Legions of Rome

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  As the Britons retired to the Thames, the Romans followed. Near the point where the Thames emptied into the sea and at flood tide formed a lake, the Britons began to cross. The tribesmen, who knew where to find firm ground and where mud would ensnare the unwary, were able to make their way across the mudflats. But when pursuing Roman auxiliary troops tried to follow they were soon in difficulties and had to withdraw. When the main Roman force arrived, Plautius set up camps along the southern bank of the Thames and built a bridge of boats upstream.

  Meanwhile, the Batavians again used their swimming skills. Once on the far bank, troops that had crossed the bridge marched to link up with the Batavians. Tribesmen caught in the middle were cut to pieces. But as the Romans gave chase to the remainder, they were led into swamps, and a number were drowned trying to maintain the pursuit. General Plautius pulled his men back and consolidated his position. Envoys were sent out to the chiefs of all the neighboring tribes, inviting them to surrender on favorable terms. With news of the British defeats at the Medway and the Thames, and with the death of Togodumnus, several chiefs quickly agreed to submit rather than face Roman steel. Once the responses had been received, Plautius sent off a dispatch to Rome, inviting his emperor to come take charge of the campaign, to accept the surrender of the chiefs, and complete the conquest of the Britons.

  Clearly, Claudius had instructed Plautius to do just this once he was in a position to do so, and was expecting the message. Within weeks, Claudius set out for Britain with a massive entourage, leaving the consul Lucius Vitellius in charge at the capital. Several thousand men of the Praetorian Guard and Praetorian Cavalry, under their prefect Rufrius Pollio, provided the imperial escort, along with cohorts of the emperor’s imposing German Guard personal bodyguard. Scores of sycophantic senators were in the emperor’s party.

  As Claudius’ guardsmen marched along the Tiber to the port of Ostia, the imperial party was conveyed down the river aboard a fleet of barges. At Ostia, the emperor, his troops and entourage boarded warships from the Misene Fleet, and coasted the short distance to southern Gaul. The storm-tossed and seasick imperial party landed at Masillia (Marseilles), from where it traveled up through Gaul to Germany. From Mogontiacum on the Rhine the imperial progress continued on to Bononia, from where the new Britannic Fleet conveyed the expedition to Britain.

  As the emperor made his leisurely way north from Italy to the French coast, taking many weeks to travel the distance that could be covered by the galloping couriers of the Cursus Publicus Velox in a matter of days, Plautius had been busy tying up loose ends. While tribes to the north had sued for peace, and Caratacus had retreated west to Wales, taking his wife, daughter and at least two of his three surviving brothers with him, the tribes of the west stubbornly refused to submit. Plautius therefore ordered Vespasian and the 2nd Augusta Legion to expand the front to the southwest. The 2nd Augusta was still driving along the south coast when the emperor landed in Kent. According to Suetonius, in this sweep along the coast Vespasian’s legion fought thirty battles, took more than twenty towns and the entire Isle of Wight, and accepted the surrender of two tribes. [Suet., X, 4]

  The remains of some of the fortified hill towns overwhelmed by the 2nd Augusta are still to be found on hilltops through the region today; others were converted into castles by the Normans 1,000 years later. One of the first towns to fall was latter-day Chichester, capital of the Regni tribe of young chief Cogidubnus, who would help convince other tribes to submit to the invaders and continued to be a valued ally of Rome for another fifty years. Downtown Chichester today still retains the layout of the Roman town which grew on the site, Noviomagus Regensium, situated beside a vast, sheltered anchorage.

  At a fort of the Durotrige tribe at Spettisbury Rings, near Blandford, over ninety skeletons were found in a mass grave in 1957, many bearing the evidence of sword and javelin wounds. Part of the fort’s wall had been pulled down on top of the grave to complete the burial. At the Hod Hill fort, 18 miles (30 kilometers) northeast of Maiden Castle, a number of Roman ballista bolts were found, evidence of the 2nd Augusta’s assault. [W&D, 4, II]

  The 2nd Augusta was still pushing along the coast, through today’s Dorset and Somerset, when the emperor and the members of his expedition joined Plautius at the Thames. Palatium propaganda would have it that Plautius’ legions crossed the Thames under Claudius’ command, met and defeated a large army of British tribesmen, then took the surrender of British kings and their disarmed warriors. In reality, with the fighting at the Thames almost certainly over by the time Claudius arrived, Plautius had the kings that were submitting to Roman rule gather at Camulodunum to submit officially to his emperor.

  At Camulodunum, the men of three legions, their supporting auxiliaries and the cohorts of the Praetorian Guard would have formed up in full parade dress to awe the locals, standards glittering, decorations shining and helmet plumes blowing in the breeze. Troops of the German Guard would have flanked their emperor as Claudius sat on a raised tribunal. There, in the words of the dedicatory inscription on the Arch of Claudius at Orange in France, “he received the formal submission of eleven kings of the Britons.” [CIL, VI, 920] Sixteen days later, Claudius left Britain for a meandering return to Rome. He walked back into the Palatium the following year after an absence of six months, although he had only spent a little over two weeks in his new province of Britannia.

  By the time autumn ended, the 2nd Augusta Legion controlled the south coast of England. Only western Devon and Cornwall remained to be subdued. At the River Exe in Devon, Vespasian and the 2nd Augusta turned the capital of the Dumnoni tribe on the east bank of the river, with its buildings of timber and mud, into what became the substantial Roman town of Isca Dumnoniorium, today’s city of Exeter. There, the 2nd Augusta established a base which became the legion’s new permanent home, from where it guarded a frontier from Devon up to southeast Wales.

  By the end of AD 43, all four invasion legions had spread across southern England and set up permanent forward forts and rear supply bases. The 14th Gemina built its base in the West Country north of the 2nd Augusta’s new home, the 20th based itself at Camulodunum, which Plautius made his provincial headquarters, and the 9th Hispana occupied a frontier line north of Camulodunum. The legions had come to stay.

  AD 54–58

  XVIII. CORBULO’S FIRST ARMENIAN CAMPAIGN

  Tough treatment creates victorious legions

  Tiridates, a Parthian prince, had now taken the throne of Armenia. With the death of Claudius, the chief advisers to the new teenage Roman emperor, Nero, convinced him that Rome must wrest Armenia from Parthian control. Those advisers, Nero’s chief secretary, the famed philosopher Lucius Seneca, and Praetorian prefect Sextus Burrus, recommended that the man for the job in Armenia was Lucius Domitius Corbulo, one of Rome’s toughest generals.

  In AD 54, Corbulo went east to mastermind an Armenian offensive. Officially, Corbulo was the new governor of the provinces of Cappadocia and Galatia, on the Armenian border, but the Palatium had furnished him with powers superior to those of any provincial governor. When Corbulo arrived, he found the four legions stationed in Syria in a deplorable state. He chose the 6th Ferrata and 10th Fretensis legions to spearhead his planned campaign, but he would not embark on any military operation before he had knocked those units into shape. Many of their soldiers had sold their helmets and shields, most had never stood guard duty, some had become “sleek money-making traders.” [Tac., A, XIII, 35]

  Their standards might have identified these units as the 6th and 10th as legions, but they were not legions by Corbulo’s standard. Discharging those who were too old or frail, Corbulo put the rest through a rigorous training schedule. At the end of the year, he marched his legions up into the Cappadocian mountains, making them winter there under canvas in the snow. Conditions were so severe that men standing guard suffered frostbite. Corbulo shared the freezing conditions with his men, and as they toughened up they began to show grudging respect for their uncompr
omising general.

  Corbulo was not a man to rush anything. It was AD 58 before he was satisfied with his men and his preparations. After adding six cohorts of the 3rd Gallica Legion from their station in Judea to the force he assembled in Cappadocia, in the spring of AD 58 Corbulo invaded Armenia. For the operation, legate Cornelius Flaccus led the 6th Ferrata Legion and the hard-bitten Syrians of the 3rd Gallica cohorts. Corbulo himself led the 10th Fretensis supported by auxiliaries. Their opponents were the Armenian army, trained and equipped in the same manner as their allies, the Parthians.

  With new Roman allies, the Moschi tribe, running wild in northern Armenia as a diversion, and with his supply lines over the mountains well guarded, Curbulo’s legions swept into western Armenia from two directions, taking Tiridates’ commanders entirely by surprise. In one day, Roman troops stormed three separate fortresses. At the fortress of Volandum, strongest in Armenia, Corbulo split his units into four groups, each using a different method of assault and in competition with the others to be the first to fight their way into the fortress. Volandum fell to Corbulo within hours, “without the loss of a [Roman] soldier and with just a very few wounded.” All the adult males found at Volandum were executed. “The non-military population were sold by auction. The rest of the booty fell to the conquerors.” [Tac., A, XIII, 39]

  Courage and success were rewarded by Corbulo, but he could not stomach cowardice. Sextus Frontinus, a successful Roman general who knew him, wrote that when two cavalry squadrons and three cohorts gave way before the enemy near the Armenian fortress of Initia, Corbulo made their men sleep outside his camp walls “until by steady work and successful raids they had atoned for their disgrace.” [Front., Strat., IV, I, 21] For the same crime, Corbulo stripped the clothes from the back of cavalry prefect Aemilius Rufus and made him stand naked at the praetorium until he chose to dismiss him. [Ibid., 28]

  Linking up, Corbulo’s two forces advanced on the Armenian capital, Artaxata, fording the River Avaxes downstream then swinging around to assault the city from the east. Marching in battle order on the plain and flanked by foot archers and squadrons of cavalry extending to the hills, the 6th Ferrata occupied the column’s left wing, the 3rd Gallica the right. The 10th Fretensis marched in the middle with the baggage. Cavalry and auxiliaries comprised the rearguard.

  King Tiridates brought thousands of horse archers pounding out on to the plain to intimidate the Roman troops, staying out of missile range on the flanks and keeping pace with the column. A young Roman cavalry prefect who had a rush of blood and galloped too close to the shadowing enemy, was filled with Armenian arrows. As night fell, Tiridates’ horse archers melted away.

  The next day, Tiridates and his army were reported to be withdrawing to the east. When Corbulo arrived outside Artaxata, the inhabitants threw open the gates. Because he had no capacity to hold or defend the exposed city, Corbulo ordered the inhabitants to pack and leave, then burned their city to the ground. He then marched west, with his troops unhappy that they had run out of grain for their daily bread and had only meat to eat. Nonetheless, the legionaries stormed two fortresses before the army reached the second city of Armenia, Tigranocerta, on the River Nicephorius in the southwest.

  On hearing from his friend Frontinus that the Tigranocertans were very likely to make an obstinate defense, Corbulo executed Vadandus, a captured Armenian noble, then had Vadandus’ head shot into the city by ballista. “When the leaders of the city saw this,” said Frontinus, it “so filled them with consternation that they made haste to surrender.” Tigranocerta swiftly opened its gates to Corbulo and his legions. [Front., Strat., II, 5]

  Nero had chosen a Cappodocian noble, Tigranes, to be king of Armenia, and the prince now arrived at Tigranocerta. Leaving Tigranes a palace guard of two legionary cohorts, 1,500 auxiliary infantry and some cavalry, Corbulo withdrew to Syria, of which he became governor on the death in office of incumbent Ummidius Quadratus.

  After a swift, unstoppable campaign by Corbulo’s three legions, Armenia was again in the Roman sphere.

  AD 58–60

  XIX. RIOTING IN JERUSALEM

  Legionaries save the apostle Paul

  On a late summer day in AD 58, the guard cohort of the 3rd Gallica Legion stationed at Jerusalem’s Antonia Fortress was unexpectedly called to arms. That afternoon, toward the end of the “hour of prayer” at the Jewish temple up on the Temple Mount, a riot had erupted, and “all Jerusalem was in uproar.” [Acts, 21; 31]

  A Jewish man from Cilicia had been assaulted in the Temple, then thrown out. As temple attendants pushed its massive bronze doors shut, the Cilician was being beaten by a crowd of angry Jews that grew larger by the minute. The 3rd Gallica’s camp-prefect at the Antonia, Claudius Lysias, led forth “soldiers and centurions, and ran down to them.” When the troops arrived on the scene, the crowd drew back. Camp-Prefect Lysias ordered the battered victim, a bald, bearded man in middle age, to be bound hand and foot with two chains, then demanded to know from the crowd who this fellow was and what he had done. [Ibid., 32]

  Lysias was answered by a cacophony of voices, all saying something different, so he ordered his men to carry the prisoner back to the Antonia. With the crowd following them, calling for the man’s death, he was carried to the Antonia’s gate. At the top of sixty steps that led to the gate, the prisoner, speaking Greek, asked Lysias if he might talk to him. Lysias, who, like many Romans throughout the East, was of Greek extraction, was surprised that the Jew spoke Greek. He then thought that he recognized the fellow as the Egyptian who, four years before, had led 4,000 followers against Jerusalem, only to have his band bloodily dispersed by the Roman garrison. But the man said that he was from the city of Tarsus in Cilicia, then asked for permission to speak to the crowd. Lysias agreed.

  From the Antonia’s steps, the Jew addressed the mob, which fell silent, as, speaking in their native tongue, he said that he was Saul of Tarsus, a Cilician Jew who had studied at Jerusalem under Gamaliel, a leading rabbi of the day. Later, he said, under the instructions of the Jewish High Priest and the Sanhedrin, he had hunted and imprisoned members of the breakaway Nazarene sect—the Christians. But while on the road to Damascus to collect more Christian prisoners, he had received a vision of Jesus of Nazareth. When he said that Jesus had instructed him to take his teachings to non-Jews, however, the mob exploded with rage. “It is not fit that he should live!” they exclaimed, casting off their clothes and throwing dust in the air in the Jewish custom. [Ibid., 22]

  Camp-Prefect Lysias had the prisoner hustled inside the fortress and ordered that he should be interrogated under the lash. As the prisoner was being tied to a column with leather thongs and a flagellator was preparing, the prisoner asked the 3rd Gallica centurion in charge if it was lawful to whip a man who was a Roman citizen without a sentence from a magistrate. It was indeed illegal to punish a citizen without trial, and the worried centurion hurried off to tell the camp-prefect what the man had said. Lysias immediately came to see the prisoner, and demanded to know if he did truly hold citizenship. The man replied that he did. [Ibid., 25]

  Apart from having the records checked in Tarsus, there was no way of confirming the prisoner’s claim. Lysias was not convinced that the Jew would hold citizenship, saying that he himself had actually paid a large sum to acquire Roman citizenship when he was younger. The fact that Lysias’ first name was Claudius suggests that the camp-prefect was a peregrine who had obtained his citizenship during the reign of Claudius, when the empress Valeria Messalina had notoriously taken bribes to arrange for her husband to grant citizenship to large numbers of people. The prisoner responded that he had been born a free man—intimating that he had possessed Roman citizenship since birth.

  Lysias believed the man, who used both the Jewish name of Saul and the Roman name of Paulus. This was Paul, the Christian apostle. Lysias kept Paul in the fortress overnight. Next day, he took him before the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish religious counsel, to determine what charges they wished to lay agai
nst Paul, for the man had not broken any Roman law. When Paul revealed to the Sanhedrin that he had been raised a Pharisee, a Jewish sect which believed in resurrection, dissension broke out between the Sanhedrin’s Pharisee and Sadducee members—Sadducees did not believe in resurrection. As the Jewish argument raged, Lysias returned Paul to the Antonia Fortress.

  Paul had a sister living in Jerusalem, and later that day her son learned that more than forty Sadducees had vowed not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul. The young man was admitted to the Antonia to visit his uncle, and when he told Paul about this murder plot, Paul informed the camp-prefect. Lysias decided that the best way to avert trouble was to spirit Paul out of Jerusalem and send him to the Procurator of Judea, Antonius Felix, at Caesarea, and let him decide the Jew’s fate. Accordingly, that evening Lysias had two of his centurions assemble an escort from the Roman troops stationed at Jerusalem. This comprised two centuries of legionaries, two centuries of auxiliary spearmen and seventy cavalrymen. [Ibid., 23–25]

  As soon as darkness fell, in the third Roman hour of the night—roughly between 7.00 and 8.15 p.m.—Paul was led from the Antonia, placed on a mule, and with his escort around him, taken from the city. The centurion in charge took with him a letter from Lysias which urged Procurator Felix to decide what should be done. That night the party traveled as far as Antipatris in the Judean Hills. At dawn, the foot soldiers returned to Jerusalem while the cavalry continued on to Caesarea with Paul. [Ibid.]

  Paul was kept at Caesarea for a year. In AD 59, he asserted his right as a Roman citizen to appeal directly to the emperor, and was sent to Rome with other prisoners. They were escorted by a centurion Julius and soldiers who were presumably from the 3rd Gallica Legion. After surviving shipwreck on the Maltese coast, prisoners and escort would arrive in Rome in AD 60. According to Christian tradition, Paul was released by Nero, only to be executed in Rome on other charges, several years later.