10
VALERIAN AND THE GENERALS
The new emperor Valerian was an important man of long experience – it had been he who had brought the news of old Gordian’s proclamation to Rome and brokered its acceptance in the senate. He was certainly of an old senatorial family, although the only source to give details of his parentage is plainly making them up. That said, we can be sure that he had held his first suffect consulship before 238 and was serving as some sort of military commander in Gaul when Aemilian rebelled against Gallus – he may have been a consular legate in one of the garrisoned provinces, but it is also possible that both Decius and Gallus had continued Philip’s practice of appointing trusted men as correctores over large areas, as Valerian would certainly do. However, our uncertainty over what type of command Valerian was holding upon his acclamation reflects a phenomenon of these middle decades of the century – the disintegration of the empire’s traditional military organisation, with its well-defined fighting units of legions and auxiliaries. In their place, we find multiple campaign armies, made up of detachments from a variety of units – a practice that becomes more regularised as the century progresses. In many ways, the reigns of Valerian and his son and successor Gallienus – poorly attested in the sources though they are – were the seedbeds of late third-century government and the late imperial state more generally.
In 253, almost as soon as he was acclaimed emperor, Valerian made his adult son P. Licinius Egnatius Gallienus his co-emperor. Gallienus was a man of about forty who already had a son, so in him Valerian could not only rely on a second adult ruler of equal authority but also the realistic prospect of dynastic continuity across several generations. In theory, that would allow the two emperors to deal with threats in different parts of the empire as they arose. The new rulers planned a flurry of activity. They spent the winter of 253–4 in Italy, establishing familial authority there. Valerian’s late wife Egnatia Mariniana was deified as diva Mariniana, while Gallienus’s wife Cornelia Salonina was made augusta and mater castrorum and their eldest son, Valerianus (Junior), was elevated to the rank of caesar and princeps iuventutis. However poorly recent attempts at dynasticism had gone, there remained a visceral sense that establishing a dynasty was essential to successful rule. As always for this period, the coinage is exceptionally instructive – Valerian abandoned the types favoured by Decius and Gallus, choosing instead to return to Severan reverses and legends, if not perhaps advertising continuity then at the very least suggesting his own preference for that now-vanished world.
With the passing of winter, the emperors began a period of frantic activity. Gallienus established himself in the Balkans, probably making Viminacium and Sirmium his main bases and foreshadowing those cities’ great importance to the next 200 years of imperial history. They were among the cities founded by the Romans after Augustus had made the conquest and consolidation of the Balkans one of the main tasks of his principate. The rivers Sava, Drava, Morava and Danube were the main paths through the landscape of northern and western Illyricum, and the routes between them were dotted with towns that had begun life as way stations for Roman campaign armies. On the Drava, there were Poetovio (modern Ptuj) in Pannonia Superior and Mursa (modern Osijek) in Inferior just before the river flows into the Danube. Further south in Superior, on the Sava, there was Siscia (Sisak), and in Inferior Sirmium (Mitrovica) and Singidunum (Belgrade), where the Sava and the Danube meet. In Moesia Superior, there was Viminacium (Kostolac) on the Danube and Naissus (Nis) on the Nisava just before it meets the Morava. Naissus was the last of the great cities of the western Balkans, just as Serdica (modern Sofia), in Moesia Inferior, near the Iskar, was the gateway to the eastern Balkans and Thrace: the Succi Pass, just to the south of there, would become a military hinge between the eastern and western Balkans during the later empire.
Most of these cities were Julio-Claudian foundations, but the vast majority of the provincial populations in this region had only become citizens in 212 through the edict of Caracalla. It may be this unusually long gap between conquest, early imperial urbanisation and full enfranchisement that gave the region a peculiar sense of local citizenship. Whereas in most parts of the Roman empire, people were regarded as having their patria, or ‘home town’, in the legal centre of the civitas, in the Balkans the vici or villages within a civitas are regularly noted. This reckoning of regional identity, and the third-century prominence of men from the region in the government of the empire, may help us understand the growth of regional factions in fourth-century imperial government, a topic to which we will often return, in this volume and its sequel.
With his subordinate commanders overwhelmingly men of Balkan origin, Valerian headed to Syria overland via Cilicia, probably spending the winter of 254–5 in Antioch. The eastern frontier had been so disturbed, both by Shapur’s invasions and the usurpations that they encouraged, that it would require more than just one winter’s attention, but in 256, both Valerian and Gallienus moved to Colonia Agrippina (Cologne), where they campaigned against the Alamanni. Perhaps they judged it best for all corners of the empire to witness the emperors working effectively and in concert with one another, even if that meant gesturing towards problems rather than solving them. In the autumn of 256, the imperial pair travelled to Rome so that Gallienus could enter his first consulship on 1 January 257. Probably in that same year, or at the beginning of the next, Gallienus’s elder son, the young Valerian Caesar, died and was consecrated as divus Valerianus Caesar, his place in the dynastic order being filled by his younger brother, Saloninus Gallienus, who was made nobilissimus Caesar and princeps iuventutis early in 258.
However, the mere fact of Valerian’s residency in Antioch two years before had triggered a new Persian response. In 256 or 257 the south-easternmost Roman garrison on the Euphrates, at the long disputed fortress of Dura-Europos, fell to Persian forces. The site became a ghost town thereafter, thus leaving it for modern archaeologists to excavate as one of the most significant early imperial frontier sites (and a recent victim of Islamist vandalism). In response to this latest eastern setback, Valerian left Rome and made for Antioch, a journey from which he would never return. Events of the following years are hard to pin down with certainty: there was another Scythian attack in 257 or 258, this time into Pontus and Cappadocia via the Black Sea coast. These invaders were now organised enough to deliberately target local mints, seizing dies that the Greek cities used to strike bronze coins, and using them to strike gold versions that are found north of the Black Sea. The army Valerian led to confront this invasion was ravaged by an illness that one source describes vaguely as ‘plague’, possibly a recurrence of the haemorrhagic fever of Decius’s time, and it was this already depleted force that Valerian then took to confront yet another Persian invasion of Mesopotamia, in the spring of 260. The size, composition and routes of the respective armies are unknown, but whereas in 252/3 Shapur had achieved strategic surprise thanks to the help of Mariades, in 260 both Persians and Romans seem to have followed the well-worn military routes through the Mesopotamian steppe.
One can infer from its location – somewhere between Carrhae and Edessa – that the Persian shahanshah and the Roman emperor both personally led their armies into the decisive battle in which Valerian was taken prisoner. One of the most famous pieces of Sasanian art to survive from antiquity is a little cameo stone commemorating the battle. It shows the emperor and the shah cantering towards each other, the one in the military paludamentum of Rome, the other in the full chain armour of Persia, Shapur reaching out and grasping Valerian’s wrist in the standard Persian iconography of capture. It is the same gesture we see on the reliefs of Naqsh-e Rustam and Bishapur, where Valerian the imperial captive stands alongside the dead Gordian and suppliant Philip. And, as had not been the case with Gordian, here there was no room for equivocation in the sources: a Roman emperor had been taken captive on the field of battle.
In Lactantius’s lurid fourth-century account – Orientalism avant la lettre – the captive emperor lived out his days as the stool from which the shah would mount his horse and then, when he died, his flayed skin was dyed red and hung in a Mazdean fire temple. More plausible is the shahanshah’s own account in the Naqsh-e Rustam inscription: he took the emperor captive – humiliation enough in itself – while his army, which surrendered in the face of so crushing a blow, was shipped to eastern Iran to build new cities for the Persians. There is architectural evidence for Roman legionary engineering in many Sasanian cities from this period, and the deportation of defeated enemies was a long-standing tradition in the ancient Near East, so this exploitation of the Roman prisoners as skilled labour makes more sense than does anything reported in the Roman sources.
In the face of the calamity, the eastern provinces fell into total disarray under their imperial officials or local dynasts and then, by April 260, news of Valerian’s defeat reached the west and the chaos in the east was duplicated there. The only group to rejoice was the Christians. Before he set out from Rome at the end of 259, Valerian had issued an edict similar to that of Decius, in that it demanded universal sacrifice, but fundamentally different in that it deliberately and specifically targeted Christians, and left open considerable room for delation, denunciation and the settling of old scores. Under this edict, known leaders of the church – bishops but also Christian senators and other important laymen – were to be arrested and ordered to sacrifice. Rather than being banned from practising their religion, they were to be given the choice of adding this show of participation in the Roman state to their normal practices. Failure to do so would result in confiscation of their estates and the enslavement of those who were in imperial service at the time of their refusal; repeated recusancy would result in execution (and there were indeed some martyrs, including the bishop of Rome Xystus).
This persecuting edict – and unlike Decius’s, this one was certainly a deliberate persecuting measure – had clearly not been widely trailed or expected. Indeed, the Roman senate asked Valerian to clarify whether the edict actually meant what it seemed to mean, and how it was to be enforced, which suggests the extent of de facto toleration among the Roman senatorial elite of Christianity in their midst. Christianity was no doubt viewed as eccentric – and in Roman terms, it was deeply eccentric – but it also seemed more threatening to an imperial bureaucracy with its aspirations to conformity and control than to the ruling classes of the empire as a whole. As if to confirm that interpretation, Gallienus restored freedom to the church, along with the extensive property rights it had formerly possessed, almost immediately after his father’s capture. Valerian’s fate, meanwhile, provided Christians with further gratifying evidence that their persecutors would meet a nasty end at the hands of their one true god.
Few others, however, can have welcomed something as unprecedented and horrifying as the captivity of a Roman emperor. Emperors fell in battle – sometimes even in battle against barbarians as Decius had done, though more often against pretenders and rivals. But captivity was worse, and what could it mean that foreign foes had destroyed two emperors within a decade? Suddenly, a world without a Roman empire must have looked possible. Equally, though, perhaps anyone could now be an emperor, since no measure of apparent legitimacy seemed to make any difference. Consequently, revolts broke out everywhere, or at least local initiatives that could look very much like revolt or usurpation when viewed from the centre.
In the east, a bureaucrat named Macrianus and an officer named Callistus rallied some opposition to the further advance of Shapur, but the self-help soon became usurpation: Macrianus’s sons Macrianus and Quietus were proclaimed emperors in Syria in the summer of 260. Further south and east, Odaenathus of Palmyra took to calling himself the lord of Tadmor (the Syriac name of the city), a designation probably aimed more at Persia than Rome. In doing so, he was claiming an unprecedented authority in the region, where he won a substantial victory over Shapur as the latter’s army was withdrawing from Roman territory. In the Balkans, when word of Valerian’s capture spread, the provincial governors Ingenuus and Regalianus each in turn declared himself emperor, Ingenuus at Sirmium in Pannonia and Regalianus in Moesia, though his coinage was struck at the Pannonian city of Carnuntum. Both were defeated before the end of the year by Gallienus’s crack cavalry commander, Aureolus. This Aureolus now emerges as the first of the great marshals of Gallienus whose careers (and imperial aspirations) would dominate the second half of the third century. Similarly encouraged by imperial disarray, another Scythian invasion penetrated deep into the peninsula. As the new Dexippus fragments show, a barbarian army assaulted Thessalonica in 261/2 and, when repulsed there, made for southern Greece. The senatorial governor of Achaea, one Marianus, organised the defence along with local Athenian and Boeotian officials and the pass at Thermopylae was fortified and defended by a makeshift army.
The ruling dynasty reacted as best it could. Gallienus’s son Saloninus was raised from the rank of caesar and proclaimed augustus at Colonia Agrippina in the summer of 260, but by then he and his father were facing a usurpation even closer to home: the rebellion of the governor of Germania Inferior, Postumus. Gallienus had been in northern Italy or Raetia fighting a raid by the Iuthungi, one of the various Alamannic groups we met at the end of chapter 9, when he learned of Valerian’s capture. These invaders, presumably taking with them great quantities of booty and many prisoners, were defeated by the emperor himself near Mediolanum (Milan). Perhaps Gallienus negotiated their withdrawal from the empire, perhaps his victory was rather less complete than our poor sources suggest, but more than a few of the Iuthungi survived the battle unscathed and in possession of their spoils. As they moved north through Raetia to withdraw beyond the upper Danube, they were attacked and slaughtered by units from Raetia and Germania Inferior, with the help of an unspecified militia. This success, which apparently freed many thousands of Italian captives, led the successful army or armies to proclaim Postumus, one of their generals, emperor.
It would make sense if Saloninus’s proclamation at Colonia in his father’s absence was a direct response to the usurpation of Postumus, orchestrated by the praetorian prefect Silvanus, who was resident in the city to supervise the young caesar. For one reason or another – and in the confused state of the evidence it is impossible to say – the troops under the young emperor’s direct command mutinied, preferring Postumus to Saloninus, and laid siege to Colonia. Taking the city by storm, they executed Saloninus and his prefect and, with that, the whole of the region north of the Loire and Alps was governed by the usurper. With the east likewise in the hands of usurpers, Gallienus’s empire was reduced to Italy, the Balkans and Anatolia, as well as Egypt, North Africa and the better part of Spain. There was little Gallienus could do – he could not be in two places at once – but it is unsurprising that he had appalling press in the later imperial period.
It was not just his military failures, either. He and his father were anachronisms in the world in which they lived. Their Severan senatorial outlook had long-since failed, destroyed in the carnage of 238. One needs only look at Gallienus’s portraiture to take the point – he is portrayed as a young Alexander, not so much heroised as feminised. For all that Alexander was a conqueror, his portraits are those of a young and beautiful but profoundly Hellenic figure. Compared to the bearded soldiers who were coming into their own, Gallienus was from another world, in which those born into the empire’s elite were meant to be good at anything they turned their hand to, simply because of who they were. Senators were deracinated by their status, adepts of a common Graeco-Roman culture that we can call paideia by its Greek name or humanitas by its Latin. They were fitted to lead as required – governing provinces meant entertaining sophists, leading armies and dispensing justice. Some, of course, would be better soldiers than others, and one could not require juristic brilliance from each and every senator, but the civilian, anti-specialist affect of the early imperial senate was never in question; as an ideal, at least, it survived the equestrianisation of government under the earlier Severans, and as an ideal it was put into practice, disastrously, by the Gordians and vigintiviri. Each of the men in the vigintivirate, with the exception of the benighted Pupienus and Balbinus, went on to prosperous careers, and the families of that senatorial inner circle consolidated their hold on wealth and status. But by Valerian’s time, the age in which such men had actually run the Roman empire was over. The new emperors’ failure was not to realise as much.
It was not that Gallienus or indeed Valerian tried to rule in the old way – they could no more reverse the structural changes to the imperial system than they could turn back time. Valerian’s edicts partook of the universalising practicality of the new equestrian mindset. Gallienus made innovative use of his armies, accelerating existing changes whereby the old combination of legion and auxiliary was replaced by a more versatile campaign army patched together from detachments of larger units, and by a growing importance of cavalry on the battlefield. But neither emperor was prepared for the breakdown of hierarchy that equestrianisation implied, the possibility that birth might not fit one to command, and that, whatever the value of family, of patronage, of position – and value they retained – talent, system, specialisation and experience might count for more. The great families might still have a hold on the proconsulships of Asia, Africa and Achaea, and have a good claim to command other relatively peaceful provinces in Spain. But wherever power was actually concentrated, it was the equestrian marshals who led the way and birth did not come into it. There is a historical irony that the last imperial dynasty with any claim to a genuine connection with the Antonine and Severan senatorial aristocracy should have been the one to usher in the triumph of equestrian military rule. But that is what happened, and it was men forged in the ranks, their careers made by the endless wars of Gallienus’s desperate reign, who embodied the future. With their stubbly beards and born in circumstances of the deepest obscurity, the Gallienan officer corps was the crucible of late imperial rulership – which makes it quite amusing that Gallienus, the last senatorial emperor, should have been remembered in the fourth century as the man who excluded the senate from government.
The whole of Gallienus’s reign played out as a series of attempts to keep control of imperial territory and bind it together in the face of repeated challenges and no certain loyalty anywhere. In 261, the Syrian proclam ation of Macrianus, initially a response to the campaigns of Shapur, became more dangerous, as the two Macriani crossed from Asia Minor into Europe, seeking to establish the dynasty at Rome in the usual way. Aureolus, already victorious over Ingenuus and Regalianus, now defeated the Macriani and put them to death. It was lucky for Gallienus – and in light of recent history somewhat surprising – that Aureolus’s consistent successes did not prompt him into his own revolt. But nor was he sent east to deal with Quietus and Callistus. Instead, Gallienus entered an alliance with Odaenathus of Palmyra, granting him the title corrector totius orientis, on the model of the command that Julius Priscus had held under Philip in the same region. The reliance on such supra-provincial commanders, outranking any provincial governor, is a further sign of the breakdown of the old governing system, but it was a logical response to persistent instability. Odaenathus at once marched on Emesa, where the soldiery mutinied and killed Quietus and Callistus without taking the field against the Palmyrene.
This was the first act with which Odaenathus proved himself a powerful and reliable ally to the central emperor. He accepted Gallienus’s provincial appointees without demur, but he was also, to all intents and purposes, the independent ruler of an eastern Roman empire. In the west, in the same year 261 that saw the suppression of the Macriani, Postumus achieved the major success of bringing Spain and Britain under his control. Postumus’s emperorship is an interesting phenomenon, one that bears no relationship to the symbolic subordination but de facto hegemony of the Palmyrene leader in the east. Postumus, after all, claimed the imperial title. His full titulature was Imperator Caesar M. Cassianius Latinius Postumus, pius felix invictus Augustus, pontifex maximus, pater patriae, proconsul.
Postumus had declared himself consul at his accession in 260 and he entered a second consulate in 261, the year that all the provinces west of Italy recognised him not as a legitimate emperor, but as the legitimate emperor, a sole legitimacy which his titulature also asserted. His was a usurpation like any other, but with one major difference – successful usurpers, like the Macriani for a time, understood that the rules of the game were to secure one’s rear and then march on the reigning emperor in order to defeat him, because there could only be one emperor at a time. In the face of such a putsch, the reigning emperor was obliged to eliminate the challenge, and would inevitably make that a priority over any other threat he might face – or so it had invariably played out in the past. Postumus, uniquely in Roman history, neither attacked the Italian territories of Gallienus nor sought to legitimise his position as his co-emperor, in the way that Clodius Albinus and Septimius Severus had in the 190s and would become normal practice in the fourth century. Rather, he contented himself with ruling the provinces that had declared for him in 260 and 261, safe behind the Alps, Vosges and Schwarzwald. Gallienus was constrained to regard him as an enemy and an existential challenge simply because of his imperial claim, but he did so without any active provocation from Postumus.
As a result, it is normal to talk of a separate ‘Gallic empire’ created by Postumus and sustained under several successors until suppressed in the 270s by Aurelian. There are problems with that view, however, inasmuch as it implies a sense of separatism – the German term for the regime, the gallisches Sonderreich (‘Gallic splinter empire’), makes the point even more clearly. But evidence for separatism is hard to find. In ideological terms, Postumus and his successors at Colonia Agrippina ignored the existence of Gallienus as an imperial rival, and refused to follow the political script and pursue his defeat and destruction, but by the same token they never claimed to be anything other than Roman emperors. They simply didn’t bother to try to control Rome. The de facto result was two imperial polities in Europe, both of which regarded themselves as the Roman empire. Only one, however, viewed the other as an existential challenge, and thus Gallienus would make several attempts to eliminate the Gallic emperor in the next years of his reign.
The most significant of these was in 265. Gallienus had by that point settled matters in the Balkans to his satisfaction, touring Achaea and holding the archonship of Athens in 264, and also acknowledging the heroism of the local population in resisting the Scythian invasion of two years earlier. That done, he was able to concentrate his manpower on challenging Postumus. He personally commanded the army that crossed the Alps and won a victory over Postumus, who fled to an unknown city where his rival besieged him. During the siege, Gallienus was wounded by the defenders and called off the attack. Postumus’s regime was granted a long reprieve but, as a result of the campaign, the Spanish governors returned their allegiance to Gallienus. The year 266 is almost undocumented, but events in the east took a surprising turn in the autumn of 267, when Odaenathus, on campaign northwards to Heracleia Pontica, was murdered, possibly at Emesa. His son Herodianus, whom he had raised to co-rulership, was likewise killed. The motives and identities of their murderers are impossible to sort out from the confused sources, but it was clearly a family affair of some bitterness. The immediate beneficiary of the murders was Odaenathus’s widow, Zenobia, who was the mother of several of his children, but not the older and favoured Herodian. Under the nominal rule of her son Vaballathus, Zenobia launched a conquest of the Roman east that went beyond the classic model of usurpation, not least in its success.
That took a couple of years to prepare, and we must be careful not to romanticise what is obviously an almost unique regime. Zenobia was born Julia Aurelia Zenobia, or Bath-Zabbai in the Syriac, to the Palmyrene nobleman Julius Aurelius Zenobius. She had built up a strong power base during the lifetime of her husband, but was no doubt displeased at the pre-eminence given Herodian, the offspring of a previous marriage, over her own sons, Septimius Hairanes and Septimius Vaballathus. With Odaenathus’s death, the 7-year-old Vaballathus was given his father’s titles of rex regum (the Latin for shahanshah, ‘king of kings’) and corrector totius Orientis, but there is no evidence that Gallienus accepted this succession from competent and loyal father to pre-adolescent boy. Zenobia, for her part, began to call herself Septimia Zenobia and queen. Her regime was much aided by the disarray of Shapur’s late reign, when he faced disputes among his own heirs and a chaotic new situation on his eastern frontiers which we will look at later in this chapter. As a result, however, Shapur was unable to capitalise on the disruption in Syria as he would certainly once have done, and Zenobia’s hands were almost entirely free.
We cannot know what Gallienus’s response to these eastern events might have been, for he never got the chance to make one. In 268, the Balkans descended into violence once again, with a ‘Scythian’ invasion (this time the invaders are named as Heruli, a group well known in later history), again by ship, into Asia Minor and peninsular Greece. At the same time, Gallienus’s great marshal Aureolus revolted, clearly on his own behalf, though claiming to be doing so as an ally of Postumus and striking coins in the latter’s name at Mediolanum. It may be that Aureolus was at the time commanding a field army in preparation for another Balkan or Gallic campaign. Mediolanum would long be a centre from which to launch such ventures, commanding as it did all the key roads through the North Italian plain. Aureolus did not move swiftly enough to meet Gallienus in battle and found himself besieged in the city. What happened next is poorly documented and the sources give conflicting versions of how Gallienus came to be murdered while conducting the siege. Between them, the different accounts manage to blame almost every one of the prime movers of the next few years of imperial history: Gallienus’s praetorian prefect Aurelius Heraclianus; the generals Marcianus, Marcus Aurelius Claudius and Aurelius Aurelianus; and a regimental commander called Cecropius, otherwise unknown. Practically the only great marshal of Gallienus’s not named in one story or another is Marcus Aurelius Probus. One version has them being tricked into conspiracy by Aureolus; another has Gallienus being tricked into exposing himself to danger by Herodianus; others strive to exculpate one or another of the key players. There is no way to sort claim from counterclaim, no argument can be probative one way or another and, as with the murder of Odaenathus, we can either admit ignorance or let the question of cui bono guide our choice. If we do that, then regardless of who orchestrated the actual murder, the chief plotter will have been Claudius, because after Gallienus’s death, the army acclaimed him emperor at the gates of Mediolanum.
Aureolus died in battle shortly afterwards, and the successful Claudius made a show of honouring his predecessor, sending his body back to Rome and interring it in the family’s mausoleum on the Appian Way. He also prevailed upon the senate to have Gallienus deified. Before going to Rome himself, however, he marched north and won a victory at Lake Garda, in northern Italy, against some Alamanni who had launched an opportunistic invasion when the renewed Roman civil war offered them the chance. Claudius probably spent the winter of 268–9 in Rome, where he entered his first consulship in the company of a long-time senatorial supporter of Gallienus, Aspasius Paternus: whether from conviction or necessity, some of Rome’s senatorial grandees were content to make their peace with this new regime of the marshals.
For Claudius, there was no question but that the year 269 would bring heavy fighting. His only choice was whether to favour an internal or an external foe. The Balkans were still being devastated, whether by the Herulian raiders of the previous year or by further incursions from across the Danube – instability at the centre always encouraged such activity at the frontiers, and we also happen to learn that there was a substantial nomadic attack on the African province of Cyrenaica at just this time. Athens, too, was sacked some time in this year, perhaps in the springtime. Claudius sent his fellow general Julius Placidianus to invade southern Gaul, assigning him some sort of extraordinary command. Claudius himself set out for the Balkans, while his fellow conspirator Heraclianus went east, perhaps to deal with Zenobia. Although the sources do not say so explicitly, we should discern in all this activity the work of a military junta determined to confront the multiple threats that faced it: in a coordinated strategy, three of Gallienus’s marshals, who had in all likelihood shared in plotting his death, now each took charge of one of the three fronts with which Gallienus had been unable to deal. Outcomes, however, did not meet expectations.
Placidianus faced a confusing situation in Gaul, where one of Postumus’s officials, Ulpius Cornelianus Laelianus, had rebelled, taking the imperial title for himself at Moguntiacum in Germania Superior. Postumus rapidly defeated Laelianus, but when he prevented his troops from sacking the city, he immediately faced a mutiny. His own troops murdered Postumus and declared one Marcus Aurelius Marius emperor in his place. Marius was in turn attacked and killed by Postumus’s praetorian prefect, Marcus Piavonius Victorinus – probably a Gallic nobleman, to judge by his name. Victorinus had shared the consulship of 268 with Postumus and he now managed to hold things together longer than had his very short-lived predecessors. The invasion of Claudius’s colleague Pacatianus advanced as far as the village of Cularo (later the fourth-century town of Gratianopolis, thus modern Grenoble), but no further. Perhaps inspired by the tide of the Claudian advance, the city of Augustodunum (Autun) revolted against Victorinus but, without support from Pacatianus, it was besieged and sacked by Victorinus and this once-prosperous Gallic town lost much of its importance thereafter. Despite these losses, Victorinus was able to enter a second consulship undisturbed in 270.
Meanwhile, at Naissus in the Balkans, Claudius won a dramatic victory over the Scythians that earned him the title Gothicus maximus, joining the Germanicus maximus that he had taken the year before to celebrate his victory over the Alamanni. We do not know where in the Balkans Claudius wintered in 269–70, but the next year opened with moppingup operations against the Scythians whom we can now for convenience begin to call Goths – the victory title Gothicus demonstrates that this is how the Romans were beginning to identify the people they were fighting beyond the lower Danube.
In the east, Zenobia reacted violently to the arrival of Heraclianus. She had been claiming the title corrector totius Orientis for Vaballathus ever since the death of Odaenathus, as if it were a hereditary designation. She now began to mint coins in the name of Vaballathus, an act that could only be construed as rebellion, usurpation and treason. An obscure legend on coins may suggest that Vaballathus began to be styled vir consularis [or clarissimus], rex, imperator (et) dux Romanorum. If so, it was almost a claim to the imperial throne, but just enough short to be deniable – every title in the formulation could be explained in a relatively innocent way. What could not be explained away was the invasion of Arabia and Egypt, which Zenobia’s army, under the command of one Zabdas, undertook in 270. The prefect of Egypt, Tenagino Probus, was defeated and killed defending his province against this invasion. Zenobia appointed his deputy prefect, Julius Marcellinus, as his successor, and Egypt now fell under Palmyrene hegemony for nearly half a decade.
Heraclianus proved powerless to dent Palmyrene control over the core territories in Syria and Arabia, and Zenobia’s supporters felt emboldened to push into Anatolia. Meanwhile, in the Balkans, Claudius’s recent victory over the Goths could not save his army from devastation by a more formidable enemy: plague broke out among the soldiers during the winter months, carrying off many of them – and then the emperor himself. There is a certain poignancy in the fact that the only emperor in decades not to die by the sword should have reigned so very briefly. But death saved his reputation – when the fourth century remembered the dark years before Diocletian and Constantine, Claudius was the only emperor to be well regarded by every different historical tradition, so much so that it could seem worth fabricating a fictional descent from him. Not since Severus and Caracalla had there been an emperor whose memory held that much credit.
With Claudius dead, his brother Quintillus claimed the throne at Aquileia in northern Italy as a bequest from the late emperor, but without much success. An imperial army on campaign could not exist without an emperor to lead it and Claudius’s Balkan legions were much the strongest force in the empire. They were not about to accept any choice but their own, and so they elected Marcus Aurelius Aurelianus, the dux equitum of the dead Claudius, who, like him, was implicated in the putsch that unseated Gallienus. Aurelian began the march back to Italy and Quintillus, having reigned a mere seventeen days without leaving Aquileia, was killed (or perhaps committed suicide), thus averting yet another civil war.
Aurelian continued into Italy, basing himself at Mediolanum, where he repelled an attack of the Iuthungi in late 270, and one by Vandals in the winter of 270–71. In spring 271, another Iuthungian invasion followed. It seems clear that consolidation of authority within the Alamannic regions, and perhaps the withdrawal of Roman administration from the Agri Decumates beyond the Rhine–Danube salient, had made some of them much bolder in seeking out profit inside the Roman frontiers. The Vandals, however, are something new: Aurelian’s brief campaign marks the first time that they appear in our sources as anything more than an indistinct ethnonym from central Europe, beyond real historical ken. Unlike the Goths, who were to all intents and purposes a creation of the Roman frontier zone, these Vandals seem to have been migrants from east-central Germany – or perhaps a particularly bold and successful war band that had managed to travel a good 400 miles or so in search of loot. It would be many decades before we hear of Vandals making a sustained impact on Roman history and for many decades the Quadi and Sarmatians remained the main cause of concern for the Roman military on the middle Danube.
Unlike the Vandals, the Iuthungi continued to be a threat. Whereas the campaign of 270 had gone smoothly, that of 271 began appallingly for Aurelian, with a major defeat near Placentia (modern Piacenza). The emperor pursued the victorious raiders and forced them to battle at Fanum and then at Ticinum (Pavia), where he crushed the invaders: we hear nothing of Iuthungi for decades thereafter. Moving south to Rome, however, Aurelian was greeted by rebellion – the workers at the imperial mint rose up, with grievances that go unspecified in the sources, and suppressing them was a messy afair that left thousands of Romans dead in the streets. It is a reminder of how militarised the Roman civil service was becoming that skilled craftsmen like the mint workers should be able to organise rioting just as effectively as a mutinous army unit.
After this rising had been suppressed, Aurelian conciliated the people of Rome by adding subsidised distributions of pork to the oil and bread that were already supplied to the plebs of the city by the imperial annona. The senate was conciliated with high offices: a great Roman aristocrat, Pomponius Bassus, was made Aurelian’s colleague as consul in 271, and the emperor designated two other Roman grandees for the consulate of 272. Although senators had not been deliberately excluded from the consulship by Aurelian’s predecessors, the frequent turnover of emperors and proliferation of dynasties, who had at a minimum to hold the consulship with their potential heirs in their first year in power, meant that very few non-imperial consulships had been available. Equally, the expansion of equestrian positions in provincial administration came at the expense of consular ones, which in turn meant that providing enough men of consular status to staff the provincial commands was no longer necessary for administrative reasons, as had still been the case in the Antonine and Severan periods. The suffect consulship, in consequence, more or less disappeared, while the ordinary consulship grew in status, as fewer and fewer opportunities for holding it lay open to the civilian elites of Rome. Aurelian understood the value of the consulship for such men and though he, like all the later third-century emperors, stemmed from a lowly military background, he knew he could not govern without some support from the old aristocracy.
While still in Rome, Aurelian also initiated a building project of unprecedented scale: a gigantic new wall around the city, as much a monument to his own ambition as a working defensive construction. The walls would take the whole of his reign to complete, but by 275 the circuit enclosed all the hills of Rome, as well as the Campus Martius and parts of the city on the other bank of the Tiber, including much of the Janiculum and modern Trastevere – almost twelve miles in circumference all told. Ten feet thick, made of concrete faced with brick, and with a square tower every hundred feet, the wall imposed itself on the landscape, as it still does today wherever its circuit survives. To be sure, given how few troops were actually stationed in Rome and also given the impossibility of defending twelve miles of wall, it could never withstand an actual siege. But it was not meant to. Aurelian’s wall was built to discourage attack and overawe attackers, and to provide psychic comfort for an Italian population that had recently suffered the unaccustomed and unwelcome attention of peninsular invasion, not by a usurper but by barbarian armies.
To augment the propaganda victory of Aurelian’s wall-building project, the news from Gaul was good – Victorinus had been killed in a coup by another Gallic nobleman, Gaius Esuvius Tetricus, who showed no more inclination to attack Italy than had any of his Gallic predecessors. With Italy also quiet, the emperor was free to plan his destruction of Vaballathus and Zenobia, whose assertions of imperial authority, and still more their conquest of Egypt, could not be tolerated now they no longer had to be. Marching a campaign army through the Balkans and taking the opportunity to repel another barbarian raid, probably by Goths, Aurelian also evacuated the Roman administration from the provinces of Dacia.
This may have been a sensible manoeuvre, in that it made more troops available to him at a critical moment before the eastern campaign, but it was also ideologically risky – giving up provinces was not something Roman emperors did often or admitted to doing. Dacia, however, had never been worth the money it cost to maintain, as most studies have shown both archaeologically and historically, and in the shifting circumstances of the middle and lower Danube frontiers it is not at all certain that the Carpathian basin was really defensible any longer. Nevertheless, to provide some cover for a potentially unpopular move, Aurelian created two new provinces under the names Dacia Superior and Dacia Inferior, splitting up the old Moesia Inferior in order to do so. The inhabitants of Dacia do not seem to have been evacuated, merely the imperial administrative superstructure around them. None the less, over time the Roman cultural base of the region withered away. Unlike Moesia, or still more Pannonia, Dacia had never developed the civilian infrastructure to accompany its military, administrative and mining apparatus. Whatever part of the Roman population chose not to emigrate lacked the ability or desire to keep up a provincial Roman culture and was absorbed into the emerging archaeological culture that we call Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov and associate with the beginnings of true Gothic hegemony in the region.
With Dacia’s government evacuated and his army reinforced, the emperor could move east. Zenobia and Vaballathus now prepared for full-scale war, and the coins they minted finally drop the dual images of Aurelian on one side and Vaballathus on the other. De facto usurpation had become an open claim of imperial rivalry. News of Aurelian’s boundless energy and his signal battlefield successes must have gone before him, as too did word of the ruthlessness for which he was long and rightly famed – imperial officials who had clearly sided with Zenobia and Vaballathus in 269 and 270 now came over to Aurelian. Among them were Virius Lupus, the governor of Asia, who would go on to share a consulship with the emperor Probus and serve as urban prefect in the years between 278 and 280, and Statilius Aemilianus, who returned Egypt to Aurelian’s allegiance without demur and continued in his role as prefect of the province as a reward, even while a certain Firmus – clearly an equestrian official of some sort – was named provincial corrector over him. Aurelian met no resistance until he reached Tyana in Cappadocia, which closed its gates to him – and where it is claimed that he saw a vision of the wonder-working holy man Apollonius that stopped his laying the town waste and massacring its citizens.
The hostility of Tyana does not appear to have been matched by other cities in the region, and Aurelian’s forces made it through the Cilician gates and into Syria without further opposition. In Syria, however, there was a major battle against Zenobia’s generals in the Antiochene suburb of Daphne, which would soon become one of the swankiest addresses in the fourth- and fifth-century east. Moving south and east, Aurelian won a second battle at Emesa, whose cult Zenobia had honoured for its well-known Severan connections. She had, for that matter, been a generally prolific sponsor of the east’s religious melting pot – from the Sarpedonion of Cilician Seleucia, to the Christian bishop of Samosata, to the Persian prophet Mani, whose revelation was being preached at this time. None were of much use to her now – the god Elagabal appeared to have sided with Aurelian, and the string of coins honouring Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, which Aurelian began to issue at this time would suggest as much.
From Emesa, the conqueror marched on Palmyra itself, capturing the city during the summer of 272. A few key supporters of Zenobia and Vaballathus were executed, but for the most part the city and its inhabitants were spared. Zenobia was taken captive to be brought back to Rome in triumph. Unlike Cleopatra VII, to whom she had compared herself in her propaganda, Zenobia chose captivity over death. The victorious Aurelian took the titles Parthicus maximus and Persicus maximus, though his campaigns had not engaged the Sasanians in any way: under the short-lived shahs Ohrmazd I (r. 272–3) and Varahran I (r. 273–6), the Sasanian court was occupied in a power struggle of its own over how much prominence the Zoroastrian priesthood, in particular its dominant figure, Kardir, should have in the state, and how much or how little other religions like Christianity and Manichaeism should be tolerated.
Despite the momentary Sasanian weakness, however, Aurelian chose not to fight that particular battle. Instead, with one usurper – or breakaway regime – suppressed, he turned his attention to another one, in Gaul. Thinking the eastern reconquest complete, Aurelian started to march west. He had crossed to Byzantium on the European side of the Bosporus when news reached him from Palmyra – the city had rebelled. Just as bad, the riot-prone Egyptian city of Alexandria had erupted again, presumably finding the reimposition of central control by Firmus less agreeable than the rule of Statilius Aemilianus had been.
In January 273, Aurelian marched right back across Asia Minor and into Syria, where this time he put Palmyra to the sack. The great caravan city of the high empire became in the next century a down-at-heel posting for detachments of Rome’s Syrian garrison. But the end of the Palmyrene regime actually meant more than that in terms of Eurasian history: in the course of just thirty years, three of the most important cities of the Syrian and Mesopotamian steppe – Hatra, Dura-Europos and Palmyra – had either been destroyed or comprehensively degraded. Neither the Roman nor the Sasanian polities, however often their respective armies might campaign across the region, were equipped to take over the role that those cities’ indigenous elites had played in them. The result, over the course of several centuries, was the rise of newly assertive Arab confederacies further south in the Arabian desert. In the years after this book’s narrative concludes, these Arabs would become a constant feature in the relations between Byzantium and Persia, from which would arise the last great religious movement of antiquity and the Islamic caliphate its adherents created. In the short term, by contrast, it looked as if forty years of eastern torment had finally been ended by Aurelian.