We dare risk intelligence.
Unaccepted CIA motto suggested by
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The general Julianus of Pannonia’s (Hungary) grab for the throne delayed the clash of Carinus and Diocletian.1 Julianus had support of only one or two of the more than thirty-two legions of the Empire. Diocletian’s moves had deprived him of most troops of the Danube frontier and the Balkans. That he acted under Diocletian’s orders in invading north-eastern Italy is tempting to believe, but the coinage he issued assert his challenge to that wily Illyrian. Nevertheless, he served Diocletian’s purposes. Julianus seemed desperate, perhaps caught in double-dealing or with his hand in the treasury’s till. Rome’s inflexible harshness in these situations repeatedly motivated men in power to worse crimes once they were discovered.
When Romans struggled for the throne, each claimant personally led his army against his rival. One battle usually settled the issue, the legions throughout the Empire accepting the winner. Meanwhile, frontiers were stripped of detachments to form the contesting armies.
Carinus occupied Verona, protected on three sides by the Adige river and by a wall across the neck of the peninsula. Presumably on the basis of records no longer existing, the medieval historian Otto of Freising, crusader and member of the German royal family, related that Theban legionnaires fell at ‘Bonn called Verona’.2 This seems a misreading or typo. No town had both names. The Latin script ‘et’ and the abbreviation for ‘eadem’ were very similar.3 Probably, Bonn and Verona were intended. No Theban legionnaires are venerated at Verona, although the tradition of their martyrs at Bonn is long honoured. Possibly, Thebans fell at Verona not as martyrs but killed in the clash between Julianus and Carinus.
Geography must have determined much of the battle. Carinus was well supplied and could wait. Julianus, as an invader coming through the eastern Alps, had to act precipitously. The tactics were the deeply instilled methods of the legions. Thousands of men clad in iron bands and helmets trod rank behind rank towards one another across meadows daubed in wildflowers. Within throwing distance each side halted, shields raised protectively. The executive officer, the primipilus, literally the first javelin, tossed his metal-necked spear, joined in an instant by thousands more. The intent was to pin the enemy down, reluctant to move. Trumpets blared and both sides charged, sunlight gleaming on shortsword blades.
Bloody carnage ensued. The word for death in battle, occidit, meant literally to be cut to pieces. The soldier was drilled not to slash but stab in a deadly upward thrust. Limbs, being without armour, were most vulnerable. The thrust to the throat could be fatal, regardless of the leather bands and bandana containing a soldier’s coins knotted about it. Individual combat was not a duel but a heavyweight slugging contest. No one was expected to be able to endure it for more than twenty minutes. The youngest were the first rank, the next two ranks accordingly by age, older men encouraging those foremost and ready to step in to cover a wounded or exhausted man.
Battle between equally able Roman forces in toe to toe combat was the least preferable of resolutions. The winner might emerge permanently weakened. Strategy sought to avoid equal contest of forces. If Julianus attacked Verona believing that the legionnaires within it lacked confidence in not taking to the field he was in grave error. Men trained as archers were a more effective defence than ordinary infantrymen for a walled and moated city.
There is another way in war. Cloak and dagger could be more effective than armies.
Julianus fell to Carinus’ sword or so the winner’s account relates. It gives no details of the battle.
Rome expected every enlistee to obey his unit commander. Losing in a coup, they could expect leniency if they had done what was expected of them. To be severe would give the losing side the courage of desperation.
Green grass nourished by the rains of northern Italy’s autumn, trampled underfoot, red and slippery with blood, became carpeted with weapons and shields cast down in surrender. Men stood grimly as the victors surveyed the ranks. Some murdered colleagues to settle old grudges and placate the victors. Others handed a sword to a comrade and fatalistically asked to be killed. The defeated survivors were scattered and incorporated into units of proven loyalty.
The situation impressed upon Carinus’ forces what they could expect if they lost to Diocletian. Meanwhile, Carinus’ seductions of the wives of his most trusted officers stirred resentment.
The Thebans’ officers had rejoined the army expecting a purely training function, handing over the legion in Britain to its regular officers, its role strictly defensive. Events put them in hazard of the laws of the Church. Desertion was punishable by death and totally against their conditioning. Their holding together as an effective unit was their best protection come what may.
It would seem wise for them to set the legion’s troops marching across the Alps into Gaul at the earliest opportunity as soon as the snows in the mountain passes had melted and the worst dangers of floods and avalanches had passed. The headquarters section would be the rearguard so that most of the troops would be out of harm’s way while the unit’s commanders might deal with the emperor’s appointees, whomever the emperor might be.
Northernmost Italy was cursed and blessed by the ruggedness of its terrain. Its farms were small, accessed by steep paths. The soil was so thin and rocky that not even the greediest of lowland landlords coveted them. Except for Egypt, huge estates were the norm, owned by absent landlords. Increasingly, they were turning to herding because it required far fewer workers and yielded greater profits. Unneeded farmers and their families on the estates were ‘liberated’ to fend for themselves. Some drifted into the cities, some broke apart, others sought to become rural slaves. In the hill country, small farm owners were poor, but independent and free. They were one of the few recruiting sources for the army away from the frontiers.
Independent small farmers produced a good crop of children, if a bare subsistence otherwise. This was in contrast with the Empire’s slave population who were denied a normal family life, and rarely reproduced its numbers. In- numerable gravestone epitaphs attest the lot of most slaves, most of whom were unmarried.
In Rome, events were occurring in the aftermath of the departure of the Thebans from the city.
Sebastian was a baptized ‘nobleman’ of Milan who came to Rome in 285 to join the army in order to protect his fellow Christians amidst persecution. This was a clear case from the Acts of a Christian joining the army although church law until then had forbidden it.
His Act makes no mention of the Theban Legion.4 He, apparently, arrived in the city after the Thebans had departed. Meanwhile, Carinus had murdered the commander of the Praetorian Guards and replaced him with an elderly civilian of no military experience, Matronianus, whose chief function was as a procurer of lovers of either sex for Carinus.
Sebastian was possessed of a civility that mollified even his enemies. The Acts declare that Carinus made him second in command of the Praetorians, presumably in order to leave Rome in the care of officers he could trust.
Diocletian sent forces to Rome after Carinus’ departure, including a man born in the same town of Diocles as he and bearing the same name who became mayor of Rome. He was said to be a relative of the Bishop of Rome at the time, Marcellinus, another Illyrian.
Sebastian busied himself aiding needy and politically harassed Christians. He preached his faith among the Praetorians. Diocletian, the mayor, repeatedly asked Sebastian to cease his public display of belief, emphasizing that he wished him no ill, but others might. Disobeyed, he had him handed over to be practice target for the archery of the Praetorians. Soldiers were executed by beheading or being clubbed to death according to military law. Officers were not subjected to torture. Wounded, Sebastian was handed over to fellow believers who nursed him back to health, his punishment perhaps a mockery of his desire to be an officer of a unit of bowmen, the Theban Legion.
Healed, Sebastian renewed his activities. He directly approached the mayor to ask for better treatment of arrested Christians. At this point the patience of the mayor snapped. He ordered Sebastian to be clubbed to death. In violation of a citizen’s rights under Roman law, the corpse was thrown into a sewer so that it would not become the object of a martyr’s cult. Recovered nonetheless, it was buried in the catacombs.
Until the Renaissance, Sebastian was depicted in art not as a youth but as a grey-bearded man in soldier’s cloak without armour or weapon. It is hardly likely that a young civilian would have been placed in command over the Praetorians. Probably, Sebastian was another recalled veteran intending to join the Thebans as campidoctor (a military retiree recalled to train a newly recruited legion), but accepting command of the Praetorians officers’ school instead.
Other victims of the praepositus cubiculi Diocletian (in effect, the Mayor of Rome) in Rome were the Armenian brothers Calocerus,5 a civilian, and the primicerius Parthenius. More Armenians were killed with the priest Aemilianus6 at Trebia twenty miles east of Rome. Their record makes no mention of a legion. Primicerius, first among equals in rank, was not a legionary or auxiliary rank at the time but suggests a special status. Mauricius was a primicerius. Parthenius was possibly his predecessor over the Thebans or leader of another new legion, the XII Victrix, intended for the continental forts of the Saxon shore. The channel had become a frontier province and Roman frontier provinces each had two legions.7
The presence of Armenians martyrs in Italy and Gaul at this time when none appear earlier or later suggests some common cause.
In the winter of late 285, Carinus awaited Diocletian’s advance by the Brenner Pass southwards into Italy or by the Via Gemina through the eastern Alps or by pincers utilizing both, as was the case.
Diocletian waited also. It was not simply ambition that impelled him. He wanted to reform the Empire in order to reverse its decline. Every phase of life was to be affected. His solutions would be temporarily effective but brutally totalitarian. Scarcely any ruler previously had ever displayed his administrative zeal and imagination.
Introspective, and aloof yet aware that he needed an alter ego whose qualities balanced his, Diocletian had chosen a general, Maximian to be his deputy. Diocletian would be emperor, augustus, and Maximian would be caesar, viceroy. Born on the same day of the year as Diocletian but younger, Maximian was about thirty-five.8 To believers in horoscopes their common interests were preordained.
A propagandist of Maximian Herculius wrote that he had campaigned earlier in his life as far as the River Hibero, the Habur (Nahr Khabour), the eastern frontier of Roman Mesopotamia.9 The town of Nicephorium was to be named Maximianopolis after him. Probus had encouraged the career of Diocletian but not Maximian in the East. Maximian might have been present at Carrhae in 276, since Nicephorium was fifty miles south-west of that city on the same river.
Like Diocletian, Maximian was an Illyrian, the son of slaves of the state, managers of other slaves, the first Roman rulers from this background. Brilliant in using unexpected routes to gain the advantage of surprise, Maximian did not lead his men but drove them. He was poorly educated, a crude extrovert with a lust for physical action, and an able, loyal and willing instrument of his patron. Maximian’s contemporaries declared him bizarre in his decisions, easily swayed by bad advisers and a remarkably poor judge of men. The pagan Eutropius described him as ‘a man inclined to every kind of cruelty and severity, faithless, perverse, utterly devoid of consideration for others, undisguisedly vicious and of a violent temper, showing his disposition in the sternness of his looks.’10 Another held him ‘of a bloodthirsty rashness, foolish in council.’11
Maximian was to adopt in 286 the name Herculius. He shared with that demigod muscular strength, brooding vanity, obstinacy, bisexuality and a propensity for suicide. No individual portrait bust of him is known. His lust for physical action complemented Diocletian’s chill intellect. He was to become so detested that crowds would shatter every public image of him they could lay their hands on. His portrait survives on coinage and the mosaics of his palace in Sicily.
Carinus was exasperated waiting for Diocletian to move. The winter was mild and the mountain passes were not blocked by snow, prompting him late in 285 to order his army to march into the icy winds funnelling through the Brenner Pass. He would meet his foe deep within the adversary’s territory.
The indications are that the Theban Legion remained in north-eastern Italy along the road from the army port of Aquileia to Bergamo. They would guard Carinus’ supply route and be his link to Italy and the West. In the meantime, they would be reinforced by more troops arriving at the port of Aquileia in north-eastern Italy and prepare to march over the north-western Alps to the Rhine and passage to Britain in the spring of 286.
At Margus near the Danube Carinus collided with Diocletian’s army. He won the battle. According to the official story he was then murdered by an outraged husband among his officers. Or Diocletian’s intrigues had proven once again more effective than legions.
Not long after Carinus’ death his nephews and niece, Cantius, Cantianus and Cantianilla, were brought to Aquileia by their Christian tutor, Protus.12 All were martyred. Two years earlier the city’s bishop Hilarius13 and his fellow clergy had been put to the sword there. Why would Protus take his wards to a scene of recent persecution, a great army depot, unless he believed it contained friendly forces? The Theban Legion presumably departed shortly before they arrived.
None of the Acts of Aquileia mention the Theban Legion. Each is very brief and although many martyrs fell the same year they do not refer to one another, the typical problem confronting the historian attempting to reconstruct the events.
Valentinus,14 a magister militum or military instructor fell in 286 about the time of Protus and his wards. Concordius,15 a navy doctor, and his two sons joined them in martyrdom at Aquileia that year. No other martyrs at Aquileia are known from 286. A motive in killing these individuals may have been to prevent them warning the Thebans that the army of Maximian had arrived through the Eastern Alps and was pursuing them.
An inscription at Aquileia from early 286 honours Diocletian as the sun god Sol and Maximian as Belenus, ‘starry eyes’, the Danubian Apollo.16 This was nothing less than the first notice of a revolution in Roman policy. The Senate had declared several emperors, including Probus, to be gods after their deaths, but had never allowed any living person to be worshipped.
Diocletian did not consider himself a god. He did believe that he ruled by divine right – heaven or fate or whatever gods had enabled him to achieve power. Philosophers could argue as to definitions; he saw emperor worship as a shrewd test of loyalty. He had a flair for pageantry but was less interested in principles than results. Maximian, too, would be an object of worship.
Maximian Herculius’ insecure personality may have welcomed the idea that he was the embodiment of a demigod. One of his hireling poets wrote that wherever he might retire all lands and seas were full of him.17
Maximian’s religious enthusiasm was sealed by Diocletian appointing him high priest of the Empire, a sharp break in centuries of custom. The high priest, the pontifex maximus, had always been the emperor.18
Maximian had a Syrian wife.19 A pagan gossiped that his official heir, Maxentius, had been sired by another man. Church scribes mention an illegitimate son, Olympius, who was martyred at Antioch.
The gross corpulence of Maximian in his later years is manifest in his image on coinage. His swings in personality from passive obsequiousness to raging violence seem symptomatic of a deeply disturbed nature.
That Maximian later became a eunuch could explain the submissiveness with which he obeyed Diocletian who, like the Persian shahs, introduced to his court an entourage of castrated officials.20 This was the totalitarian concept of virtue, not freedom but physical constraint. Castration was utterly repugnant to Latin values. It had been illegal. Diocletian’s fondness for silk robes contrasted with early republican Rome, which had held it a crime punishable by death for a man to wear silk.
Maximian’s extraordinarily rapid rise demanded that he quickly win victories or be sacked or worse. To rule, he thought it essential to inspire fear. Some people could be made examples to impress the rest. Christians as an unpopular minority ideally suited the role.
His career depended on the Theban Legion not arriving at the Channel to join Carausius. And the Thebans were already on the march northwards after wintering at Verona.