seen, the Romans likewise received the Naristi into the Empire, and the Marcomanni and Victuali had earlier asked for similar treatment. Not that all the projected resettlement had the Roman frontier region in mind. Marcus moved decisively at one point to prevent the Quadi from moving as a body northwards into the territory of the Semnones on the Middle Elbe.6

  It is important not to go overboard here. None of this suggests that there was some unstoppable tide of barbarian migration blowing in from the north, and the Marcomanni, Quadi and Iazyges surely did exploit the advent of trouble to pursue their own wealth-gathering agendas. Some of the outsiders who moved into the frontier zone also came only to raid. Even so, there is enough here to indicate that the Germanic groups of the frontier region, for the most part semi-subdued client kingdoms of the Empire rather than its sworn enemies, became caught up in the war at least in part because of the appearance of intrusive population groups, and to some extent did actually require – as they claimed – Roman assistance. Ballomarius, king
of the Marcomanni, at one point stood up before the Emperor Marcus Aurelius as spokesman for delegations from a total of eleven frontier groups whose accustomed haunts were being threatened by pressure from the north.7 If we had to leave the Marcomannic War at this point, and up to about 1970 we would have, it would all be very intriguing, but ultimately frustrating. By themselves the historical sources cannot give us any real sense of the scale of the bigger picture of which Marcus’ quarrels with the Marcomanni and Quadi formed just a part. In the last scholarly generation or so, however, a vast new body of archaeological evidence has come to light, which has added dramatically to our knowledge of what was afoot in northern Germania in the second century.

  The fact that this evidence exists at all is a fascinating by-product of the Cold War. Numerous sites had been excavated in central and eastern Europe before 1939, but so many of the finds were lost in the conflagration of war that scholarship more or less began again from scratch afterwards, when much of the impetus, manpower and funding came from a particular quarter: the eastern bloc states that emerged under Soviet hegemony. These states managed to combine two interests, which, on the face of it, should have been incompatible. On the one hand, they were vigorously nationalistic. This expressed itself archaeologically in the desire to prove that the present inhabitants were the latest descendants of an indigenous population that had continuously occupied the same piece of territory with distinction far back into the distant past. This was combined with a healthy interest in demonstrating the truth of the processes of ancient historical development as outlined in the nineteenth century by Messrs Marx and Engels, despite the fact, as we have already seen, that for Marxists any kind of national identity could only be a false consciousness. For both these reasons, investigating the deep past was regarded as the height of chic behind the Iron Curtain, and the result was a huge state-sponsored growth industry. When you read them now, the ideological overtones of some of the publications generated by all this work, particularly those from the 1950s and 1960s, make your hair stand on end. But there were many scholars who steadfastly refused to surrender to the extraordinary weight of the official Marxist-nationalist expectations of the past, and, whether by just paying lip-service to official lines or by ignoring them entirely, pursued their research with integrity. Some tremendously important work was already being done on the basis of all the new finds, even in the Stalinist era, and by the 1970s and 1980s many East European academic communities had won almost complete intellectual freedom.8