Sometimes the accounts include moments of grim humour, such as the following exchange between a governor in Spain and a local Christian.
Governor: Are you a bishop? (Episcopus es?)
Bishop: I am. (Sum.)
Governor: You were. (Fuisti.)14
The bishop was then burned alive. Public executions for any crime were made especially unpleasant since they were supposed to act as a deterrent. They were also often included in public entertainments. Not all Christians were killed. Men might be sent to labour in the appalling conditions of imperial mines, while women were sometimes sent to work in brothels. On other occasions fines or imprisonment were used, again in the hope of persuading the accused to recant. When the death sentence was imposed, it was often inflicted in extremely savage ways, even by Roman standards. Usually the crowd revelled in the slaughter and only rarely was there any trace of sympathy. On one occasion in Africa around 203 two young women were to be killed by a maddened heifer.
So they were stripped naked, placed in nets and thus brought into the arena. Even the crowd was horrified when they saw that one was a delicate young girl and the other a woman fresh from childbirth with the milk still dripping from her breasts. And so they were brought back again and dressed in unbelted tunics.
The crowd seems to have been quite happy to see clothed women being trampled and gored to death.2s
Persecutions were spectacular, and appalling for those caught up in them, but they were also rare until the middle of the third century. Most of the time, the majority of people in the Roman world were content for others to follow their own conscience in matters of religion. Many who were not Christians still revered Jesus as a holy man. Julia Mamaea had summoned the famous Christian thinker Origen to Antioch so that she could listen to his ideas. Her son, Alexander Severus, is even supposed to have had a statue of Jesus along with those of other gods and great men he prayed to and kept in his personal chambers. It is easy to forget that the polytheistic mindset made it easy to accept new deities, even if Christians themselves insisted that worshipping Christ must mean a denial of other gods. Philip is said to have been sympathetic to Christians - one later source even claims that he was one himself."
Persecutions were local and occasional and do not seem to have hindered the spread of Christianity. As usual when it comes to statistics, we have no real idea of how many Christians there were at any set period. It appears to have been primarily an urban religion, but then we always know more about life in the cities than the countryside so this assumption may be mistaken. From the beginning Christians produced great quantities of writing, which indicates that a good number were literate and that some were well educated. They probably included many individuals from locally important and prosperous `middle classes'. Probably Christians were rare amongst the senatorial class, but even this is impossible to prove.
Christianity remained illegal, but only rarely was the law enforced, and most of the time Christians went about their normal lives and even practised their religion in a semi-public way. Decius' edict challenged this and Christians responded in various ways. Some bribed the local officials to purchase the receipt without actually performing the sacrifice. Others complied and made the offering - sometimes one member of the family doing this to protect the others. A few may have abandoned their faith in the face of this government order. Far more resisted, but how they were dealt with depended on the attitude of local magistrates and the provincial governors. Some Christians were executed, even more arrested and punished in other ways, but the sources are too poor for us to know how many suffered. The prominent Alexandrian theologian Origen, who two decades earlier had been summoned by Julia Mamaea, was one of the victims, dying as result of a spell of imprisonment. Decius' edict changed assumptions about the influence of the State over beliefs and also highlighted the ambiguity of the official attitude towards Christians. It was the act of a nervous new ruler, and one worried by foreign invasions, the probability that usurpers would challenge and also the continued impact of outbreaks of plague.17
Defeat and Humiliation
Decius' reign lasted less than three years. He had probably already begun to mollify the decree for sacrifices before he was killed in 251 fighting barbarians on the Danubian frontier. The army chose Gallus, the senatorial governor of Moesia, as his successor. We know of at least one attempted usurpation in Syria, before the man Gallus had appointed to replace him in Moesia rebelled in 253. When the rival armies met, they did not fight a battle, but after a conference simply murdered Gallus and his son. The victor, Aemilianus, suffered the same fate within a matter of months. Valerian (fully, Publius Licinius Valerianus) was also a distinguished senator and promptly appointed his son as fellow Augustus. The father soon went to the eastern frontiers where a crisis had developed, leaving his son, Gallienus, to deal with problems in the west.Z"
Shapur had taken advantage of Rome's weakness to intervene in Armenia. At some point he seems to have arranged the assassination of the Armenian king. In 251 he launched a full invasion and drove out that man's successor, who sought sanctuary with the Romans. Shapur chose to take this as a breach of Philip's promise to give him a free hand in Armenia. As importantly, he knew that the Romans were busy fighting amongst themselves. In 252 he marched up the Euphrates and attacked Syria. A Roman army was defeated and Antioch itself captured, along with many smaller cities. However, the Persians never intended to stay. They plundered the cities, took captives and then returned home. Prisoners were an important objective for the Persian king, who settled them in communities deep within his territory where they could labour on large-scale irrigation and building projects. As the Persians pulled back, some minor victories were won by Roman troops and local militias, but really this was just a question of hastening the withdrawal.
The Persians were quiet again by the time Valerian arrived in Antioch in 255. He soon faced other problems from widespread raiding by fleets of Germanic pirates. As resources were shifted to deal with this, the frontier with Persia was once again weakened. Shapur launched a series of small attacks, aimed mainly at capturing border towns. Then in 260 the Persian king led another great invasion, striking first at Mesopotamia. Carrhae and Edessa were attacked. Valerian rushed with a large army to confront the enemy. Concentrating so many troops was dangerous, since it weakened defences elsewhere and, still worse, there had been several recent outbreaks of plague. Again, we do not know quite what happened. There may have been a battle or perhaps simply manoeuvring. What is certain is that Valerian and his senior officers were captured by the Persians, apparently in the middle of a parley. Shapur is shown holding the emperor by the wrist on several victory monuments. He claimed that the defeated Romans numbered 70,000 men, but we should be as sceptical about Persian claims of enemy numbers as we are about those made by the Romans. The Persians raided widely throughout Cappadocia, Syria and even Cilicia. Antioch probably fell for a second time."
Dura Europos was already abandoned by the time Valerian was captured. It seems to have been briefly occupied by the Persians between 252 and 253 before it was retaken by the Romans. The latter were soon working to strengthen the fortifications by building a heavy earth bank behind the main wall, demolishing nearby houses in the process. A few years later the Persians attacked again. With the Euphrates to the east, deep wadis to the north and south, inevitably their main effort was made against the western wall. An initial assault on the main gate failed after heavy fighting which left many arrowheads embedded in the brickwork. The Persians then turned to engineering. Above ground they constructed a ramp that would allow a mobile siege tower or battering ram to be brought against the wall. Underground they dug tunnels to undermine the defences. In response, the Romans laboured to raise the height of the wall in front of the ramp, and also started working on counter-mines. Siege warfare was a battle of ingenuity and engineering skill as much as brute force.
The Persians had some success when one of their mines caused the collapse of a tow
er that was well placed to shoot at the men working on the ramp. However, soon after this success, the Romans struck back when their tunnels undermined the assault ramp and rendered it too weak to take the weight of a siege engine. Further along the wall Persian miners were already working on another tunnel, this time intended to bring down a tower and the adjacent wall and create a breach in the defences. The Romans guessed what they were up to and dug a mine that eventually broke into the enemy tunnel. Perhaps there was a vicious melee fought in the dark claustrophobic confines of the mines. Certainly, almost twenty Roman soldiers died there, along with one Persian, and their remains were found by the excavators. Recently another intriguing reconstruction has been put forward. This suggests that the Persians knew that the Roman raiders were coming and prepared a dreadful surprise, heating sulphur and pitch to give off noxious fumes. The layout of the tunnels meant that the draught carried this quickly into the Roman tunnel, asphyxiating the soldiers. Later, the Romans' bodies seem to have been heaped up into a makeshift barricade, to protect against other attacks, as the Persians prepared to burn the props and collapse the whole mine. Unknown to them, the equally nervous defenders were busy bricking it up at the other end in case the Persians should try to follow it into the city. Later, the Persians collapsed their main mine, but it did not have the intended result. A tower and parts of the wall sunk several feet into the ground, but did not collapse. We do not know how the Persians finally got into Dura Europos. The defenders may have surrendered, despairing of resisting another onslaught, short of food, or because there was no hope of relief. The Persians stayed for a little while, but then abandoned the city to the sands. It was probably too far forward for them to hold in the long term.3°
5
Barbarians
`... wars are decided by courage rather than numbers. We have no mean force. Two thousand of us have gathered in all, and we have this deserted spot as a base from which to damage the enemy by attacking him in small groups and ambushing him. ... Let our watchword in battle be our children and all that is dearest to us, and to save these let us set out together for the conflict, calling on the gods who watch over and aid us.' - The historian Dexippus'version ofhis rallying speech to the Athenians after the fall of their city to raiders in 267/8.'
n June 251 Emperor Decius attacked a group of barbarians who had crossed the Danube to plunder the Roman provinces. They were led by a chieftain named Cniva, and the emperor had been hunting them and other similar bands for more than a year. At the beginning of his reign he took the name Trajan, in memory of the conqueror of Dacia. Doubtless the idea was to promise new victories on the Danube, but so far there had been few enough. Trajan had been an experienced commander, with a powerful and disciplined army drawn from all over the empire. Both army and empire had been free of civil war for a generation. Decius was less fortunate, a good deal less talented and led forces far weaker than his namesake. Cniva had already beaten him in the previous summer. Afterwards, when Philippopolis in Thrace was besieged, Decius was either unable or unwilling to march to its relief. Abandoned to his fate, the commander of the city betrayed it to the enemy and promptly declared himself emperor. Other usurpers emerged at this time on the Rhine and in Rome itself. All were swiftly killed by loyal officers, but Decius knew that his prestige was at a low ebb. He needed a big victory.
Cniva was on his way home with the spoils of his raid when the emperor caught up with him near Abrittus - an insignificant settlement today near the border between Romania and Bulgaria. Most of the details of what then happened are now lost. There may have been one battle or a series of smaller skirmishes. Initial success turned to disaster when the Romans were ambushed in boggy terrain. Decius was killed, as was his son and co-emperor. One source claims that their horses became stuck in the mud and they were then killed by missiles.
We do not know how many soldiers fell with Decius and his son, although the accounts of the campaign do not suggest that either army was exceptionally big, probably numbering thousands rather than tens of thousands. Roman armies had been beaten by barbarian tribes in the past. Famously, Augustus had lost three legions and their auxiliaries - a force of perhaps 15,000-20,000 men - in an ambush in the Teutoberg Forest in AD 9. The losses were probably lighter at Abrittus, but it was the first time an emperor had been killed by a foreign enemy - and was made worse because his body was never found for proper burial. Ironically enough, the disaster occurred not far from Tropaeum Traiani, where Trajan had built a huge drum-shaped monument to commemorate his Dacian victory, as well as a memorial to honour the war dead.
Cniva's raid was just one of many to burst into the settled provinces of the empire during the middle decades of the third century. Regions that had been peaceful for generations - Gaul, Italy, Spain, Greece, Asia Minor and North Africa - fell prey to marauding bands from beyond the frontiers. Most of the raiders spoke a Germanic language, but the Germans were divided into many separate tribes and some wider groupings. Cniva was from a Gothic tribe, a people who had only fairly recently come into close contact with the Romans. By the end of the third century the Goths, along with other apparently new and powerful peoples like the Franks and Alamanni, posed serious threats to the frontiers on the Rhine and Danube. The balance of power seemed to have shifted profoundly.2
The Germans
Julius Caesar claimed that the Rhine marked the boundary between the Germans and Gauls, conveniently providing him with a `natural' stopping point for his conquests. The restless, aggressive and very numerous Germans were always trying to push westwards into the rich lands of Gaul and beyond. Caesar portrayed the Germanic tribes as semi-nomadic and posing a threat to Rome's allies and even to Italy itself. He dealt with this `threat' ruthlessly, but it is clear from his own account that the situation was a good deal more complicated than this. Some German tribes were already well established west of the Rhine and were incorporated into the new Roman provinces without difficulty. Caesar also recruited many German mercenaries from east of the Rhine to fight alongside his legions. From the very beginning, the Germans were a valuable source of military manpower as well as a threat.
Augustus tried to annex the lands from the Rhine to the Elbe, but his plan for a great German province died with the legionaries massacred in the Teutoberg Forest. Although Roman armies marched out to punish the tribes for this defeat, the project was never revived and the frontier settled on the Rhine. Neither this nor the Danube was a strict limit to Roman territory, for a strong military presence was maintained on the far banks. Near the end of the first century, the gap between the two rivers was linked by a fortified line, bringing a substantial area of territory, known as the Agri Decumates, under direct Roman rule. A little later, Trajan conquered Dacia, but this was the last major change to the frontier line in Europe for a century and a half. Along it was stationed over half of the entire Roman army - almost two-thirds if the garrison of Britain was included.'
To the east were tribal peoples, not all of them Germanic. On the Danube there were the Carpi, relatives of the Dacians who had escaped the conquest of that kingdom, and Sarmatians, originally nomads from the steppes who had moved to the Hungarian Plain. Another tribe, the Bastarnae, may or may not have been Germanic. Yet the overwhelming bulk of peoples who lived next to the frontier were Germans as far as Roman observers were concerned. However, it is doubtful that they saw themselves this way. Some tribes had relations of kinship and shared cults with their neighbours, but there seems to have been no real sense of `German-ness'. Although their languages had similar roots, it is quite possible that people would have had trouble communicating with anyone from a distant tribe. The important ties were to a tribe, and perhaps even more to smaller groups of clan and family.4
Caesar describes the Germans as essentially pastoralists who did not till the soil. Even in his day this was a huge exaggeration. In some areas it does seem to have been common for villages to be simple and shortlived, the people moving on after a few years to a fresh site when th
ey had exhausted the closest fields. Yet the overall picture from the Roman period is one of continuity and stability, and the creation of the static frontier line may well have encouraged this. Several excavated villages were occupied for three or four centuries. Most were small, but some consisted of a dozen or more - in one case thirty - sturdily built rectangular timber houses. The population of such a community most likely numbered a few hundred people. There were no towns comparable to those that had grown up in Gaul and parts of Germany in the Late Iron Age. Instead the picture is of many villages and isolated farms.5
Some tribes had kings, but in the first century it was noted that war leaders were elected from a broader aristocracy. A chieftain's power was measured by the number of warriors he maintained in his personal following - his colnitatus, to use the Latin word. These men were pledged to fight beside him in battle, and in return he feasted them and rewarded their valour with weapons and gold. Centuries later similar attitudes would be celebrated in poems like Beowulf. One powerful fourth-century king had 200 warriors in his band and similar numbers are suggested by spectacular collections of weapons excavated in Scandinavia. These were spoils taken from defeated enemies and then offered to the gods by the victors, who threw them in a sacred lake. At Illerup in Denmark weapons - spear and javelin heads, shield bosses and some swords - sufficient to equip some 300-350 men were dedicated sometime around the year 200. A century later enough weaponry for around 200 warriors was thrown into another Danish lake near Ejsbol.
How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower Page 13
