There at Carnuntum in AD 170, the emperor received peace envoys from Furtius, king of the Quadi. To seal the peace, the Quadi delivered thousands of captured horses and cattle into Roman hands, and promised to hand over 13,000 Roman captives and military deserters at once. Marcus granted the Quadi peace, in the hope, said Dio, that this would separate them from the Marcomanni. Furtius also promised not to accept Marcomanni or Iazyge fugitives, nor to let them pass through Quadi territory. Although he agreed to the peace with them, Marcus banned the Quadi from markets in Roman territory while the war lasted, in case other Germans posed as Quadi to reconnoiter Roman positions and purchase provisions. [Dio, LXXII, 11]
Before the year was out, several other German tribes surrendered. Marcus formed their fittest fighting men and returned deserters into auxiliary units and sent them to serve in the farthest reaches of the empire. Other surrendered Germans were settled on land in Dacia, Pannonia, Moesia, the Rhine provinces, and even in Italy. Some were settled in the Italian naval city of Ravenna, but that proved a mistake—dazzled by the wealth around them, the Germans rose up before long and seized control of the city. They were soon dealt with, probably by marines and sailors from the Ravenna Fleet, and removed from the country. Marcus would not make the same error again.
In AD 171, while Marcus was launching into the writing of his famous Meditations at Carnuntum, one of his armies, led by Praetorian Prefect Vindex, was defeated in Bohemia by the Marcomanni, with Vindex himself falling. Marcus, never a well man, was forced to assume a more prominent military role, and personally led one of his armies on the next campaign against the Iazyges. Marcus was so frail and sickly, said Dio, that when he stepped up on to the tribunal to address an assembly of his troops one wintry day he was chilled by the cold and could not open his mouth, and had to retire to the warmth of his praetorium. [Dio, LXXII, 6]
In Bohemia, the legions under Pertinax and Pompeianus fought the Marcomanni to a standstill, and by AD 172 the king of the Marcomanni, Ballomarus, had sealed a peace treaty with Marcus and withdrawn from the conflict. “In view of the fact they had fulfilled all the conditions imposed on them, albeit grudgingly and reluctantly,” Marcus restored to the tribe half of what had previously been considered a neutral zone along the northern bank of the Danube, permitting them to settle to within 5 miles (8 kilometers) of the river. Both sides exchanged prisoners, and days for regular trading between Roman and Marcomanni merchants were established. [Dio, LXXII, 15]
In theory, both the Quadi and the Marcomanni were now out of the war, leaving just the Iazyges further east to confront. But Marcus did not trust the Quadi. Since King Furtius had signed the peace treaty he had been overthrown by his own people, who had given themselves a new king, Ariogaesus. And under the new king’s reign, contrary to the peace conditions signed by his predecessor, Marcomanni fugitives fleeing Roman troops were helped by the Quadi.
When envoys came to Marcus from Ariogaesus to confirm the treaty signed by Furtius and offering to return another 50,000 Roman prisoners, the emperor steadfastly refused to recognize the new king. Furtius had been placed over the Quadi by Antoninus Pius, Marcus said, and he reserved the right to appoint a king of the Quadi of his choice. The envoys of Ariogaesus were sent away empty-handed. To encourage the Quadi to hand over their new ruler, Marcus offered a reward for Ariogaesus, alive, of 100,000 sesterces (the equivalent of eighty-three years’ salary for a legionary), half that for his head. [Ibid.]
When the Quadi failed to hand over their new king, Marcus lost patience with them. They did send back some Roman captives, but only the old and infirm; or, if they were in good physical condition, the Quadi retained the captives’ families so the men would come back to their territory to be with their loved ones. Marcus determined that the only way that Rome could remove the threat posed by the Quadi was with the sword.
AD 174
LII. THE THUNDERING 12TH
Triumphing for Marcus
With the Danube Wars dragging on and casualties mounting, Marcus Aurelius sent for reinforcements from the East. By the summer of AD 174, the 12th Fulminata Legion had arrived in Pannonia from its longtime base at Melitene in Cappadocia. The 12th Fulminata Legion had not long been on the Danube when it was called out to follow the emperor to intercept a Quadi offensive. Led by King Ariogaesus, the tribe had re-entered the war, launching a surprise campaign across the Danube. Marcus, with just the newly arrived 12th Fulminata plus auxiliaries and no doubt elements of the Praetorian Guard and Singularian Horse, marched to deal with them.
At the height of summer, on a battlefield in Pannonia, the two armies met. It was on ground favorable to the Quadi, and a blisteringly hot day, according to Dio, when the German tribesmen, “far superior in numbers,” apparently caught the legionaries on the march early one morning. [Dio, LXXII, 8]
“Only a few of them have swords or large lances,” Tacitus wrote of German warriors. “They carry spears called framea in their language, with short and narrow blades.” These were so sharp and easy to handle that they could be used at close quarters or in long-range fighting, for the Germans could hurl them great distances. The tribesmen frequently went into battle naked, or merely wearing a short cloak. Occasionally a breastplate could be seen, and here and there a helmet of metal or leather. Their most distinctive piece of equipment was the small wooden shield, painted with bright colors. Singing battle songs in honor of Donar, the German Hercules, and shaking their weapons at the Romans, the barefoot, long-haired and bearded Quadi were confident of victory. [Tac., Germ., 6]
The situation looked grim for Marcus Aurelius and the surrounded 12th. With their shields locked together, said Dio, and apparently in orbis formation, the legionaries created a solid wall around themselves, with the cavalry and the emperor’s party in the middle of their formation. Despite expending several hours, many of their spears and much energy, the Quadi could not break through the legionary line. [Dio, LXXII, 8] King Ariogaesus therefore halted the attack and pulled his warriors back, continuing to encircle the 12th Fulminata and their emperor, waiting for a Roman capitulation. For Marcus and the 12th Fulminata Legion, said Dio, “were in a terrible plight, from fatigue, wounds, the heat of the sun, and their thirst.” [Ibid.]
With Marcus Aurelius was Arnuphis, an Egyptian who was, said Dio, a magician. Arnuphis now began to chant incantations to various deities, in particular the Egyptian equivalent of Mercury, god of the air, seeking intervention on behalf of the emperor and his troops. Clouds soon gathered; heavy rain began to fall. “At first, all turned their faces upward and received the water in their mouths. Then some held out their shields, and some, their helmets, to catch it.” The Roman troops not only drank deeply of the rainwater but also gave it to their horses. The blood of some wounded Roman soldiers flowed into their helmets, but that did not deter them; they gratefully drank the bloody water. [Ibid.]
The Quadi, seeing that the Romans were preoccupied slaking their thirst, suddenly charged the legion line. Some legionaries who had lowered their curved shields to drink, or held them up to catch the rain, were felled by German spears. As the Quadi closed in for hand-to-hand combat the Roman defense was shaky. But the storm increased in intensity; hail now lashed the two armies, the hailstones pounding down like slingers’ bullets. The legionaries, in helmets and armor, could withstand the hail, but the unprotected Germans took the full force of it. The Quadi broke off the attack and ran for the cover of trees.
The storm intensified. Thunder boomed in the heavens, lightning bolts lanced down into the trees, with terrifying results. Not only did trees burst into flame, Quadi warriors and their weapons, too, were struck by lightning. Said the poet Claudian of the scene: “Spears glowed, molten by lightning, and swords vanished suddenly into smoke.” Here a Quadi warrior “sank down beneath his fire-wasted helmet,” there a cavalryman was left trembling on the smoking back of his charger. [Claud., SCH, 341–6] The terrified Germans, some of them on fire, ran from the trees and to the Romans, begging for the
ir aid and protection. The battle disintegrated into a disaster for the Quadi. By the time that the storm had passed, the battle was over, and many Quadi, including King Ariogaesus, had been taken prisoner.
Claudian, writing two and a half centuries later, said that while some attributed Marcus Aurelius’ famous victory in a thunderstorm to “Chaldean seers” and “their magic spells” he was of the opinion that “Marcus’ blameless life had the power to win the Thunderer’s [Mars’] homage.” [Ibid., 347–50] Marcus himself seems to have attributed the victory to the legionaries of the 12th Fulminata Legion. It would have been pointed out to the emperor that the legion was known as the “Thundering 12th.” Now, the 12th had truly become the thundering legion, defeating the Quadi in a thunderstorm summoned by the Egyptian priest. According to Dio, Marcus now officially conferred the title Fulminata on the legion. [Dio, LXII, 9]
In a later interpolation to Dio’s work, a Christian writer replaced the reference to Arnuphis and his prayers to the Roman gods with a passage that made all the men of the 12th Fulminata Christians, and it was they who did the praying, he wrote. This was historically impossible. During Marcus Aurelius’ reign, Christians were crucified if they did not repent and sacrifice to the Roman gods. An entire legion of 5,000 men could not have been Christians at that time. It would be hundreds of years before Christianity had such a hold in the Roman military. Intriguingly, Claudian, a man of consular rank, writing in around AD 400, eighty years after Constantine the Great had made Christianity the official State religion, still spoke of the Christians as a mere sect, and gave full credit for the 12th Fulminata’s AD 174 victory to Mars, god of war.
At an assembly convened by the emperor following the victory, the men of the 12th Fulminata hailed Marcus Aurelius imperator. Normally, said Dio, Marcus would not have accepted such an honor before the Senate voted it to him, but this time he felt that Heaven had made his victory possible, so he sent a dispatch to the Senate telling them that the Quadi had been vanquished and that he had accepted the title of imperator from the troops. [Ibid.] The Senate, in its gratitude, not only confirmed the emperor’s latest grant of the imperator title—he had previously received it six times for his generals’ victories—it granted the influential empress Faustina the title of Mater Castrorum, or Mother of the Camp.
As for the captured Quadi king, Ariogaesus, Marcus sent him to Britain, to live out the remainder of his days in exile there. Twenty thousand Roman soldiers were now stationed in the Marcomanni and the Quadi homelands, to ensure that the Germans could not assemble in number. [Dio, LXXII, 20]
Marcus could now concentrate on the Iazyges, the last German combatants left in the ring with Rome. As soon as the Iazyges heard of the defeat of the Quadi by a single legion, one of their two kings, Banadaspus, sent envoys to Marcus seeking peace. But Marcus was not interested in signing a treaty. After the Quadi had broken their promises and again gone to war with him, he would not trust their cousins the Iazyges; Marcus saw just one solution—he “wished to annihilate them utterly.” [Dio, LXXII, 13] Once the Iazyges heard that Banadaspus’ peace feelers had been rejected, they locked him up, threw their support behind second king, Zanticus, and prepared to receive the full weight of Marcus’ legions.
AD 174–175
LIII. BLOOD ON THE ICE
Victory on the frozen Danube
Over the winter of AD 174–175, Marcus’ best general, Publius Pertinax, led a Roman army from Pannonia toward Iazyge territory above the Danube. The Iazyges had been expecting this offensive, and King Zanticus sent a large mounted column to confront the Romans, crossing the ice on the frozen Danube to engage Pertinax in Roman territory. The initial battle, in bitter winter conditions, went against the Iazyges, with Pertinax using cavalry and infantry to combined effect, forcing the Iazyge cavalry to withdraw in disorder to the northern side of the Danube.
With the enemy on the run, Pertinax and his legions hurried in hot pursuit, but on the far side of the river German leaders were able to reform their riders. The Roman legionaries began to slip and slide as they gingerly made their way across the frozen Danube; it was then that regrouped Germans attacked. “Some of the barbarians dashed straight at them, while others rode round to attack their flanks, as their horses had been trained to run safely even over a surface of this kind.” Yet the Roman troops “were not alarmed, but formed in a compact body, facing all their foes at once.” [Dio, LXII, 7]
Pertinax’s legions formed the square, also called the brick and the box by Romans, a standard formation for defense against cavalry attack, and still used by infantry to counter cavalry as late as the 1815 Battle of Waterloo. The legionaries stood many ranks deep to create a large hollow square, with each man facing outward, and with the cavalry, auxiliaries, standards, non-combatants and senior officers inside the square.
On command, “most of them laid down their shields [on the ice] and rested one foot on them, so that they might not slip so much.” As Iazyge cavalrymen closed with their lances, some firm-footed legionaries grabbed the bridles of horses. Others grasped the shields and lance shafts of German riders. Often, horses were dragged off their feet on the ice, or riders were dragged from their mounts. If a legionary lost his footing, he kept his grip on his opponent and dragged him to the ground with him. Countless wrestling matches took place on the ice. More than once, Roman soldiers used their teeth as weapons in these desperate tussles. The barbarians were overwhelmed by these unorthodox tactics, said Dio, and “few escaped out of a large force.” [Ibid.] With the ice stained crimson with blood, the battle on the Danube was a decisive victory for Pertinax’s legions.
As Pertinax invaded their homeland, and deserted by all their German allies, the Iazyges saw the futility of continued resistance. King Zanticus and his fellow Iazyge leaders came to Marcus at Carnuntum, suing for peace and seeking to restore the old alliance with Rome. Zanticus even prostrated himself before the emperor. But Marcus did not trust the Iazyges, and still wished to “exterminate them utterly.” [Dio, LXXII, 16] The Iazyges were saved from extermination by disturbing news that now reached Marcus from Martius Verus, governor of Cappadocia. Marcus’ friend Avidius Cassius, governor of Syria, had declared himself emperor of Rome. Worse still, the provinces of Syria, Cilicia, Judea and Egypt and the troops they contained had all hailed Cassius emperor.
Cassius had seemed the most loyal of Marcus’ adherents. Three years earlier he had marched an army down to Egypt to relieve the resident 2nd Traiana Legion which was under siege at Alexandria by Egyptian partisans led by a priest named Isidorus who opposed Marcus’ rule. Why, now, had Cassius suddenly decided to usurp Marcus?
AD 175
LIV. CHALLENGING FOR MARCUS’ THRONE
The accidental pretender
Avidius Cassius had declared himself emperor of Rome because he believed that Marcus Aurelius was dead. This had arisen out of a misunderstanding involving Marcus’ wife Faustina, a powerful behind-the-scenes player. Marcus had not been well for some time, and in AD 175 his health worsened. He himself was to say this same year that he was “already an old man and weak, unable to either take food without pain or sleep without anxiety.” [Dio, LXII, 24]
The empress Faustina had thought that Marcus was close to death, and, deciding that Cassius would make a better successor as emperor than Marcus’ unpleasant son Commodus, she had sent Cassius a secret message urging him to take the throne for himself as soon as Marcus died, promising to support him. Cassius had subsequently received a report that Marcus was dead, and had immediately claimed the throne. But Marcus was still very much alive. Even when Cassius learned the truth, he would not recant; he had already shown his hand.
At Carnuntum, treating with Iazyge peace envoys when he would have preferred to exterminate the tribe, Marcus knew that he had to march to the East to put an end to the usurper’s claim. And to do that, he could not afford to have a Danube war continuing behind his back. As the 12th Fulminata Legion received orders to prepare to return to the East with
the emperor, Marcus reluctantly sealed a peace agreement with the Iazyges.
Marcus granted the Iazyges similar peace terms to those enjoyed by the Marcomanni and Quadi, with several exceptions. He stipulated that the Iazyges must live twice as far away from the Danube as their former German allies, and must contribute 8,000 of their most superior surviving cavalry to the new alliance. These men would be posted to the fringes of the empire—5,500 would go to Britain as members of numeri units, for example. In this way Marcus deprived the Iazyges of their best fighting men, and of their capacity to go to war against Rome again. The Iazyges also gave up all Roman captives taken during the ten-year war. Even after some prisoners had died in captivity and others had escaped, the Iazyges still held 100,000 captive Roman civilians, who were now returned. [Dio, LXXII, 16]
Rewarding Pertinax, his most successful and loyal general, for his “brave exploits” with a consulship for the year, the emperor set off east to confront Cassius, taking along the empress Faustina and a large body of troops. [Dio, LXII, 22] En route to the East, Marcus received word that Cassius was dead. Just three months after declaring himself emperor, Cassius had been assassinated. One of his own centurions had stabbed him, then galloped off, leaving him seriously wounded. A decurion, apparently from Cassius’ escort, had finished the job. Cassius’ severed head was sent to Marcus.
Marcus continued on to the East to cement the loyalty of the legions there before he returned to Rome. When he did finally return home in AD 177, he conducted a Triumph through the streets of the capital for his victory over the Germans, and erected a triumphal arch in Rome. Marcus Aurelius’ Danube wars had come to an end. But the peace he had won was not to last long.
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