Never waste a crisis.
Rahm Emanuel
The Roman public in hundreds of cities enjoyed the violent death of others as public spectacle almost daily, not merely as entertainment but example and morale booster.
The legionnaires would have seen the Circus Maximus, Rome’s largest stadium, which could hold 385,000 ecstatic fans, built with the slave labour of Jews after the first revolt and inaugurated in the year 72. The use of Christians as circus victims had been initiated a decade earlier. Tacitus wrote:
Nero had all admitted Christians seized. These informed on others who were also arrested, not so much for setting fire to the city as for their hatred of mankind. Everything was done to make their deaths humiliating. They were dressed in animal skins and torn to pieces by dogs, crucified, or covered with pitch and used as torches to light the arena after dark. Although as Christians they deserved punishment, still people felt that they were being punished to satisfy the emperor’s love of cruelty and not for the good of the nation.1
An altar stood in the arena offering Christians the opportunity to recant. Tossing a few grains of incense would immediately save their lives. Few did. Presumably, they would have done so before being thrown into the arena.
The games opened and closed with religious ceremonies.2 The gladiator incarnated Roman ethos, brutal yet glamorizing violence, disciplined yet profligate, murderous yet masochistic. A great many were volunteers, others prisoners of war or criminals. Graffiti demonstrated the adulation given to the few enduring winners who could become wealthy men. But money was not the attraction, nor the women morbidly and erotically fascinated by the gladiator’s situation. Men of every class of society chose the arena, as if escaping life found unbearable in order to seek release by confronting death.3
The gladiator typically showed no emotion. His coldness was held inspirational by men as eminent as Cicero.4 Applauded, cheered and praised by the mob urging him on to die a hero, he rarely disappointed his audience. If visibly frightened or hesitant, the gladiator could trigger a collective rage among the spectators, a social rejection held worse than death.
The martyr, too, fulfilled his role and could inspire his audience but in ways unrecognized and unintended by persecutors. He or she died for being defiant. It was not the lesson taught by the gladiator.
Nine out of ten people in the Empire lived in the countryside where there were no arenas. They laboured to support the way of life of the cities and the circuses. Their labour was despised by the ruling class.
Cicero declared, ‘All gains made by hired craftsmen are dishonourable and base for what we buy of them is not their labour but their artistic skill; their success only increases the slavishness of their work.’5 He begrudged the craftsman’s pride in accomplishment. ‘Ars gratia artis,’ art is enough for the artist, was his rationale for paying low wages to skilled workers. ‘All retailing too belongs in the same category for the dealer gains nothing except by profuse lying … the work of all skills is shameful. There is nothing ennobling in a workshop.’ And Christ was a carpenter.
No banks in the modern sense existed. The purchase of slaves absorbed most money available to be invested. Amidst inflation, profits were more easily gained by producing less to gain a higher price than by producing more.
Chimneys, doors, windows, public toilets, the liberation of slaves, prostitution, burials – almost everything was taxed. The tax in gold and silver collected every five years from great merchants to blind beggars, and the price of the licence to practise their trade, caused men to hide their shops and sell children into slavery to escape it. Free craftsmen fled the cities as if honest labour was a crime.6
Members of the upper class were carried through the streets in litters accompanied by servants, gladiator bodyguards and assorted hangers-on. Matrons walked slaves on leashes wearing iron neckbands inscribed with requests to return to the owner in case the banded strayed. A house fortune teller and dream analyzer was usually close at hand. Fate excused people from responsibility they found too much to bear, so they claimed.
Slavery did not make slaves simply victims but moulded many into sly, flattering, sullen, treacherous, two-faced and disassociated personalities. Devious qualities that might aid a slave to survive could make him unfit for freedom. ‘So many slaves, so many enemies,’ wrote Seneca.7 ‘These people are not enemies we have but those we have created.’ He added, ‘We must live dependent on those who hate and weep because of us.’
There were Roman virtues worse than vices. A free father by law could beat or kill his wife or offspring or sell his children into slavery, subject only to the interference of in-laws who could legally beat or kill him.8 For better or worse, the law did not intrude into family matters.
Parents stood at the city gates and market stalls pleading to sell waifs they could not support.
That the declining birthrate and weakening of the empire was the result of ever looser morality was a fallacy. Soldiers and slaves alike had low birthrates. Their lives were not spent in self-indulgence.
Six senatorial families owned most of North Africa. The Senate of Rome was powerless yet had enormous prestige, all that money could buy. Born into senatorial families, or appointed by the emperor, senators were envied and patronized. Generals wanted more than victories; they wanted gold and honours and respectable retirement. The Senate sought men with no scruples in drawing swords to defend it. Shrewdly, it had opened its ranks to all legionary generals, active or retired.
The Senate had the potential to be a true congress of nations but was overwhelmingly Italian. Its members refused to yield place to persons less than fifty years of age or anyone who was not the owner of vast tracts of land. Wealth from trade and industry was detested. The Senate’s gift to the public was rhetoric, endless speeches stringing together quotes, mythological allusions, unctuous flattery, diatribes, rantings and logic far removed from reality. Clerks groaned and visiting barbarian chiefs snored loudly. An emperor forbid comedians to wear the violet-bordered toga, the uniform of the Senate, ‘lest the public be confused’.
At sundown, the capital of the Empire shuttered and double-bolted its doors, the streets left to the creatures of the night. Few dared walk its tenement canyons unless part of a large group. The rich returned to suburban mansions proceeded by torchbearers as wagons rolled into the city with supplies. No wheeled vehicles were allowed during the day. In the shadows the fornicari, the prostitutes of the streets, offered their wares. Fornus was the stone foundation of a bridge where their business was conducted. Praetorian guardsmen, paid double a legionnaire’s normal salary, staggered down the streets. The vigiles, the police of the capital, were not so foolish as to antagonize them.
Reports arrived in Rome that Numerian had called off the Persian campaign and was leading his army back to Europe. Might he challenge Carinus’ crown, or was he anxious to find safety nearer his brother? Whatever the case, the Senate would approve the winner. In 218, it had auctioned off the Roman world to the highest bidder, the winner a senator cut to ribbons by the army within a month.9
Numerian was a lawyer little attracted to the military. The feeling was mutual. At Antioch, Numerian and a bishop, Babylus, argued in a church doorway.10
Christians were growing ever bolder. Often, they bought burial and other licensed societies in order to use them as legal fronts. Archaeology demonstrates that the shrine of the Theban legionnaire Gereon at Cologne, West Germany, had been a temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis before it became a Christian church during the era of persecution.11 This suggests that Egyptian Christian priests, said by pagans to worship Serapis, may have bought pagan temples to gain their licences to worship.
One does not argue with anyone in a skirt be it a priest, judge or a woman, so goes the proverb. Bishops were ill advised to argue with an emperor. Babylus was executed without trial in violation of his rights as a citizen and his church seized.
The reports were that Numerian’s army was steadily marching towards Italy.
To offset the power of the Praetorians, a second officers’ training corps, the promoti,12 served as a cavalry bodyguard for the emperor in the field. The Praetorians provided a detachment as infantry bodyguard.
Numerian was losing his sight, having contracted an eye ailment in the East. To conceal his disability, he confined himself to the curtained litter in which he was carried, an unmilitary means of transport. His army arrived in the Balkans unimpressed by their ruler.
The leader of the cavalry guard was an Illyrian, Diocletian. He was intelligent and introspective, with a face as wizened and impassive as an actor’s mask. His parents had been imperial slaves, supervisors of the slaves of a palace.13 Diocletian’s mother was a priestess of a Balkan cult. As a young officer in Gaul, a druidess had foretold that he was destined to be emperor, but not until he had killed a boar. Aper is the word for a wild hog in Latin.
The commander of Numerian’s Praetorians was Arrius Aper.
Aper had been stealing money from the imperial treasury. The penalty was death. Aper was warned that Numerian had learned of his guilt. Fearful of being arrested, Aper murdered the semi-blind prince of the empire. As Numerian rarely left his litter the murder remained undetected until the stink of the corpse revealed it.
On 24 November 284, before the assembled troops, Diocletian confronted Aper on a stage erected for the emperor.14 Announcing the murder and its motive, he stabbed Aper to death. Moments later, swords clattering upon shields, and the troops hailed Diocletian emperor as he swore innocence of any plot.
That was the official version.
Diocletian swiftly acted to abolish the grain commission, the frumentari, the imperial secret agency for cloak and dagger acts, replacing them with his creation, the agentes rebus, ‘agents for things’ – things unmentionable, such as espionage, blackmail, assassination and the like. The Praetorians were oiled, polished, placed on the shelf or eliminated.
Carinus received the news as if anticipated. The only major troop reserves in the Empire were those near the city of Rome and those blocking the southern Alpine passes. Carinus harangued that Diocletian intended to abolish the Praetorians as he had the grain commission. It was a fair statement. The Praetorians were the Empire’s military academy and the emperor’s bodyguard, a centre of intrigue and coups, elite, overpaid and arrogant. ‘Who guards the guards?’ was a bitter Roman saying.
The Thebans received orders to march to northern Italy and await further orders or Diocletian’s invasion of Italy through the eastern Alps. Other Acts suggest that other Thebans were arriving at Aquileia on the northern Adriatic by sea. After Diocletian was defeated, they could go over the Alps to their duty station, Britain.
The Thebans realized they soon might be in battle for the first time as a legion. Most soldiers spent their careers without seeing combat. They might soon be warring against fellow legionnaires.
Diocletian, if not innocent of shedding blood, at least had been careful to limit it to a few important victims.
Carinus was legally emperor, coming to power peacefully by inheritance and approved by the Senate.
Diocletian was a tyrannus, taking power violently.
The clash of legions would choose between them.
The Theban Legion was inexorably being drawn into a political maelstrom that its members sought to avoid.