St. Maurice's head on the shield of Corsica (and Savoy).
W must be neither murderers nor accomplices in our assassination.
Albert Camus
Instead of attempting to trace the history of the Theban Legion, it is better to begin with the career of one man. What happens to an individual grips us emotionally more than knowledge of events happening to great numbers.
How can we know of the life of Mauricius, the commander of the Thebans given only his name by monastic scribes? Much can be deduced.
Romans had a family name and a first name, the latter known and used only by family and intimates. Christians only recorded a third name, the cognomina, given in a ceremony of coming into adulthood at the age of eighteen.1 This, in effect, was a formalized public nickname that could identify a person either physically or in character. Crispus was curly haired, Paulus was short, Genialis had an amicable personality. Mauricius meant a Moor, a North African. Maurus as an adjective in Latin meant of swarthy or brownish complexion. Aethiopus, as in the name of Aesop, the writer of fables, meant a black.
If it did not create differences within the human race, the vast Sahara long kept them distinct. Transportation across the desert was a dangerous ordeal. Along the thousands of miles of the River Nile, the only river crossing the Sahara, people always in contact, complexions tended to gradually change between north and south.
Prejudice is hardly possible without stereotype. Romans knew people of darker complexions to be of many sorts: in language, tribe and way of life, rich and poor, ignorant and highly educated, herdsmen, farmers, craftsmen, merchants, soldiers, actors, doctors, diplomats, athletes and holy men. No label such as slavery fit them all. Some beyond the Roman desert frontier were foederati – allies.
The Moors were chiefly Berbers,2 but of a wide range of racial and cultural types sharing the same language. The Greeks had referred to them as Gaetuli, the robed men, the melano or black gaetuli being those south of the Sahara.
The double-humped camel introduced by Romans from the Persian Empire had enabled legionnaires to explore across the Sahara to Lake Chad and the River Niger. In return, caravans from south of the desert entered the Empire. Blacks clad in bright and many coloured robes, herdsmen and horse-traders, metalworkers and healers, they wove their colour into the fabric of Roman Mauritania. Some deduced the laws of genetic heredity and inoculation against disease, discoveries made in raising cattle, unknown to Europe for millennia.
The Roman explanation of race was that cold bleached people’s skin as the tropics darkened them.3 Northerners were sluggish in mind and body, whereas southerners were swift but light minded. They, the Romans, being in the middle, were the best of the lot. That all mankind had common origin was held selfevident. Homer had declared all people more alike than different.
No human difference escaped caustic comment among Romans. ‘The absent are always wrong,’ as Ovid observed. But Roman prejudice was more a matter of personalities and class than race. With rare exception, the slaves everywhere in the Empire were Caucasian. Eklavus, slave, in Greek literally meant blond or fair-haired.
Racial attitudes in the army are revealed by an incident involving the Emperor Septimius Severus, on tour in Britain when a ‘black soldier from an auxiliary unit, a popular wit well known for his practical jokes, ran up to him with a wreath of cypress branches’. The soldier quipped ‘You have routed the world, you have conquered the world. Now, conqueror, become a god.’4 Severus, troubled by the wreath, of a type used in funerals, ordered the man removed from his sight.
Emperors after death could be declared gods by the Senate, a rite called apotheosis. The auxiliary’s remark could have been taken as a veiled warning, joke or omen. There is no mention that the soldier was punished.
That a black man dared publicly taunt an emperor suggests much about the position of blacks in the army. Ability earned respect. Marginal in a sociological sense, a black comedian or soothsayer could effectively bid for more. Colour of itself was not culture to Romans.
Compared with many other ethnic groups within the Empire, Moors were less burdened by slavery and class sensibilities, better educated, more individualistic but family and community oriented, and moralistic yet tolerant of creed. Christianity was widespread among them in contrast to its slower and more sporadic growth in Europe.
Moors such as Mauricius may have out-Romanized Romans in some ways, while ignoring others. Military pride, brio, would have motivated one to excel while not giving the appearance of competing, a task building inner tensions. A man would need a positive philosophy of life to pursue a career in a way of life, a culture not of his birth, without becoming bitter or ambiguous.
Without it, he could become acculturated, sharing several cultures, a citizen of the world – the Roman world.
The Moors had little sexual segregation. The family name was that of the mother.5 With wealth in her own right, a woman’s status was not subservient. Women spoke and voted in tribal council, rejected undesirable suitors or abusive spouses, and could make or break a man’s reputation with the praise, wit or slander they sang as troubadours. Dressed in blouses and short skirts, Berber women shocked Latins, who did not realize that in sexual mores the Moors tended to be puritanical compared with other Romans.
St Augustine, a Moor, visiting Italy, complained that Latins had much less respect for privacy than his countrymen.6 Few could read silently without moving their lips, he complained.
The Empire’s influence upon the Moors was so strong that as late as the eleventh century Arabs would refer to Berbers as Roumis, the Romans.7
Extensive olive groves, vast wheat fields, aqueducts and unwalled cities north of the Aures mountains evidenced the peace and prosperity of most of Roman rule. Only in the extreme west of North Africa were towns walled, Volubilis being the best-known example. Every summer, desert tribes ventured northwards into Roman domain, grazing their herds of sheep, goats and camels and working as harvest hands, putting up straw huts amidst the fields. Their numbers were probably less than 100,000 in the entire region.8
North Africa’s landlords were largely absentees residing in Italy. After the first century BC slave revolts in Italy and Sicily, Roman authorities avoided concentrating large slave populations. North Africa’s land holdings were leased and sublet as in Egypt, but the farms were much larger and the leasers were equites, upper middle class. Ironically, Roman law protected the rights of tenants in the provinces but not in Italy.9
The Berbers called themselves amzgyah, the ‘free people’.10 They had never been conquered nor did they enslave others. By treaty they had been annexed to the Empire.
The Moorish King Juba II in the first century BC had been the author of fifty works of history and science and had sent explorers to find the Canary Islands. The last ruler of semi-independent North Africa, King Ptolemy, was executed by Emperor Caligula (r. 37–41) while visiting Gaul when the populace openly demonstrated its preference for him.
Many Roman high offices were obtained by North Africans. The sculptured bust of Lucius Quietus11 reveals negroid features and cheeks scarred in tribal rituals like those of the Senegalese and Gambians. Quietus, a tribal chief ‘from the unknown desert’, had joined the Roman army as an ally, foederatus. Given equestrian rank by the Emperor Domitian, cashiered for insubordination, then reinstated and promoted by Trajan, he led his cavalry on the Danube and versus Persia. He became a senator, governor of Palestine and one of Rome’s two consuls, within reach of the throne at Trajan’s death. But Rome was not yet ready for a barbarian militarist as emperor. Trajan made a fellow Spaniard, Hadrian, his heir. Quietus revolted and was killed.
Septimius Severus had been a North African, so too was the Emperor Piscennius Niger of Moorish visage.12 In the 270s, the admiral of the Atlantic fleet, the Moor Bonosus, had proclaimed himself ruler of Britain. Another Moor, Victorinus, sent by Probus, successfully ousted him.
North Africa’s only legion, the III Augusta, dominated from the Atlantic to Libya for four centuries. It policed the coastal plain. In the interior it guarded against raiders, explored across the desert and created farmland from semi-arid wilderness. Some 2,400 cities and towns dotted the legion’s territory.13 (Four hundred would survive two millennia later; the results of climate change and political neglect.)
The III Augusta waged an unceasing warfare against the desert. It dug countless foggara, deep gravity-fed wells connected by tunnels, and built aqueducts, drains for the rare rain and covered cisterns. Veterans farming on the desert’s edge were granted lower taxes in appreciation of their vital task in holding back the desert. The climate was growing much drier as wind patterns shifted. The predecessors of the Romans, the Carthaginians, had brought lasting ecological havoc by cutting down mountain forests in order to build their war fleets. Goats, tearing up roots, completed the ruin as the desert expanded.
All the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, were born in the desert. Much as the Israelites had regarded Canaan civilization, Berbers living in tents regarded the civilization of the coast.
Berber hospitality was proverbial. Yet there was a strong streak of moral righteousness and revolt beneath the traditional civility of Berber values.
Christianity had grown much faster in North Africa than in Europe. In North Africa, Tertullian preached deeds, not Greek theologies. ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’14 he demanded. He emphasized that faith was not provable and condemned whoever held those who disagreed with Christianity to be of ill-will. ‘It is the law of mankind and the natural right of every individual to worship what he thinks proper, nor does the religion of one man either harm or help another. It is not proper for religion to compel men to religion, which should be accepted of one’s own accord, not by force,’ he insisted.15 The individual was spiritually alone save for God, he taught. His was a teaching, not a church. Expecting the end of the world, he made no provision to pass on his ideas. His puritanism was tainted with the Montanist ideology, a heresy to many Christians because it despised all worldly matters. Tertullian courted martyrdom boldly yet never attained it, fortunate to live in a generation without persecution. He despised Greek philosophy but also condemned the Judaic Bible, holding it not as the roots of the New Testament but in opposition to it. Tertullian was uninterested in organized charitable works or evangelization.
Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage, a lifetime later than Tertullian and contemporary with Mauricius’ youth, differed from Tertullian in his social consciousness. When Cornelius, the first Latin in ancestry to be bishop of Rome, successor of Peter, his predecessors Jews or Greeks, was challenged by Novatian and a minority of the congregation in Rome, Cyprian spoke eloquently in Cornelius’ defence. To Cyprian, Cornelius’ authority took precedence over that of all other bishops but was interdependent with them. He was their leader, first among equals, not their lord. During persecution, Cyprian sharply criticized the lax attitudes formed in years of security that had made many betray the faith.16 Nevertheless, he readmitted lapsi (Christians who worshipped the gods under the threat of persecution) to the church despite opposition by many of proven courage.
Both Cornelius and Cyprian were confronted by clergy defying their authority. Pope Cornelius accepted people baptized by such schismatics but Cyprian summoned a council of eighty-seven bishops who unanimously rejected this tolerance. His martyrdom in 258 saved him from being a schismatic condemning schismatics. A touch of fierce independence was part of the character of North African Christianity.
Many North African Christians referred to God as senex, the ‘old man’, their ancestors’ term for Baal-Saturn – a view of God as stern despot rather than loving father.17 The cult of martyrs replaced that of human sacrifice.
Cornelius, Novatian and Cyprian: all were martyred.
In 238, a Balkan peasant, a thuggish soldier of quite unRoman traditions, Maximinus Thrax, succeeded where Lucius Quietus had failed. He became emperor. He doubled army pay by outrageously raising taxes and seizing municipal and temple funds. In Mauritania, North Africa, his procurator confiscated land. A number of young aristocrats, raising their farm workers in revolt, killed the procurator. Realizing that there was no turning back, they hailed an elderly senator, Gordian I, as governor and emperor. Their envoys to Italy swiftly won the support of the Senate and slew Maximinus Thrax’s Praetorian prefect.
Capellianus, commander of Legio III Augusta, moved his troops against Carthage. The Gordians, defended only by a hastily recruited citizen’s militia, were crushed in battle, their reign only twenty-two days. Legio III Augusta ran riot: rape and arson, and slaughtering and looting18 exposed the powerlessness of civilians against the army’s avarice. The aftermath was becoming typical; the Emperor Maximinus Thrax was slain by his soldiers with his two senatorial successors (Galbinus and Pupienus) within the space of three months. The grandson of Gordian, a boy of thirteen, was made emperor by the Praetorians. He was killed by the troops of Philip the Arab, who then asked the Senate to hail his victim as a god.
There was long a tension between many military and the civilians they supposedly protected. ‘Wolves set to guard fat sheep,’ as a Roman writer put it. The lack of anyone in the army on terms of duty of less than twenty-five years except tribunes, six to each of the Empire’s thirty-two or more legions, split society. Some soldiers, increasingly recruited from barbarian tribes on the frontiers, scorned civilians with a repressed resentment capable of fuelling an astonishing rage.
Gordian’s followers were equites, the upper middle class and tribal chieftains supplying tribunes to the army, usually for four years of service. They led the farm labourers, free but humble folk who accepted the equites as their tribal leaders. Tribe was family expanded to include hundreds and even thousands of kinsmen. As in many cultures then, and the Middle East and Africa in the present, tribal loyalty often superseded any loyalty determined by lines drawn from maps by dominating foreigners.
The revolt in North Africa was not a class warfare, nor anti-Roman, but the people in arms defending their rights as Romans. Civilians, however, were no match for disciplined soldiers clad in iron and marching in shieldwall, mowing down any foolhardy civilian in their path. Renegade troops were at war against the people of the Empire’s richest province.
Mauricius must have been about ten years of age when these events, unlike anything previous in North Africa’s history, peaceful for centuries, erupted to shock the populace. Many in the towns fled to the temples for sanctuary, only to discover them becoming slaughterhouses. In retrospect, soldiers would be astonished at their own bloodthirsty rage. Normally in Roman warfare, prisoners would be taken in order to be enslaved, the profits divided, the chief incentive to wage war in the minds of many military. This was different. No one was spared.
The actions and rank of Mauricius’ father amidst this carnage is not known except that he would not be ousted from the army but sent to another province, unlike comrades regarded as criminal or cowardly. To remain in camp as smoke arose on the horizon and wailing refugees pounded on the gates to enter might have seemed safe and neutral to some soldiers but, in effect, was taking sides with the predators.
To order men to defend the local populace could have put a soldier against former comrades. It might have been asking a man to defend tribal folk, old enemies of his kinsmen, while his own tribe was under attack miles away. In times of crisis, conscience is most deeply needed and values taken for granted would have been badly shaken, re-evaluated or evolved.
Roman forces from other provinces restored order. The aggressors were executed or cashiered. Many fled to the interior and became bandits, the alternative career for misfits. The populace fundamentally distrusted them and had no illusions that they were guerrilla heroes fighting for the oppressed of society. The army had good intelligence to counteract the scattered rebels.
Legio III Augusta was disbanded in disgrace in 238.19 Those of its soldiers not thrown out of the army were sent to the Rhineland and Austrian legions.
Mauricius, probably a boy in North Africa when it was plundered by Legio III Augusta, had been an impressionable eyewitness to soldiers terrorizing those who expected their protection. His father, handicapped in promotion, exemplified that army authority could be unjust and fickle and that soldiers could commit atrocious crimes against civilians.
Deduction can posit much concerning the career of Mauricius. Romans had a nickname, cognomina, made formal in a ceremony on becoming an adult about the age of eighteen. Felix meant happy or lucky, Severus meant harsh, Innocentius one who ignored unpleasantness. Character label as lifelong name demonstrated Roman fatalism, the view that personal character was unchangeable. A primary appeal of Christianity was its belief that old ways could be cast off and temperament could find new ways of expression.
To call a Moor in North Africa Mauricius would be redundant. It would be reasonable if Mauricius received that name when living outside Africa as a kin of a soldier sent to Europe from III Legio Augusta struck from the army list. Since many Moors were hardly distinguishable from other Mediterranean peoples, Mauricius may have been darker than most and from the interior.
In the reign of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, there were seventy-seven hereditary members of the Senate of Rome. A century later there were only four. The rulers of the Empire may have been immoral compared with their ancestors in the Republic, but worse was a growing amorality, a shaking off of all responsibility. The cursus honorum (the career of honour), serving for some four years as an army officer before entering rank in civil service and government, withered along with the desire to continue family.
The people of the Republic had possessed a strong sense of shame. Dignitas was similar to the idea of saving face and public reputation found in cultures worldwide. The first century biographers Plutarch and Seutonius depicted a world largely determined for good or evil by men with flawed but wilful character. Later historians avoid mention of the moral faults of the emperors, men depicted attempting to rule a world increasingly out of control.
The reaction of many to epidemic diseases, wild inflation, underpopulation, family collapse, banditry and invasion was a renunciation of worldly values. Pagans, sceptics and Montanist Christians were among those washing their hands of obligation. They seemed to lose their virtues with their vices, overcome by pessimism and loss of confidence.
There seemed to be a centrifugal force in Roman values. As the leading classes living in the safest interior regions of the Empire grew increasingly selfindulgent to the point of excluding pietas, social duty, those on the embattled frontiers cherished the old virtues more so. To Romans, virtutatis made a man – vir a person who merited and gave respect. This attitude influenced Christian attitudes. Faith was not simply creed but action.
Jesus repeatedly told persons healed of illness that their own faith had healed them. Some could hardly have known Jesus. Not all claiming to believe in God were healed. This faith that healed seemed a trust in goodness of itself, an acceptance of self and life. The pampered slave-owning and exploitative ruling classes might grow anxious and contemptuous of social inferiors, but men like Mauricius on the margins between civilization and chaos lived in a psychological world with dimensions of feeling and sentiment that the more smugly secure scarcely recognized, becoming morally colour-blind.
Christians in their writings showed an awareness of decline not found elsewhere in Roman literature. Men like Mauricius, or the future Emperor Probus, did not despair of creating a better society. Unlike many others, they trusted that reform was most effectively carried out within the institutions needing it, not by quitting them.
Valerian reinstated Legio III Augusta in 253.20 A new legion would have taken several years to organize before it entered the army list. Mauricius’ early career probably involved service in the newly reinstated Legio III Augusta.
A man entered the Roman army between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. He had to be at least five feet ten inches in height and have letters of reference that he was of good family, disciplina regarded as best learned not in barracks but at home. All were volunteers for twenty-five years of service.
Mauricius, future leader of the Theban Legion, would be baptized by Zabdas, Bishop of Jerusalem according to the medieval church historian Gratian. Eusebius, a Roman bishop, cites Zabdas as bishop in 279. Since twenty-five years was a soldier’s term of service and two or three years’ preparation required for baptism, he must have entered the army about 251.
There were three ways to become a Roman officer.21 Most rose from the ranks of enlistees with the approval of the centurions. Centurions ranked the equivalent of lieutenant to colonel and might retire as equites, hereditary upper middle class, literally those who rode horses. Probus had been directly appointed a tribune by the Senate, his father of senatorial rank. This method was abolished by the Emperor Gallienus because it too often ranked political hacks serving short terms in the army above professional officers22 but without it, the door to militarism opened wider.
A third way was entering the army as an equites given centurion rank directly with the approval of the Senate. If he was the son of an officer, Mauricius may have entered the army as an equites.
A legionnaire, especially an officer, would have many duty stations in his career. The sixth century Christian poet Venatus Fortunatus wrote that Mauricius had belonged to a legio felix, a ‘happy legion’.23 This was perhaps poetic usage. One legion in the East bore the title Felix, III Gallica Felix, stationed at Beirut.24 If Mauricius had served both in III August and III Gallica Felix, the only two legions in Roman history disbanded for insubordination and later reinstated, it could help explain his eventual dissent. He would be following a virtual tradition.
In his choice of career Mauricius revealed a respect for his father’s example. His father may have been insubordinate to immediate superiors in being loyal to the citizens he was supposed to protect.
St. Maurice's head on the shield of Corsica (and Savoy).