Hell is where there is no possibility of reason.
Prologue to the film Platoon
The sole record of these events appears in a document written in the fourth century in four different languages, ‘The Dialogue of Archelaus with Mani’.1 This document presented the philosophy of Mani, a Persian firebrand who sought to create a new universal religion. He had requested a debate with Bishop Archelaus of Carrhae, with Marcellus as mediator. A generation later the pagan emperor Diocletian would declare Manicheanism illegal in a decree displaying an extensive knowledge of it, perhaps utilizing the Dialogue as his source.
The episode of the massacre introduces the Dialogue without explaining why these events should be recorded in a theological document. No specific army unit is cited. No Christian soldier or official is specifically mentioned. Presumably, the prisoners were Christians as Archelaus and his congregation became their hosts.2 The region was predominately Ebionite,3 sects retaining Jewish customs while accepting Jesus as the Christ.
The various language versions of the document had different commentaries, one of which declares that the debate occurred when Probus was emperor.4 Since Probus took power in the summer of 276 and Mani was executed in Persia in 277, the time can be roughly placed.5
Marcellus’ family name and background, nationality, career and title are unstated. Christians in the era consistently ignored these matters in recording the dead.
Marcellus is depicted as a rich man in command of both army and civil affairs, on excellent terms with a Christian bishop and sought out by a foreign religious zealot as protector and open-minded listener. Marcellus was a person obviously well known at the time, judging from the Dialogue, yet no Marcellus is known to history by that name who could fit his description.
The military-governor of Mesopotamia in 275 was a Marcellinus6 who was also one of the two consuls of the Empire that year, his partner the emperor. As consul, Marcellinus was the most honoured Roman in the eastern regions of the Empire. Marcellinus in Latin signified little Marcellus – Marcellus junior. In Semitic languages it could be put as Marcellus Bar (son of) Marcellus. In translation and in omitting the governor’s parentage along with other biography, could Marcellinus have become Marcellus? Christians routinely ignored family in identifying people in the era.
If he were governor, Marcellus was not a baptized Christian as he would have had to preside at pagan rites. An enlisted man or minor civil servant might circumvent these rites, an official or officer could not and refusal was punishable by death.
A few years earlier, the Emperor Aurelian in 272 had besieged the oasis of Tadmore, capital of Palmyra. The Palmyrenes, led by King Odenathus, had stemmed the tide of Persian invasion, acting independently yet never formally rejecting Roman authority. Odenathus’ widow, Zenobia, defied Aurelian and was defeated. Aurelian dealt with the Palmyrenes leniently. The town was placed under the protection of a garrison of archers. Zenobia, courageous, cunning and overreaching, revolted. The Roman garrison of five hundred bowmen was virtually annihilated.
Marcellinus was offered leadership of the East if he joined the insurrection.
Marcellinus warned repeatedly that the revolt was a gamble against the odds, treachery in exchange for mercy – unforgivable in the eyes of Aurelian. Admitting that the offer was attractive, he repeatedly advised the conspirators to abandon the revolt. Secretly, he informed Aurelian. The emperor, en route to Europe, reversed his march and hastened to Palmyra, renewing the siege of its capital. In the effort he was wounded in the leg by an arrow. Having stormed the town, resplendent with colonnaded temples atop its steep hills, Aurelian demonstrated as much severity as he had mildness previously. The city was razed and the entire population killed or enslaved.
With the caravan town destroyed, trade between Rome and Persia collapsed.
The Historia Augusta says Zenobia was paraded in gold chains in a triumph through the city of Rome, peacefully ending her days in a comfortable villa.7 The historian Zosimus states that Zenobia was murdered by drowning while crossing the Dardanelles, the woman in gold chains presumably an official deceit.8
Aurelian rewarded the governor Marcellinus with the consulship in 275.
Was Marcellinus identical with Marcellus? The name Marcellinus was not a Christian usage. He would have been Marcellus to the Christians.
When Marcellus, the man of consummate piety, had heard this recital, he burst into a flood of tears, touched with pity for misfortunes so great and so varied. But making no delay he at once prepared victuals for the sufferers and did service with his own hand for the wearied; in this imitating our father Abraham the patriarch…9
In the chaos of the generation past, the churches had effectively ministered to refugees whom Roman bureaucracy callously ignored. The Government had motive to be grateful. A decade earlier, Christian leaders had asked the Emperor Aurelian to settle a dispute between two claimants to a bishopric. The Church no longer avoided those in power. In the Middle East it sought them out.
The Bishop Archelaus asked permission for the local church to care for the prisoners. Marcellus readily agreed. The soldiers demanded of the Bishop a ransom price for each captive. Archelaus could not meet the sum.
A green branch hung in a marketplace announced a slave auction.10 Slave dealers were mangones, scorned by even the corrupt, forbidden baptism; their money respected but not their presence. Roman law held the buyer at fault if cheated. Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. Slaves were an exception. A mangone could be sued or jailed for fraud.11
Slaves for sale were stripped, signs stating their origins and skills placed around their necks. Many adopted a shamelessness as psychological selfdefence. A slave had no legal family. A female slave could accuse her master of abuse if she dared. Court judges were usually slave owners.
Cato the elder in the second century BC had written the classic manual on slave maintenance. Warning that the most dangerous slaves were those who finished labouring and did not immediately sleep, he advised they be worked until exhausted, even if the work was unneeded.12 He recommended that the sick, elderly and disabled slaves be set free because they were useless and none would buy them.
On the feast of the Saturnalia,13 the winter solstice, about 25 December to Romans, traditionally, master and family departed or locked themselves in an upper floor, handing over the villa to the slaves. In some households it was a pleasant feast respecting human equality, an occasion for gift giving. Elsewhere, it was an occasion for drunken rages, rapes and stabbings. Libertas in Latin was something to be dreaded: anarchy, an anomie, a freedom without direction or discipline but violence.
The aristocratic Roman poet Horace wrote that civilization was based on the use of tools, namely dumb tools, semi-communicative tools … cattle, and speaking tools … slaves.14
Matrimonium meant that a man recognized legally only one mother of his children, a convenience to slave owners. Often the most cruel oppressor a slave encountered was the owner’s jealous wife or a master suspicious of his wife’s infidelity.
Romans who worked for wages did so on a daily basis without job security. The Church did not dogmatically condemn slavery. To free a slave unable to earn a decent living was not a kindness. St Paul in his letter to Philemon said of slaves that it was better to be free but did not insist upon it. He urged Philemon to treat the runaway slave returned to him as a brother in Christ.15 That slave, Onesimus, eventually became a free man and Christian bishop.
Slavery corrupted victim as well as victimizer. Survival under oppression necessitated duplicity. To cavile was the Latin term for playing one role to one person and another to another. It pervaded society. To escape responsibility by assuming a passive stolidity was a common survival mechanism. Masters might condemn slaves as stupid, lazy, dishonest and thieving, while motivating them to be so. Resentments a slave repressed could be unleashed in terrible violence, usually against another slave. Many slaves dared not hope lest it produce despair.
For free people, enslavement and being torn from family was a shock for which they were not prepared.
The average Roman infantryman in the era could barely afford to buy a new tunic in a year.16 The overrunning of the frontiers at Valerian’s fall had crippled the government’s tax incomes at the same time that gold and silver lost in trade beyond the Empire was becoming irreplaceable as mines exhausted. Coins were issued with ever lower quantity of precious metal, triggering a wild inflation. Soldiers might not strike. They did riot and overthrow emperors.
Auxiliaries were paid less than men in the legions.17 About half the army comprised auxiliaries in units of five hundred or a thousand men, the rest legions of some six thousand men each. The intent was that auxiliary units, recruited from a particular tribal or ethnic group unlike the well integrated legions, would be too small and independent to cooperate in coups against the state. To counteract the grievous inflation in the era the legions enjoyed the simple solution of ransacking Roman cities. The auxiliaries, underpaid and employed to do the most dangerous and harshest tasks of the army and stationed far from the towns, lacked the option of robbing the public treasury.
If the captives could be sold as slaves the campaigners could hope for undreamed of rewards. An adult skilled male could bring a price at auction equivalent to several years of an auxiliary’s wages. Officers would receive the lion’s share.
Infants, children and mothers would bring a poor price at the auction block. The Roman preference was to buy adult male slaves rather than to encourage the slave population to reproduce. At least a third of the Empire’s population were slaves.
Marcellinus paid the soldiers the price demanded for the prisoners.18 He then, astonishingly, ordered that all were to be set free and returned home. ‘He at once distributed the gifts of duty among the soldiers without any strict consideration of number or distinction.’19 He urged many soldiers to leave the army. Some took scarcely a fourth of the ransom and the rest made their departure without receiving even so much as would pay the expenses of the journey.20 No explanation is given. Plausibly, some were Christians following John the Baptist’s advice to be content with their usual pay.
Since Marcellinus is described urging soldiers to leave the army, he must have been speaking to men eligible for discharge. A man quitting the army before twenty-five years of service lost his retirement bonus and could be executed unless he had permission for disability.
The soldiers discharged were eligible for the usual salary or stipendum paid three times a year, the retirement bonus or praemia given at least to legionnaires, as well as the forced savings given at discharge and a donative, a bonus award from the emperor as substitute for campaign loot.21Viaticum was the travel money given to retiring veterans. Romans had seized the booty Persians had taken in overrunning the Middle East a few years earlier.22 The governor would have been in charge of it. Donatives were given to cement the loyalty of the troops.
Looking upon the riches surrounding him – art in stone, gold, silver, bronze and ivory – Marcellus perhaps was reminded of an Egyptian proverb. A flood was disaster but the same water in ten thousand channels a great blessing. He had paid off the troops generously, even as many refused to take all their due.
Outside the walls of Marcellus’ palace people lived crowded together, bringing forth children as if forging weapons against their enemies, each group’s gods arrayed against the next.
He was weary of imposing peace as if people were incapable of it of themselves.
He had shown mercy. That would be taken as weakness by some. It was time for him, like many of the soldiers he had paid, to retire. By 277 he was no longer consul.
In the Middle Ages Vincent of Beauvais wrote that an unnamed ‘old book’ (Gratian’s?) recorded the Theban legionnaires baptized at Jerusalem and confirmed in Syria by a bishop Marcellus.23
Could this have been the same Marcellus as the Dialogue, retired and become a church leader? In this era the Church was remarkably open to swift promotion of leaders from secular life becoming higher clergy over the heads of men long in the priesthood.
As a governor, Marcellus chose his bodyguard and administrators from soldiers of the two legions found in most provinces and their auxiliary forces. Christians, presumably, were among them. Unlike other soldiers, they were not in the habit of assassinating their host. Mauricius may have been among them.
If Christians were among the soldiers at Carrhae, they would remember the brutality against civilians in the campaign of 276. Confronted with a situation threatening civilians in the future, they would be psychologically and morally prepared.
This would be all the more likely if in the interim they had been free of army routine and in an environment conducive to reflections in conscience, i.e., as retired veterans at Jerusalem.
Gratian in the eleventh century would write that Mauricius was baptized by Zabdas, Bishop of Jerusalem during the reign of Probus. The two or three years of preparation then required for baptism and the fact that only veterans, not soldiers on active duty, were allowed baptism matches well with the time and region of the troops retiring at Carrhae, future officers and men of the Theban Legion.
In the Roman Republic soldiers had been discharged individually after fulfilling their service. On active duty they had been forbidden to marry. Alone in civilian life, unaccustomed to freedom from authority, a senator described many ‘as orphans’ in their behaviour. Augustus, the first emperor, desired that the army be virtually a hereditary military caste, a goal contradicted by the continued prohibition against soldiers on active duty marrying.
In reaction, a policy emerged of discharging veterans in groups every two years to be sent to veterans’ colonias, of which there were scores throughout the Empire. These enclaves were expected to provide a loyal and stable population in times of upheaval and a recruiting ground since soldiers’ marriages were made legal at the beginning of the third century.
Jerusalem, ravaged and depopulated in two disastrous attempts at revolt versus Rome, was the Colonia Aelia Capitolina, one of many in Israel established to displace the Jewish population. Mauricius chose it as his retirement home, accompanied by comrades of many years. He was retiring as the pressures upon the Empire were reaching a window of opportunity that if neglected might never emerge again in the Roman era. It is in crisis that a society, like an individual, is most likely and able to change.