From Eribolon, planning to return to Rome, where he was sure he would still have the support of the Senate, Macrinus took a merchant ship around the Bithynian coast to Chalcedon, modern Kadekoy in Turkey. This was just across the water from Byzantium. From Chalcedon, Macrinus sent a message to a local procurator seeking money to enable him to continue his journey. But this was a mistake. The procurator, choosing Elagabalus over Macrinus, had the fugitive emperor arrested. A centurion who had orders to return Macrinus to Syria took him as far as Cappadocia. There, Macrinus learned that his 10-year-old son had been arrested at Zeugma by a centurion of the 4th Scythica Legion while trying to cross the Euphrates.
Macrinus now threw himself from the carriage carrying him, only to fracture his shoulder. Another centurion, Marcianus Taurus, under orders to ensure that the emperor did not reach Antioch alive, met Macrinus’ party in Cappadocia shortly afterward, and put Macrinus to the sword. Young Elagabalus saw Macrinus’ body when he passed by sometime later on his way from Syria to Bithynia, and gloated over it. [Dio, LXXIX, 40] An emperor made by the Praetorian Guard had been destroyed by the legions. His successor, made by the legions, would be destroyed by the Praetorians.
Ironically, opposition to young Elagabalus’ rule swiftly bubbled over in his own back yard. Within months of his taking the throne, in the province of Syria Phoenicia, Verus the governor attempted to lead the one legion resident in his province, the 3rd Gallica, in a rebellion against Elagabalus. The son of a centurion of the 3rd Gallica serving in the ranks of his father’s legion had already stirred up the unit against the new emperor; Governor Verus himself had been a centurion before being elevated to the Senate.
Meanwhile, at the base of the 4th Scythica Legion at Zeugma in Syria proper, that legion’s commander, Gellius Maximus, the son of a physician, also came out against the new emperor. But, said Cassius Dio, these men “took leave of their senses” in opposing Elagabalus without ensuring their legionaries were solidly behind them. With their legions remaining loyal to the emperor, these rebellious officers were soon arrested, and that same year, AD 218, they met the executioner’s blade. [Dio, LXXX, 7]
But Elagabalus did not have long to live. After he imposed the worship of Baal on the Roman world and indulged in homosexual orgies, the young emperor lost popular favor and in AD 222 was murdered by the Praetorian Guard, who also killed his manipulative mother. His grandmother survived, as, in his place, the Guard hailed Elagabalus’ cousin, Severus Alexander, as Rome’s new emperor.
AD 238
LXIII. FOR AND AGAINST MAXIMINUS
The price of loyalty
Gaius Julius Verus Maximinus was the first soldier from the ranks of the legions to become emperor of Rome. Born in Thrace, before enlisting in the legions he was a shepherd. A large man, his great physical strength and determination equipped him to rise rapidly through the ranks to become a legion commander under Septimius Severus. Under Severus’ nephew and Elagabalus’ successor as emperor Severus Alexander, Maximinus was a consul and commander of the army on the Rhine. When Alexander was murdered in AD 235, Maximinus was declared emperor by the Rhine legions, an appointment reluctantly endorsed by a Senate unimpressed with his lowly background.
In AD 236, Maximinus departed from Rome leading cohorts of the Praetorian Guard and the 2nd Parthica Legion from the Alban Mount—a unit in which he may well have served as an enlisted man, for it was recruited in his home territory of Thrace. Basing himself in Pannonia, where he brought an army together from the Rhine and Danube legions, over the next two years Maximinus aggressively countered the inroads of Germans and Sarmatians.
By March of AD 238 Maximinus and his troops were preparing to launch a spring offensive against Goths occupying Moesia. Meanwhile, in the province of Africa, wealthy young landowners rebelled against high new taxes imposed by Maximinus, killing the imperial tax-collectors and declaring the provincial governor and his son coemperors. The Senate in Rome immediately endorsed their action, and the cities of Italy also came out for father and son and against Maximinus, whom the Senate declared deposed. Both new emperors were named Marcus Antonius Gordianus Sempronianus Romanus Africanus. The father, Gordian I, who was around age 70 and was more interested in literature than politics, gave his son and now coemperor Gordian ii the task of raising an army of levies in and around the provincial capital, Carthage.
There was just a single legion stationed in Africa, the 3rd Augusta, inland at Tebessa, to the southwest of Carthage. Once news of events at Carthage reached Tebessa, the legion prepared to march on the provincial capital in support of Maximinus. For the legionaries, the Gordians were not rulers in the stamp of the soldier emperor Maximinus, and, remaining loyal to Maximinus, they were determined to deal with the usurpers.
In the first week of April, leading an army of raw recruits, Gordian II and rebel leaders came face to face with the 3rd Augusta Legion on the plain outside Carthage. Silently, the legionaries of the 3rd Augusta spread into battle formation in front of Gordian’s army, then stood stock still in their battle lines and awaited the order to charge. The very sight of the highly disciplined and unflinching legionaries in formation was enough to unnerve the rebels’ recruits. Gordian’s men broke; “throwing away their equipment [they] ran without waiting for the charge. Pushing and trampling each other, more were killed by their own side than by the enemy.” [Herod., VII, IX, 7]
When the 3rd Augusta did charge, they met little opposition, quickly routing the rebel force and killing the younger Gordian. When the news of the defeat of his army and death of his son reached Gordian I at Carthage, this, along with the fact that the 3rd Augusta was advancing on the city, prompted the old man to take his own life. The Gordians, father and son, had shared the title of emperor of Rome for just three weeks.
At Rome, the news of the deaths of the Gordians caused the Senate to elect from their ranks a “board of twenty” consuls and ex-consuls to govern, and from these, two senators who would be coemperors—Decimus Balbinus and Pupienus Maximus. Balbinus had been a consul, and governor of Asia, while Pupienus was an unpopular former City Prefect of Rome. The pair was so disliked by the public that, at the insistence of the men of the Praetorian Guard cohorts at the capital, the Senate proclaimed as Caesar, or deputy emperor and heir to the throne, Gordianus, the 13-year-old grandson of the late Gordian I.
Meanwhile, Maximinus, the deposed emperor, had not been idle. On the news of the elevation of the Gordians he had marched his army from Pannonia into northeastern Italy, intent on dealing with his opponents. The first major city he came to—Aquileia—closed its gates and, led by the coemperor Pupienus, offered sharp resistance. Maximinus ordered his troops to besiege the city. As the siege of Aquileia dragged on for months, the loyalty of the men of one of Maximinus’ legions began to fray. His 2nd Parthica Legion was normally based at Alba, just outside Rome, and the legion’s troops became increasingly concerned that the senatorial forces might harm their wives and children, who lived outside the legion camp at Alba, or at the very least make them hostages.
During a break in the fighting outside Aquileia, Maximinus, his son Maximus, and most of their troops retired to their tents. Now men of the 2nd Parthica acted. They “went to Maximinus’ tent about noon and with the help of the Praetorians tore his image from the standards. When Maximinus and his son came out of their tent and attempted to reason with the troops, they were killed without being heard.” The 2nd Parthica completed the deed by also killing the Praetorian Prefect and Maximinus’ other senior advisers. [Herod., VIII, V, 8–9]
Pupienus returned triumphantly to Rome, bringing many of Maximinus’ troops with him, but he soon became suspicious of his coemperor Balbinus, who had been in sole command in Rome during his absence. The pair began to quarrel bitterly. To settle matters, the Praetorian Guard kidnapped both of them, but as the men of the German bodyguard that Pupienus and Balbinus had created for themselves rushed to save the coemperors, the Praetorians killed them.
Gordian I’
s teenage grandson now became the emperor Gordian III. His mother and later his father-in-law would rule in his name. One of the first acts of the administration of Gordian III was the abolition of the 3rd Augusta Legion, the unit that had remained loyal to Maximinus and had been responsible for the deaths of Gordian III’s grandfather, Gordian I, and uncle, Gordian II. The 2nd Parthica Legion, meanwhile, was honored by Gordian and returned to its base and its families at the Alban Mount.
Ahead lay half a century of almost interminable civil wars, with the Roman throne changing hands with alarming regularity and with the legions fighting off invaders on the one hand, and forced to fight each other on behalf of various imperial incumbents and pretenders on the other, as the empire lurched toward collapse.
AD 242–268
LXIV. VALERIAN CAPTURED
Rome’s great humiliation
King Shapur I was the son of Ardashir I, first ruler of the Sasanian Persian dynasty, which gained power in the former Parthian Empire in the third century. Shapur proved to be as able a ruler, as capable a soldier, and as violent an opponent of Rome as his father had been. By AD 242, Shapur had successfully taken up where his father had left off in the war against the Romans. Invading Roman Mesopotamia, Shapur took the cities of Nisibis and Carrhae from the legions of Gordian III. In AD 243, Shapur suffered a reverse at Resaina, home base of the 3rd Parthica Legion. The following year, after young Gordian III was murdered by his troops and his Praetorian Prefect Marcus Philippus replaced him as emperor—he would become known to later historians as Philip the Arabian—Shapur sealed a favorable peace with the Romans, which left him controlling significant portions of former Roman territory, knowing that Philip was anxious to hurry to the West to deal with Gothic invaders who were threatening Italy.
Over the next dozen years, Philip was murdered and four other Roman emperors came and went in swift and bloody succession, so that by AD 256 Shapur felt the Roman Empire to be so vulnerable that he launched a new campaign, leading his army into Armenia and Syria, penetrating even as far as Cilicia. Swatting away the legions that attempted to stop him, he sacked all the wealthy cities of Syria, including the capital, Antioch.
It fell to the latest Roman emperor, the elderly Valerian, to attempt to repulse the Persian invaders. Valerian had been a consul under Severus Alexander, and was one of the consuls and ex-consuls who in AD 238 supported the rebellion of Gordian I and Gordian II against Maximinus, then appointed Pupienus and Balbinus coemperors, and finally hailed Gordian III as their successor. In AD 253, Valerian was commanding the legions on the Upper Rhine when the then emperor Gallus summoned him to help fight off rival Aemilius. Valerian marched an army from Mogontiacum to Rome, but arrived too late to save Gallus, who had been killed by Aemilius. He avenged him by executing Aemilius, then took the throne for himself.
When news of Shapur’s invasion of the Roman East reached Rome, Valerian appointed his son Gallienus to rule the West, then headed east with fresh troops. Fortunes subsequently waxed and waned as the Roman and Persian armies slugged it out, with Valerian pushing Shapur back into Mesopotamia. With the Roman garrison at Edessa on the Euphrates (considered to have the most formidable walls of any city in the East), under siege from the Persians, Valerian led an army to its relief. But outside Edessa in June AD 260, Shapur’s Persians caught the Romans in the open and routed them. Valerian himself was captured, and forced to surrender on bended knee to the Persian king.
As many as 40,000 of Valerian’s troops were killed or captured. The Roman prisoners, the men of several proud legions, were herded east and put to work on major construction projects by the Persians. Valerian’s captured legionaries used their building skills to erect the new Persian city of Gondeshapur, and the massive dam at Shaushtar which Shapur named, with some irony, Band-e-Qeysar—Dam of Caesar.
Valerian died in Persian captivity two years later. While his son Gallienus ruled in Rome for the next eight years, the influx of invaders across the Rhine and Danube meant that Spain was in the hands of the Franks; Gaul and Britain had declared independence; and the Danube provinces were occupied by German and Gothic tribes, so that Gallienus was effectively only in control of Italy and the Balkans, even fighting invaders on Italian soil. In AD 268, Gallienus too would be murdered—in Milan, while fending off a claimant to his throne. His assassination generated yet another succession of short-lived emperors. In both the East and the West, the Roman Empire and its legions were in a shambles.
AD 267–274
LXV. THE PALMYRAN WARS
A queen in golden chains
Zenobia was the young and beautiful wife of Odenatus, king of Palmyra, a rich city state and Roman ally in the desert, at the junction of caravan routes to India. After the capture of Roman emperor Valerian by Shapur, King Odenatus had led his small Palmyran army against the Persians, capturing one of their columns—loaded down with Roman booty following the defeat of Valerian’s legions. Over the next several years, with the Roman command structure in the East non-existent, Odenatus brought surviving Roman troops in the region under his command. Using the skills of his own army, which was based on cavalry and archers in the eastern fashion, plus the infantry and siege machinery abilities of the Roman troops, Odenatus was able to whittle away the Persian hold on Roman assets in the East, earning the gratitude of the Roman emperor, Valerian’s son Gallienus. In AD 267, a year before Gallienus was himself murdered, Odenatus and his eldest son were assassinated—by whom, was never established. As a result, Zenobia’s young son Vaballathus became sovereign of Palmyra, with his ambitious mother ruling through him.
In 269, Zenobia, who already occupied Syria in Rome’s name, led the Palmyran army south to seize Egypt, then took most of Asia Minor. But instead of doing this in Rome’s name, she declared all the annexed territory part of her son’s Palmyran kingdom. The Romans, in the West, were too occupied with civil war and invaders from the north to immediately address the loss of the Roman East to the Palmyran queen, but by AD 270 the then emperor Aurelian was able to turn his eyes east.
By AD 272, Aurelian had arrived in Syria with an army which included new units only recently raised for this expedition—such as the 1st Illyricorum Legion, recruited in the Balkans. Aurelian conducted a steady campaign of attrition against the Palmyran army. At Antioch and then at Emesa, he defeated Zenobia’s army, then pushed east through the desert to surround Palmyra. Zenobia and her young son attempted to escape the Roman siege, but were caught. The city surrendered, and Roman control of the East was re-established, and Palmyra lost its client status. Aurelian took Zenobia and several of her sons back to Rome with him. When Palmyra revolted against Roman rule the following year, Roman legions marched on the city, stormed it, then razed it to the ground. The famous crossroads city ceased to exist.
In AD 274, the same year that Aurelian surrendered the Roman province of Dacia to the barbarians and withdrew all Roman troops south of the Danube, he celebrated a Triumph through the streets of Rome for his victory over the Palmyrans and for restoring Roman control to the eastern provinces. It had been a long time since Rome had anything to celebrate. The hundreds of thousands of Romans lining the streets saw Zenobia and two of her sons on display in the triumphal procession. According to legend, Zenobia was led in golden chains. Just to prove she was no ordinary prisoner, she was kept at the famous villa of the emperor Hadrian at Tivoli, just outside Rome. Zenobia later married a Roman senator, and lived out the remainder of her life in Italy.
AD 305–312
LXVI. CONSTANTINE FIGHTS FOR THE THRONE
Victory under a new standard
The Roman Empire of the fourth century was rent from within by civil wars and eroded from without by the inroads of numerous foreign invaders. Peace, security, stability, these were all things of which fourth-century Romans could only dream. Yet the century started on a promising note. The emperor Diocletian and his coemperor Maximian had vowed that they would rule for twenty years and then retire, handing over power to others. Un
iquely, in AD 305 the two emperors abdicated, with Diocletian famously secluding himself in his vast palace at Salonae in Dalmatia, today’s Split in Croatia.
The two emperors had prepared for an orderly transition of power by appointing a pair of coemperors for both the East and the West, also appointing a Caesar under each coemperor. While sharing power around eight men may have seemed to Diocletian and Maximian a sure way to prevent a single despot from gaining power, it was in fact a formula for bitter internal rivalry. For, in leaving power in the hands of eight men, the pair created a recipe for in-fighting that would dominate Roman affairs for nineteen years and cost the lives of thousands of Roman soldiers in a series of costly civil wars.
It was Flavius Valerius Constantinus, or Constantine the Great as we know him, who would eventually emerge from the chaos as the sole victor. As Constantine I, he would go into the history books as the first Christian emperor, an excellent general and a man of intelligence, and the emperor who gave the city of Constantinople its name. He was all those things. But he was also cunning, ruthless, brutal, vindictive, paranoid and obsessed with glory. Diocletian had separated military and civil commands in the provinces. But it was the subsequent changes that Constantine wrought on the Roman army, from the organization and distribution of units to the structure of the officer corps, combined with the losses suffered in wars internal and external, that weakened the army to such an extent that within 100 years the Roman military would prove incapable of preventing the barbarians from sacking Rome. The army would also prove incapable of preventing the Roman Empire in the west from disappearing altogether within little more than 150 years.
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