Legions of Rome

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  The Battle of Lugdunum was long and drawn out, with numerous shifts of fortune. It opened in time-honored fashion. With both sides lined up facing each other in numerous ranks, both charged forward. Prior to the battle, probably in the night, the men on Albinus’ right wing had been able to dig a long pit, unseen by the other side. This pit had been given a covering, apparently of hides, with an overall layer of earth to conceal it. At the battle’s commencement, Albinus’ men here on his right dashed forward to the edge of the hidden pit, launched their javelins, then withdrew, as if through fear. This had drawn Severus’ left wing forward, on to the pit. The covering gave way, and both men and horses of the first line tumbled into the hole, which would have been equipped with pointed stakes. The second line could not stop its momentum, and many of its men also went into the pit. Troops in the next lines not only stopped in their tracks, they withdrew in horrified disorder, forcing their own men behind them over the edge of a cliff.

  On the opposite wing, the fortunes were just the opposite. After hectic hand-to-hand combat, Albinus’ left wing gave way under pressure from Severus’ more experienced right-wing troops. Men from this wing fled back to Albinus’ camp, with Severus’ troops in pursuit. The gates could not be closed in the crush of panicking men, allowing the pursuers to force their way into the camp, where they slaughtered those inside and looted their tents.

  Severus had been holding the Praetorian Guard in reserve. Seeing his left wing in trouble at the pit, he led the Praetorians into action on the left. But Albinus’ troops succeeded in pushing the Guard back. The fighting “came very near destroying the Praetorians,” and Severus’ horse was killed beneath him. [Ibid.] Finding himself on the ground, Severus, seeing his men fleeing the fight, threw off his heavy riding cloak, drew his sword, and ran among the fugitives, intending to either turn them around or die fighting. After halting the flight of many of his men and reforming them, he led a counter-attack that cut down many of those who had been pursuing Severus’ troops, and forced the others to retreat.

  At this point Severus’ general Maecius Laetus intervened with the cavalry. According to Dio, Laetus had ambitions to himself become emperor and had been holding Severus’ cavalry back in the hope that both Severus and Albinus would be killed, after which he would claim the vacant throne for himself. But seeing Severus’ troops having the better of Albinus’ men, Laetus brought the cavalry into play to support Severus. [Ibid.] This turned the tide, and allowed Albinus’ army to be overrun. Albinus fled the battlefield, and took refuge in a farmhouse beside the Rhône. But he was followed, and the house was surrounded by Severan troops. Rather than fall into Severus’ hands, Albinus took his own life.

  Albinus’ body was brought to Severus. After taking in the corpse, and angrily denouncing the dead man for opposing him, Severus ordered his head severed and sent to Rome to be displayed on a pole; the rest of the body was discarded with neither burial nor cremation. When Severus returned to Rome he would execute a number of senators who had supported Albinus. Meanwhile, Severus’ loyal general Lupus received Albinus’ former post of governor of Britain, while the ambitious Laetus was sent to the East to become governor of Mesopotamia.

  Because Lugdunum had supported Albinus, Severus allowed his victorious troops to loot the wealthy city. He would have been all the more incensed at the city’s disloyalty because his son Caracalla had been born there, yet still its people had turned against him. Severus’ 1st Minervia Legion, which had been located at Bonna on the Lower Rhine since the reign of Trajan, was now detached from Severus’ army and based at Lugdunum. Treating it as an occupied enemy city, the legion would remain at Lugdunum until AD 211, after which it would return to Bonna. Lugdunum would never regain its previous prestige or importance among the cities of the empire. [Pelle.]

  With this battle outside Lugdunum, the brief civil war was brought to an end, but the Roman army had been devastated by the internecine conflict. “Countless numbers had fallen on both sides,” at Lugdunum. “Even the victors deplored the disaster, for the entire plain was seen to be covered with the bodies of men and horses,” Dio lamented. “Roman power suffered a severe blow.” [Dio, LXXVI, 7]

  But Severus was not finished with making war. Once he was back in Rome, news reached him that the Parthians, knowing that the Romans were fighting among themselves in the West, had launched “an expedition in full force.” After invading and capturing most of Mesopotamia from the Romans, the Parthians were laying siege to the governor, Laetus, at Nisibis. [Ibid., 9] Severus issued orders for a major campaign in the East. Not only did he plan to throw the Parthians out of Mesopotamia, he set his sights on achieving what Julius Caesar had dreamed of doing, what Hadrian had abandoned after Trajan’s brief excursion east of the Euphrates, and what Commodus had failed to achieve—the conquest of Parthia and the elimination of the Parthians as a future threat to Rome.

  AD 197–203

  LVIII. SEVERUS’ PARTHIAN WAR

  An eastern disaster

  In the light of the massive losses sustained by all the legions taking part in the battle outside Lugdunum in February AD 197, Severus ordered the raising of three new legions. So that there was no doubt about their purpose, he named them the 1st Parthica, 2nd Parthica, and 3rd Parthica legions—Parthica meaning “of Parthia.” All three legions took the centaur as their emblem. As the mythological centaur was said to have originated in Macedonia, it is thought likely that all three legions were in the main raised there and in neighboring Thrace. [Cow., RL AD 161–284]

  Using the Misene and Ravenna Fleets, and taking with him some of his existing European-based legions and part of the Praetorian Guard, all of which had suffered heavy casualties in the February Battle of Lugdunum in Gaul, Severus set off for the East late in the year, departing from the port of Brundisium in southern Italy. [Starr, VIII] The three new Parthica legions would have marched from their recruiting grounds to nearby Byzantium, where they were probably collected by ships of the Pontic Fleet to be ferried around the eastern Mediterranean to link up with Severus in Syria.

  By the spring of AD 198, Severus was leading his army north into Mesopotamia to relieve Nisibis, modern Nusaybin in southeast Turkey. This ancient city, surrounded by massive walls, had been under extended siege by the Parthians. The approach of Severus and his army forced the Parthian king, Vologases, to withdraw back into central Parthia. Severus’ general Laetus, a “most excellent man,” according to Dio, who was acquainted with the general, had defiantly held out through the siege for many months. “In consequence, Laetus acquired still greater renown.” [Dio, LXXVI, 9]

  The scenes on the carved panels on the Arch of Septimius Severus, erected in AD 203 not far from the Senate House in the Forum in Rome, show Severus then going to war once again with the kingdom of Osroene, which had been an age-old ally of the Parthians and several years before this had rebelled against Severus. According to the panels on Severus’ arch, he employed elaborate “war engines” against Edessa, the capital of Osroene.

  Some of these engines—massive mobile towers, catapults and cranes—were designed by the engineer Priscus of Bithynia. Priscus had been involved in the defense of Byzantium during the siege of that city by Severus’ forces, building exotic war machines that had made life difficult for the besiegers. Severus had ordered that Priscus be spared when Byzantium fell, and subsequently took him east with him. [Dio, LXVV, 11] Severus’ arch in Rome shows the city of Edessa surrendering to Severus, and then Abgar, the king of Osroene, also surrendering.

  Dio says that, using timber from a forest beside the Euphrates, Severus’ legions then constructed boats which they launched on the river, and down the Euphrates the Roman army sped, with part—the baggage, no doubt—on water, and part marching along the riverbank. [Dio, LXXVI, 9] Severus’ arch shows Vologases, king of the Parthians, fleeing on horseback ahead of Severus. Dio reports that when Severus reached Seleucia, the city on the Tigris previously destroyed by Trajan, he found it totally abandoned. [Ibid.] March
ing south, Severus found ancient Babylon also abandoned.

  The Parthians put up a fight for their capital Ctesiphon, and again Severus brought in war engines. Despite the surrender of the city’s defenders, Severus allowed his legions to enter Ctesiphon and loot it. Severus then pulled out of Parthia—partly, said Dio, due to a lack of provisions. It seems that he withdrew all the way to Nisibis, where he would spend the winter. His army, again partly in boats and partly on land, also followed the Tigris river to winter in the north.

  In the spring of AD 199, having prepared large stores of food and built numerous war engines, Severus launched a new campaign. This time he marched across the desert to the city of Hatra, capital of the Atreni Arabs, to which he laid siege. Hatra may have been remote, but it was a rich city, for it was the famous center of the worship of a sun god and contained numerous valuable offerings and vast amounts of money. Eighty-three years before, Trajan had also besieged Hatra; he had given up in disgust after both the defense and the locale had proved too much to overcome. Ammianus, a Roman officer who was to pass this way with a Roman army 164 years later, wrote that Hatra lay in the midst of desert, and that on the desert plain here it was possible to march for 70 miles (112 kilometers) and find that the only water available was “salty and ill-smelling.” [Amm., II, XXV, 4]

  Despite the conditions, Severus was determined to take the city, which was surrounded by a series of high walls, employing a range of war engines against it. Again Priscus of Bithynia created massive engines for the attack, as did the legions’ own engineers. Many of these war engines were destroyed by fire arrows shot from the city walls, to Severus’ frustration. “His siege engines were burned, many soldiers perished, and vast numbers were wounded.” [Dio, LXXVI, 11] Severus withdrew, and set up camp in a more hospitable area for the winter.

  Over the winter, Severus had supplies stockpiled for a protracted campaign in the new year, and had numerous new war engines constructed. There was obviously a mood of dissatisfaction in Severus’ camp at the human cost of the campaign to date, for Severus lashed out at those around him. Maecius Laetus had become his most successful general; more than that, Laetus had gained great popularity with the troops and the public; now Severus had him arrested, and executed. Then, when it was reported that one of the tribunes of the Praetorian Guard, Julius Crispus, had quoted a line from the poet Virgil that “we are meanwhile perishing all unheeded,” Severus took it as seditious criticism of his leadership, and had the tribune executed. The soldier who had informed on Crispus was promoted into the tribune’s post. [Ibid., 10]

  The spring of AD 200 found Severus and his army back outside Hatra for a renewal of the siege, for Severus was galled by the fact that this one city should be allowed to resist him when all others in the region had fallen. Severus’ latest siege engines were brought up as the struggle was renewed, but the Atreni tribe defending Hatra were also equipped with destructive weapons, some of which were massive catapults that launched two large arrows at a time. These had such a long range that they hit Severus’ bodyguards as the emperor sat on a lofty tribunal from which he was watching the siege progress, no doubt scattering both emperor and attendants.

  Severus’ legionaries were subsequently sent against one of the walls of Hatra using covered mantlets on wheels. They managed to break down a small part of the wall, and assault troops massed at the breach. In response, the defenders fired containers of burning bituminous naphtha against the wooden siege sheds; these burst over them and “consumed the engines and all the soldiers on whom it fell.” [Dio, LXXVI, 11] The horrible fate of these men soured the enthusiasm of the other Roman troops who witnessed it, and the attack faltered.

  Except those built by Priscus, all the siege machines were destroyed by fire as a result of Hatran barrages. Fireproofing precautions, which often involved a layer of earth on the top of wooden siege machines, may have prevented Priscus’ engines from being engulfed in flame. Eventually, another large breach was made in a wall by Priscus’ surviving siege machinery. Severus’ troops were eager to force their way through the breach, but Severus unaccountably decided to give the enemy twenty-four hours to surrender. A day later, the Hatrans had not only failed to give up but had secretly rebuilt the breached wall during the night.

  Of Severus’ legions, Dio said that those that had come from Europe “alone had the ability to do anything.” [Dio, LXXVI, 12] Yet even they shied away from tackling the wall now that the Arabs had been given time to strengthen their defenses. “They were so angry” about Severus’ twenty-four-hour delay that “not one of them would any longer obey him.” [Ibid.] “The others, Syrians,” said Dio—apparently the Syria-based legions such as the 3rd Gallica, the 4th Scythica, the 6th Ferrata and the 10th Fretensis—were ordered to make the assault in the place of the European legions but they were “miserably destroyed” and the attack repulsed. [Ibid.]

  One of Severus’ generals said that if the emperor gave him 550 men from the European legions he would take the city, but Severus sourly pointed out that he could not even find that many European soldiers because of the disobedience of their legions. [Ibid.] After twenty days of bloody failure, like Trajan before him, Severus gave up the siege of Hatra. He withdrew from Mesopotamia, leaving garrisons at various cities and forts, and traveled to Palestine. At the temple to Jupiter built on the site of the Jewish Temple at Jerusalem, Severus sacrificed to the memory of Pompey the Great, the first Roman general to take Jerusalem.

  The campaign had cost the lives of thousands of Roman troops and secured no great lasting benefits for Rome, other than buying a little time before her assets beyond the Euphrates were again besieged and overrun. Now, Severus turned his back on military affairs and played tourist. He went to Egypt, and at Alexandria locked up the tomb of Alexander the Great so that no one in the future could view his mummified body. He then sailed down the Nile, halting only when he learned that disease was ravaging Ethiopia ahead.

  By AD 202, Severus was back in Rome. He had left the new 1st Parthica and 3rd Parthica legions in the East, and they built bases for themselves in Mesopotamia—the former at Singara, the latter at Rhesana. Severus brought the 2nd Parthica Legion back to Italy with him following the Parthian expedition. Even though Severus had reformed the Praetorian Guard after he came to power, he never totally trusted it; Praetorians had, after all, murdered his predecessor Pertinax. The 2nd Parthica Legion was now installed at Alba Longa, in the Alban Hills, just 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Rome, becoming the first legion based in Italy south of the River Po since the late days of the Republic, some 230 years before.

  Here at Alba, the 2nd Parthica, which had proved its loyalty to Severus in the East, became the emperor’s pseudo lifeguards. Now the Praetorians knew that the emperor’s pet legion was just several hours’ march away at Alba should they ever have thoughts of murdering the occupant of the throne. The 2nd Parthica Legion, or the Alban Legion as it would colloquially become known, was now serving as Severus’ life insurance.

  The following year, the triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus was inaugurated in Rome. In one of the panels, a Roman soldier is seen escorting an eastern prisoner who may well have been King Abgar of Osroene, who had surrendered to Severus following the fall of Edessa. Abgar did subsequently go to Rome, with a massive escort. [Dio, LXXX, 16] He may have taken part in Severus’ triumphal procession. On an inscription on the arch, Severus claimed to have restored the state and enlarged the empire. For the moment, the Roman Empire’s extended borders were secure, the frontier lands quiet. But peace, in the third century, would be a rare phenomenon for Romans.

  AD 208–210

  LIX. SEVERUS’ SCOTTISH INVASION

  Invigorating idle legions

  The emperor Septimius Severus, feeling that the legions “were becoming enervated by idleness,” and having concluded that Rome controlled less than half of Britain, decided to correct both situations by invading the island’s northern unconquered portion. [Dio, LXXVII, 11] In AD 197, while
Severus was planning his Parthian campaign, the Maeatae tribe of Scotland, which lived beside Hadrian’s Wall, was being troublesome—their neighbors, the Caledonians, having failed to abide by their promises to Rome that they would keep the Maeatae under control. With his focus on the East, as a temporary solution Severus had authorized the governor of northern Britain, Virius Lupus, “to purchase peace from the Maeatae for a large sum.” [Dio, LXXVI, 5]

  But by 208, Severus was now ready to turn his attention to Scotland personally. In the spring, he arrived in Britain with his wife, sons and a large army. Then, from his headquarters at Eburacum, he advanced past Hadrian’s Wall and launched an offensive against the Maeatae, near the wall, then against the Caledonians in the Highlands. “But as he advanced through the country he experienced countless hardships in cutting down the forests, leveling the heights, filling up swamps, and bridging the swamps.” [Dio, LXXVII, 13] Cassius Dio, a senator at the time, says that the warriors of Scotland, who lived in tents, were “very swift in running and very firm in standing their ground.” They were armed with a shield, short spear and a dagger. The tribes also still used war chariots drawn by small, fast horses, as they had at the time of Agricola’s campaigns 120 years before. [Ibid.]

  The tribes avoided pitched battles but instead used their livestock as bait, luring the Roman troops intent on plunder into swamps and bogs. The tribesmen would “plunge into the swamps and exist there with only their heads above water,” said Dio. While “the water caused great suffering to the Romans,” the tribesmen only attacked the Romans “when they became scattered.” Wounded Roman soldiers who could not walk “would be slain by their own men, in order to avoid capture.” [Ibid.]

  Over the three years of the campaign, Roman losses were enormous: “Fully 50,000 died,” said Dio. But Severus “did not desist until he had approached the extremity of the island.” [Ibid.] By this time suffering from severe gout, he himself was carried the length of Scotland in a litter. By the end of the summer of AD 210, Severus’ expensive campaign had not subjugated the tribes of northern Britain, but it forced them to parley.