Marcus Aurelius

Lucius Verus took his time about his preparations and did not leave for the East until the summer of 162. He insisted on taking with him his entire panoply of freedmen – Geminus, Agaclytus, Coedes, Eclectus and, especially, Nicomedes, who was put in charge of the commissariat. The Misenum fleet was given the task of accompanying Verus to Asia, and thereafter keeping the sea lanes clear and making sure that all the young emperor’s logistical requirements were met. When Lucius left Rome with his huge retinue, Marcus accompanied his colleague as far as Capua.⁶ Lucius then made a leisurely progress towards the East coast, hunting and carousing as he went. At Canusium he fell seriously ill, to the point where his life was feared for and Marcus went south to meet up with him. Showing great concern, he stayed with Lucius until his recovery was assured and, immediately on returning to Rome, had the Senate send him formal good wishes.⁷ Three days of fasting and some blood-letting had apparently done the trick. Fronto saw a chance to be reconciled with his old pupil and wrote a sympathetic letter to Lucius. In that patronising mother-hen manner, in which Fronto was unrivalled, he wrote (either sycophantically or tongue-in cheek): ‘As suits your outstanding character you should be moderate in all your desires, which are bound to be keener and more insistent than usual after this enforced abstinence.’⁸ The idea of a moderate or temperate Lucius Verus would have provided a belly-laugh to anyone reading the letter. Some said that his illness had been caused by over-indulgence of all kinds, but the likelihood was that he had suffered a mini-stroke; it was a major stroke that would eventually kill him.

But Verus had learned nothing from the episode and had forgotten nothing of the art of debauchery. His leisurely and riotous journey eastwards continued. When he reached Athens after a short voyage on the Adriatic and a southward journey overland via Corinth, he was greeted as a conquering hero; some scholars attribute this reception to the close contacts of the Ceionius family with the Athenian aristocracy, who paid him the signal honour of inducting him into the Eleusinian mysteries.9 Since the ubiquitous Herodes Atticus had often fallen foul of both Antoninus Pius and Marcus, it is not surprising that Herodes was a prime mover in the initiation; it would have been his way of thumbing his nose at Marcus.¹⁰ Next Verus crossed the Aegean Sea and made a lengthy stopover in Ephesus. Here too he was lionised by the Greek-speaking elite. A prominent citizen named P. Vedius Antoninus gave lavish games in his honour.¹¹ The halting and reluctant imperial progress continued, along the coast and through all the notorious fleshpots of Pamphylia and Cilicia. At last, a reluctant Verus traipsed into Antioch, which would be his base for the next four years.¹² By the time he reached Syria, Verus had gathered around him a troupe of actors and musicians who enhanced his pleasure, but scandalised the bien pensants. He acted as if he was about to build a pleasure-garden rather than wage a war. Characteristically, his first letters to Rome from Antioch concerned the progress of his beloved racing faction, the Greens, in the races at the Circus Maximus.¹³

As Verus and his theatrical entourage fiddled while the eastern frontier blazed, the more serious-minded members of his general staff assessed the prospects for the coming campaign. Parthia had long fascinated the Romans: the references in Latin literature are abundant.¹⁴ Pliny the Elder regarded Parthia as a barren waste, a land where the locals went in for drinking rivers of alcohol on an empty stomach and where the deserts were infested with venomous serpents – for Pliny, snakes were always ‘this accursed creature’.¹⁵ Yet secure knowledge of Parthia is not easy to attain. As Parthian literature was oral, there were few written records, and most of its history had (and has) to be reconstructed from coinage. A non-Greek people, the Parthians used Greek as their official state language and on most of their coins: the most common denomination, the silver drachma, bore Greek legends for 500 years. Unlike Rome, based on slavery, Parthian society was basically feudal, relying on serfdom, as far as we can tell.¹⁶ The realm was not centralised; there were several different cultures in coexistence, several different languages were spoken and each region had its own mini-economic system, complete with its own coinage. This made Parthia fluid, flexible and elastic: the Romans captured its capital Ctesiphon three times in history, but this made little impact, as there were other important centres. The Parthian economy was robust despite its patchwork nature. On the one hand, its ruling elite acted mainly as middlemen, taking profits from numerous customs posts and taxes on goods in transit, plus the control of important trade routes.17 On the other hand, the well-managed agricultural systems of the many Hellenistic cities and the thriving riverine trade and agriculture in the Fertile Crescent gave Parthian rulers the surplus to support a large army. Parthian social structure was intimately linked with the state’s military organisation, which in turn derived from ancient nomadic practices, hence the high value given in the culture to horse-riding, the hallmark of social rank. All this was well known to the Romans, even though they had never bothered to collect proper intelligence about their principal enemy in the East.¹⁸

Yet the fact that the ‘empire’ was a mere conglomeration of kingdoms, provinces and city-states was a weakness, as the King of Parthia had to respect local warlords. Internal strife and civil war were common, and very few Parthian monarchs survived their reigns without a challenge from a pretender. The long periods of peace with Rome were essentially years of strife and civil conflict within Parthia; cynics even said that Trajan won his victories in 113–17 only because the Parthian king was simultaneously battling a pretender.¹⁹ One result of this internal weakness was that, unable to trust his nobles, the Parthian king could not afford to retain a standing army. Mustering a host in wartime was therefore a lengthy process. The reason Crassus penetrated so far into Parthia in 54–53 BC was that it took so long for the Parthians to marshal sufficient men to put into the field against him.²⁰ On the other hand, the Romans could no longer rely on covert support from the quasi-independent Greek city-states within the Parthian empire. The Greeks were shy, having been bitten twice. They rose for Crassus and again for Mark Antony, but on both occasions had been left high and dry. By the second century AD they had settled into a comfortable vassal relationship with the Parthian kings, rather like that of Alexander Nevsky and Novgorod under the Mongols in thirteenth-century Russia.²¹ Above all, Parthian kings were weakened by baronial power, with warlordism rampant and the army recruited on a feudal basis from territorial magnates and their retainers. The highest social classes tended to provide the cataphractarii – the heavily armoured cavalry that acted as the Parthian army’s elite squad, with the classes below furnishing the swarms of mounted archers who had compassed Crassus’s downfall. It was estimated that just 4,000 of the victorious Parthian army at Carrhae in 53 BC were nobles, with the remainder of the 50,000 being serfs or retainers.22

Yet another reason for Parthian weakness was that they had other frontiers to defend. Vologases IV’s invasion of Armenia and Syria was an anomaly, since Parthian kings were in general far more concerned with their northern and north-eastern frontiers than with Armenia, Mesopotamia and the west. Rome came a distant fourth when Parthia drew up a list of its principal enemies: way ahead of the Romans were the Kushans, Sakas and Alans. There were really three realms, almost entirely independent from each other, in the ‘empire’ – the west, eastern Parthia and the Indo-Parthian domains of the extreme northeast – and they each faced formidable enemies.²³

The Kushans were an Indo-European people, using the Greek alphabet, who crossed the Hindu Kush in the first century AD and created an empire that included land on both sides of it. Centred on Peshawar and Mathura, their domain reached east as far as the Ganges basin. Their empire was at its height in c. AD 105–250 and took in modern Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Ganges valley in northern India.²⁴ Their most famous king was Kanishka (127–47), a contemporary of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, who was a patron of Buddhism, but tolerated a syncretism of Greco-Zoroastrian-Buddhism. The Kushans were great traders and imported from both China and Rome (especially glassware); a Kushan ambassador was actually received by Antoninus Pius.²⁵ In return they exported fine woollen cloth, wool carpets, perfume, pepper, ginger and black salt. It was their trading prowess rather than their military ambitions that most upset the Parthians. It particularly irked them that, because of the Kushans’ trade links with the Nabatean princes of Arabia, they themselves could not establish a commercial monopoly on Arabian trade by controlling the Tigris. But the Kushans were too powerful to alienate by out-and-out trade war. It was therefore a relief to Parthia when the Chinese general Pan Chao heavily defeated the Kushan king Kadphises near Khotan in AD 90. This was a consequence of yet another population shunt. The state of Ts’In in north-west China was in the first century AD the most powerful of the states in China and was then pushing westwards towards Turkestan.²⁶

As if the Kushans were not enough, the Parthians also had to keep a watchful eye on the Sakas. In Sogdi and the Sind the last survivors of Alexander the Great’s Indo-Greek states went down before a warrior people known as the Kangju, who were supposed to have possessed 120,000 warriors, 90,000 of them skilled archers.27 The Kangju in turn succumbed to invaders from the steppe, a Scythian people known as the Sakas. Like their predecessors, the Sakas maintained a wary relationship with the more powerful Kushans on their border and, with this in mind, accepted the nominal suzerainty of the Parthians. Needless to say, from the time of the founding of their state in AD 78 they were frequently at war with their overlords. In their principality of Seistan (modern western Afghanistan), they expanded and were at their height under King Gondophanes. They later splintered again, into the two kingdoms of Sakastan and Turan.²⁸ The Sakas irritated their official masters by cosying up to the Kushans, cooperating with them to maintain trade relations through Carmania and Persia with the Arab states of Mesene and Charcene at the head of the Persian Gulf – exactly the situation that most angered the Parthians. Official state policy of Parthia was to encourage the passage of goods from China and the East over the old northern route used by the Medes and Assyrians (the Persians in the sixth century BC had diverted much of it onto the Royal Road to Lake Helmund via Susa).²⁹ The problem was that the southern kingdoms who were tributary to the Parthian empire were independent in commercial matters. The Parthians realised that to establish a true trade monopoly in their realms they would have to impose a centralised monarchy, and how was that possible, given the feudal state of Parthia? The two Lake Helmund routes could only have enjoyed a monopoly if Parthia had been prepared to make war on Petra and the Arabian states on the Gulf.³⁰ But this would have involved them not only in a war of pacification, but in a simultaneous war with the Sakas and Kushans; nor would the Romans have stood idly by if the Parthians had attempted to stifle the maritime routes to India.³¹ So the Parthians had to grin and bear the existence of two powerful enemies in the north-east.

Yet in some ways their most pressing problem of all was with the nomadic Alans of the steppes. An Indo-Iranian nomadic people, one of a long line of steppe fighters that would culminate with the Huns and the Mongols, the Alans are thought to have been mentioned by Herodotus, but receive their first definite mention in Latin literature in Seneca’s Thyestes.32 Tall, good-looking, blond and fierce-eyed, they occupied a heartland on both sides of the River Don in southern Russia and controlled the area between the Sea of Azov and the Caspian. A people reputed to live only for war, with a pronounced warrior culture, where women did all the hard work and old men were despised and ill-treated for not having died in battle, the Alans practised polygamy, but not slavery; instead they recruited prisoners into their clans and families.³³ When not on the warpath, they were pastoralists with huge herds and lived in wooden wagons drawn by draught oxen. Brilliant equestrians, they made formidable heavy cavalry. Frequently sallying out from their homelands and across the Iron Gates in search of plunder, they became a permanent and much-feared menace to both Armenia and the Parthian empire. Their prowess with spear and bow, as well as their astonishing horsemanship, was much commented on; as also were the weapons new to the Romans, such as the lasso and the kontos – a two-headed lance. The Parthians loathed and feared the Alans, not least because they fought in much the same way and could therefore beat them at their own game of charges by heavily armoured horsemen.³⁴

The Alans were kept quiet in the ensuing decade by a defeat inflicted on them by the Parthian general Yodmangan (whom some identify with the son of Publius Agrippa, a Roman envoy sent to Georgia either by Trajan or Hadrian). Before the outcome with the Alans was clear, Hadrian had to appease a number of angry tribes on the frontier (including the Iazyges of Hungary, of whom we shall hear more). Cassius Dio tells us that Hadrian ‘Introduced them to the Senate’ and was empowered by it to return suitable replies, which he composed and read out to them.³⁹ Even Antoninus Pius, who had the devil’s own luck in pursuing his particular brand of appeasement for twenty years, had to keep a wary eye on the Alans; there were periodic raids on the Greek cities of Asia Minor nearest to the Black and Caspian Seas.⁴⁰ Antoninus used the system of client kings to build buffers between the Roman empire and the Alans. In this regard he particularly courted the King of Georgia, who came to Rome in 141 with his wife and entourage. Antoninus lionised him, granted him increased territories, offered him an equestrian statue in the temple of Bellona, allowed him to sacrifice on the Capitol and then co-hosted with him a military spectacular (the modern equivalent would be a tattoo).⁴¹ By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the Alans were no longer considered benighted barbarians, but significant enough to feature in the writings of Martial and other Roman luminaries. Moreover, the Roman army had learned valuable lessons from observing the way the Alans fought, which would help them enormously in the coming campaign in Parthia.42

If Parthia was seriously weakened by the struggle of king versus barons and the perennial motif of monarch versus pretender, to say nothing of serious incursions by Kushans, Sakas and Alans, it also held few of the cards in a sustained military struggle with Rome, for no other contemporary nation matched the Roman army in discipline, technique and efficiency. The Roman army was superbly trained, and its arms and equipment were superior to those of its enemies. Its commanders had perfected the use of cavalry as shock troops, and the skill of its engineers was legendary: whether the task was to build a bridge over the Danube or to break down the defences of ‘impregnable’ fortresses like Masada, they could always find a way.⁴³ At 500,000 strong, the army was a well-oiled machine. Its hierarchy was also a marvel of organisation, but class distinctions were important, for only men of senatorial rank could command a legion; members of the equestrian order were restricted to commanding the brigades of auxiliaries. The commander of a Roman legion was a legate, ranked as a senator and in his mid-thirties, who had already held a praetorship. Where there was only one legion in a province, the post of provincial governor and legionary commander was combined.⁴⁴ The legate served about three and a half years and had his family with him at his post. On military matters he relied heavily on the advice of the senior centurion (primus pilus), but his administrative deputy was an equestrian officer, the camp prefect (praefectus castrorum) chosen from ex-senior centurions. Technically outranking the camp prefect was the senatorial tribune, a young man of eighteen to nineteen; there were six tribunes in a legion, but the other five were knights. Before coming out to his army command, such a youth would have held one of the two minor magistracies in Rome known as the vigintivirate. The post of senatorial tribune was a military apprenticeship and was usually followed by the quaestorship. The senatorial tribune outranked the five equestrian tribunes in a legion, but everyone knew that these tribunes, men in their thirties, were the backbone of the army; though the same age as the legate, they had far more military experience.⁴⁵

The presence of a powerful army in any society usually spells trouble, for the temptation for the military to intervene in politics is huge. One of the wonders of the Roman empire was the way that military coups were largely avoided during the first two centuries AD, the two notable exceptions being in 69 (the ‘year of the four emperors’) and 193, on the death of Commodus. The depoliticisation of the army had several causes, but one of the important aspects was the increasingly provincial origin of the armed forces. Under Augustus 68 per cent of the army was of Italian origin, but this reduced to 48 per cent by the year AD 50 and 22 per cent by the year 100.49 When Marcus Aurelius came to the throne, only 2 per cent of the legionaries were of Italian origin. Demography provided the answer: 7,500 new recruits a year were needed for the legions, but, given ancient mortality rates, this would have equalled 17 per cent of all twenty-year-old males in Italy. If these soldiers then served abroad, it was obvious that Italy would rapidly become depopulated, hence the switch to foreign recruitment. The increasingly provincial origin of the army meant that Rome could uncouple military service from local loyalties, switching German legions to Syria, say. Long service on the frontier lessened interest in events at Rome, and meanwhile the link between citizenship and empowerment by military service had been severed. Moreover, there was no powerful officer class in Rome and no central army command.⁵⁰ In Rome itself the power vacuum was filled by the praetorian guard, which had its own ethos distinct from that of the legions; and the prefect of the guard was always of knightly rank and thus debarred from becoming emperor, and thus in turn less likely to be interested in a bid for power. For all these reasons Rome in the first two centuries AD never suffered from the disease of modern Latin America, where the military are politically ubiquitous. Yet this was only ever a relative consideration. No emperor could afford to ignore the army and its interests entirely, hence the frequent and munificent bounties.⁵¹

Even apart from the donatives, the costs of the Roman military establishment were astronomical. It cost 100 denarii to clothe a single centurion and thus 500,000 denarii to equip a normal-sized legion. With nine legions operating in peacetime, this meant an outlay of 4,500,000 denarii just to clothe them. In wartime this figure would be tripled at least. Food and drink were another massive item on the military budget, even if we accept that the Roman soldier, being smaller and older than the present-day front-liner, would need only 3,000 calories a day.⁵² There were twenty legions in the field at the height of the Punic War, but by the end of the first century this would have counted as a small army. In Vespasian’s reign there were twenty-nine legions (four in Britain, eight on the Rhine, seven on the Danube, eight in the East and one each in North Africa and Spain); even in the ‘peaceful’ reign of Antoninus Pius there were twenty-eight legions.⁵³ The total figure of 500,000 for the Roman armed forces has been disputed, but lower estimates depend on counting only the legionaries and the auxiliaries. If to these we add the praetorian and other guards, the paramilitary police in Rome (some 10,000 strong) and the irregulars or numeri raised from tribes on the fringes of the empire (Palmyran archers, Balearic slingers, and so on, who retained their traditional methods of fighting and were used for strictly limited objectives), we edge close to half a million.54 That figure is easily exceeded if we include also the marines and rowers of the fleets at Misenum, Ravenna, Alexandria and the Black Sea. In return for the massive costs incurred by the Roman state, Rome had the best-trained and most tightly disciplined force in the world, better equipped, protected and fed than any enemy, with better weaponry and armament, blessed with a superior organisation, which made more reserves available than any foe could hope to match. The tactic of the swift offensive was usually successful. Morale was high, and the aplomb and confidence of the legionaries was sky-high. Veterans claimed that they smiled when they saw the massed fire of a legion’s artillerymen (ballistae) whizzing over their heads when they were drawn up in rank, knowing how demoralised their opponents must be when they found they could not close the range. A Roman commander could usually ask his men for the extra ounce in battle and get it.⁵⁵

And so the Romans looked forward to the coming clash with Parthia with eager anticipation. The Parthians relied heavily on two tactics, used to devastating effect against the Romans at Carrhae: the charge by heavily armoured knights or cataphractarii, and a deluge of arrows raining down on an enemy fired by a throng of mounted archers.⁵⁶ The Parthians had become over-confident after the defeats of Crassus and Mark Antony and were overrated as military opponents as a result, but, certainly since the campaigns of Trajan, the Romans had the measure of them. Three counter-measures had been found effective: the use of slingers and other missile-firers as a primary weapon; the massed charge by heavy Roman cavalry; and the use of the square. At Carrhae the Romans had become disoriented and confused by the then-novel method of Parthian fighting, and had allowed themselves to become pincushions for a hail of Parthian arrows, prior to panicking when the Parthians unleashed their cataphractarii. But by Marcus’s time Roman generals had learned that by judicious use of archers and slingers, the Parthian horse archers could be reduced to little more than irritants. Yet, except at very short range, missile-throwers could make little impact on the cataphractarii.57 So the crucial thing in battle was to make sure the legionaries did not panic and could face the heavily mailed horsemen with confidence. The key was to create a huge square, with pikemen on the rim forming a hedge of steel; inside the square archers, slingers and cavalry would be readied for counter-attack. The square would also use pincer or blocking movements to obstruct certain avenues of attack and to furnish anchor points for the counter-offensive. Naturally such manoeuvres called for split-second timing, for otherwise the defenders might fragment dangerously, and here the discipline and training of the Romans paid off. By Marcus’s time a direct charge of cataphractarii against a legionary square was almost certain to be repelled.⁵⁸

The Romans would then face up to heavy cavalry in nine ranks. The first rank would hold its spear-like pikes at a forty-five-degree angle while the three ranks behind threw heavy spears, and the four ranks behind them hurled lighter throwing javelins; the ninth rank would contain archers. The ballistic trajectories were designed so that each of the three volleys would hit the charging cavalry at different points of their charge.⁵⁹ Meanwhile, if by chance the mounted archers had begun to cause demoralisation through their hail of arrows, contingency plans had been laid to deploy forces in a crescent formation or to order an advance on the double. Properly commanded and directed, the legions were invulnerable to charges by the cataphractarii. Yet Roman tactics depended heavily on the Parthian willingness to offer pitched battle and on suitable terrain. It was difficult to form a square on the march or on hilly terrain and the Parthians, after some bad maulings, became more cautious and concentrated on long-range attrition and impeding communications.⁶⁰ Julius Caesar had planned to wear the Parthians down before bringing them to battle, and in his era the strategy might have worked, but not in the age of Marcus Aurelius.⁶¹ In fact the greatest obstacles to Roman success in Parthia were always geography, climate and disease rather than Parthian military prowess. It was hunger, disease and cold that had turned Mark Antony’s retreat into a kind of forerunner of Napoleon withdrawing from Moscow. By foolishly venturing into Media, he had limited the availability of the Roman army’s staple cereals.⁶² It followed that, bearing in mind sickness rates, logistics, the need to protect supply lines and communications and to garrison captured strongholds, Lucius Verus would need to put massive armies into the field, creating the need in turn for massive logistical support. As Tacitus had long before pointed out, it was the scale of this task, not the quality of the Parthian army, that made a permanent Roman conquest of the old Persian empire a pipe-dream.63

Although the normal campaigning season in the East ran only from March to June, it was clearly imperative for the Romans to turn the tide in the year 163. After a year’s preparation, spent building roads and bringing the legions up to full fighting pitch, Verus gave the nod to Statius Priscus to attempt phase one of the Parthian war: clearing the enemy out of Syria and reoccupying Armenia.⁶⁴ Priscus took with him the legions I Minervia and V Macedonica, with their respective legates M. Claudius Fronto and P. Martius Verus, on a twenty-day march through mountains, covering 300 miles. We cannot be certain of the route: the Romans probably crossed the Syrian frontier near Zeugma (modern Birecik, 37º N, 38º E) and then headed north-east, either to the head of Lake Urmia or via Lake Van; Latin inscriptions show detachments of the legions at Ecmiadzin, just south of Mouth Ararat.⁶⁵ The rigours of off-season campaigning in Armenia were well known to the Romans, but evidently Priscus had laid his plans carefully and intended to debouch from the mountains at just the right moment to take advantage of the supplies in the rich agricultural region around the Armenian capital of Artaxata.⁶⁶ Everything went according to plan, and Priscus crowned his achievement by storming and taking Artaxata itself, where he proceeded to evict Vologases’s puppet Pacorus and install the pro-Roman Sohaemus (an Arsacid and a Roman senator). The storming of the Armenian capital was evidently a bloody and destructive affair, for the Romans rebuilt it some thirty miles closer to the frontier and renamed it Kainopolis, leaving behind a strong garrison of vexillationes attached to Legion XV Apollinaris.⁶⁷ Statius Priscus gained much kudos from the affair and added to his reputation. Unfortunately he also attracted sycophants posing as genuine historians. Lucian mentions one would-be Thucydides who credited Priscus with being able to kill twenty-seven of the enemy purely with the power of his war-cry.⁶⁸ The war provided the brilliantly satirical Lucian with some of his best material. He poked merciless fun both at the chroniclers’ abysmal knowledge of geography and at their ludicrous exaggerations, of which the following is a good example: ‘The Third Legion, the Celtic contingent and a small Moorish division have crossed the Indus.’69 Lucian’s withering scorn may even have frightened off chroniclers of genuine talent, who feared being the target of his humour, and this may partly account for the exiguous sources that remain for the campaign of 163.⁷⁰ Probably the most important event late that year was that Statius Priscus died suddenly. He was eventually succeeded as governor of Cappadocia by Martius Verus in 166, with Julius Severus acting as a stopgap appointee.⁷¹

The war in 163 was not confined to Armenia, for further south the Romans were fighting on a second front. The Parthians showed contemptuous defiance by deposing Mannus, the pro-Roman ruler of Osrhoene, a principality in north-west Mesopotamia with a capital at Edessa. The Romans responded by advancing on the Euphrates, with two legions, commanded by C. Avidius Cassius (in charge of 111 Gallica), together with II Adiutrix, stiffened by reinforcements from the Danube and commanded by Q. Antistius Adventus. Alongside them fought a large number of vexillationes commanded by P. Iulius Germinius Marcianus, another transferred Danube general.⁷² These forces collided with the Parthians at Sura, on the Roman side of the river, suggesting that the Romans had still not completely cleared the enemy out of Syria proper. Lucian speaks of a hard-fought battle, which the Romans won; the star of the occasion seems to have been Avidius Cassius. Unfortunately, while Lucian scoffs at the casualty figures of 70,000, as reported by one of his despised would-be historians, he neglects to give us any figures himself. But we hear of horses without firm footing on icy ground, hands numbed with cold, and archers with bows made limp by incessant rain.⁷³ Cassius then proceeded to move forces down the Euphrates and occupied the towns of Dausara and Nicephorium (modern Rakka, 35º 50' N, 39º 5' E) on the Parthian bank (at the confluence of the Balikh and the Euphrates). The headwaters of the Euphrates were secured when Roman forces marching south from their victories in Armenia entered Osrhoene and occupied the town of Anthemusia, south-west of Edessa.⁷⁴ Elated by these successes, at the end of 163 Lucius Verus put out peace feelers to the Parthians, but Vologases, incredibly, still thought he would win the war and rejected the proposals contemptuously, to Verus’s mortification; he later confessed to Fronto that he felt humiliated by the refusal of terms.75

Verus himself continued to be a source of concern to Marcus Aurelius in Rome. His troupe of players, jugglers, mime artists, musicians and assorted thespians interested Verus more than the war itself, and the oligarchs of Syria tittered behind their hands at his riotous behaviour. When the war finally ended, he took back with him to Italy such a multitude of actors that wags remarked ‘that he seemed to have ended not the Parthian war but the Thespian one’.⁷⁶ Marcus received weekly reports from his cousin, the senator M. Annius Libo, whom he had sent out as Verus’s ‘minder’: all were censorious in tone. In time Libo got above himself and forgot that he was dealing with a co-emperor. There was a stand-up row between the two men, in which Libo asserted that he had the greater authority as he was Marcus’s plenipotentiary. Shortly afterwards Libo died suddenly; the inevitable rumour spread that Verus had had him poisoned. Undoubtedly he was irked that Marcus had sent out an agent to spy on him, and was alleged to have taken his revenge later by marrying off Libo’s sister to his favourite freedman Agaclytus; this in turn was said to have so incensed Marcus that he refused to attend the wedding feast.⁷⁷ Perhaps more seriously, Verus seemed to have no interest in the war at all. He spent his winters at Laodicea on the River Orontes and most of his summers at the health and leisure resort of Daphne, a suburb of Antioch. He visited the front at the Euphrates just once in four years, and then only at the urgent insistence of his staff, who stressed the issue of his military credibility. Disingenuously he told Fronto that anxieties about the war brought him to despair and ‘night and day made me utterly wretched’. To mitigate all this, it should perhaps be mentioned that Verus was by common consent a good delegator, who let talented generals have their head and did not interfere.⁷⁸

Having gained Marcus’s ear, Fronto then turned his attention to the co-emperor: as a good politician, he anticipated the possible consequences of a great triumph for Verus in the East. Relations between Verus and Fronto had reached a low point around 161–2, partly because of Fronto’s ‘old Roman’ contempt for the actors of whom Verus was so fond. Moreover, to his horror Fronto found that he had gone out on a limb by vehemently attacking a man named Asclepiodotus in a speech and then discovering that he was in Verus’s inner circle.⁸⁵ Fronto wrote a grovelling letter to Verus in Syria to patch things up, which the co-emperor replied to gracefully. No fool himself, he was already looking forward to the time when he would need an official chronicler of his campaigns, and Fronto seemed just right for the job. Verus encouraged Fronto to rebut the many canards that were circulating about his court in Rome. Fronto warmed to the task. Soon the man who had condemned spectacles and thespians was performing a 180-degree turn and sailing over his own intellectual tow-line. Verus’s love of the theatre, Fronto said, showed that – like Trajan – he was ‘inclusive’ and anti-elitist, enjoying the same tastes as the people. As for his love of games and circuses, why, these were not just necessary for social stability, but benefited all classes, unlike the annona or free corn issue, which was a gift to the proletariat alone.⁸⁶ He also asserted that Verus’s personal charisma lifted the morale of his troops, and here Fronto was on firmer ground, for inscriptions do indeed testify to Verus’s popularity with the Roman ‘squaddies’.87

The year 164 was spent in meticulous preparation for the invasion of Parthia. The Romans set a lot of store by cryptic support from their client or friendly states inside the Parthian empire or on its borders, and secret agents spent much of the year suborning important cities and states on the proposed line of march: Edessa (in Osrhoene), Adiabene, Dura-Europos, Hatra, Nisibis.⁸⁸ Rome had a strong hand in this area, for it had client kingdoms virtually in the heart of the Parthian empire, such as the King of Mesena (Charcene) in the extreme south of Mesopotamia, where Trajan had received a good welcome.⁸⁹ More important was the training of the army. The field commander was to be Avidius Cassius, who had made such an impression at the battle of Sura when commanding Legio III Gallica. Cassius was himself a Syrian senator; his father Heliodorus had not been, though he was one of Hadrian’s top officials and had been Prefect of Egypt in his reign.⁹⁰ Avidius Cassius soon made his mark through soldierly ability, but more especially because he was a ferocious martinet. The Syrian legions had at the outset of the war been slack and undisciplined (though the extent of this is debated), but Cassius soon put the fear of the gods into them by his draconian practices. He winkled the scrimshankers among his legionaries out of the fleshpots of Danae, where they were accustomed to loll in hot baths; one of his first decrees was that there would be no more bathing except in rivers and streams. He made some early savage examples, beheading unruly troops or cutting off their hands for even minor infractions of discipline. He forbade his troops to carry anything with them on the march except lard, biscuits and vinegar; anyone caught disobeying the rules was instantly executed. A decree was promulgated that anyone found in Danae in uniform would be publicly flogged. Another of Cassius’s innovations was a weekly kit inspection.⁹¹ He addressed the men first and told them that if they did not shape up, they would be confined to their tents all winter under martial law – and the legionaries knew from bitter experience that their commander was no bluffer.

The second Roman army, under Avidius Cassius, achieved spectacular success. Against strong opposition Cassius crossed the Euphrates on a bridge of boats (it is uncertain where, and various candidates have been suggested: Zeugma, Sura, Nicephorium) and advanced on Dura-Europos where the Parthians awaited him. A ferocious battle ensued, in which the Parthians were utterly defeated. Once again casualties of 70,000 were mentioned – a recurring figure with which Lucian had predictable fun.96 It is uncertain why the Parthians were so massively vanquished. It was said that Vologases’s vassals had refused to turn out for him, and it may be that he received less-than-adequate support from the people of Dura-Europos, a wholly Macedonian city only loosely affiliated to the Parthian empire, where the only language spoken was Greek, in contrast to the Greek/Syriac bilingualism of Edessa, Hatra and Palmyra. Since the Parthians derived most of their revenue from tolls on trade routes, and Dura-Europos was a kind of oasis for goods from the Silk Road being taken from Media across the desert to Palmyra and southern Syria, perhaps the burghers of Dura-Europos were glad to welcome the Romans as conquerors.⁹⁷

Towards the end of 165 Avidius Cassius launched the second phase of the campaign and advanced down the Euphrates to its near-junction with the Tigris. The Romans quickly mastered the art of amphibious warfare, for Mesopotamia was striated with canals – to prevent flooding from the Euphrates, which was engorged in spring with melting snow coming down from the north, and to link the Euphrates with the Tigris.⁹⁸ Where the two great rivers almost converged were located the twin cities of Ctesiphon and Seleucia. Ctesiphon was the Parthian capital and a prestige target, but Seleucia on the Tigris was a far more important objective. Ctesiphon, originally a winter resort for the kings of Parthia on account of its salubrious climate, was by this date mainly used for billeting troops, and its significance was purely symbolic: although the Romans destroyed it three times within a hundred years (in the campaigns of Trajan, Lucius Verus and Septimius Severus), its loss affected the loosely structured Parthian empire not at all.⁹⁹ Avidius Cassius put it to the torch, just as Trajan had done before him.

Seleucia was a very different matter. Eighteen miles south of modern Baghdad, and a showpiece of Hellenistic culture, it was widely considered superior to Antioch and comparable only to Alexandria. Pliny the Elder reported that the plan of its walls resembled the shape of an eagle spreading its wings.¹⁰⁰ A huge city, with a population estimated at anywhere between 400,000 and 600,000, it was a key trading centre handling goods from central Asia, India, Persia and Africa and commanding the southern Silk Road running from Bactria and Ecbatana into Syria. From Seleucia the nearby Euphrates was navigable all the way to the Persian Gulf. Under the Parthians it retained some kind of Hellenistic city-state status, but evidently the Parthians did not entirely trust Seleucia’s loyalty, for they had built up Ctesiphon to emulate it and then constructed an entirely new city of Vologesocerta as a trade rival, with the result that by the time of Cassius’s assault, Seleucia was experiencing a relative decline in prosperity.101 Perhaps this, rather than Avidius Cassius’s menacing legions, explains why Seleucia opened its gates without a fight, having secured favourable terms of capitulation. But some time late in 165 Seleucia was brutally sacked and ravaged by rampaging legionaries. There was enormous loss of life (30,000 deaths by one calculation), and the Romans were said to have taken 40,000 prisoners.¹⁰² Exactly what happened is unclear. The Romans, predictably enough, said that Seleucia had not kept the terms of surrender, so that fighting broke out. But ‘failure to keep the terms of surrender’ was the ancient Roman version of ‘shot while trying to escape’. Some say that the disaster was a result of fighting between the Greek and Syrian factions in the city. There was a cultural division in Seleucia between the Syriac-speaking Asiatic people (Pliny the Elder calls them ‘Arabs’) and their Jewish allies on one side and the Greek-speaking majority on the other.¹⁰³ The famous stasis, or trans-class factional strife, had claimed many victims in the heyday of the Greek city-states, and it is not impossible that wholesale massacre was triggered by some low political intrigue. But the overwhelming likelihood is that Cassius’s troops, bedazzled by the wealth of the city, simply ran amok and their officers were unable to control them. Avidius Cassius, who had made his reputation as a disciplinarian, was faced with a crisis of credibility and so wheeled out the old ‘failure to keep the terms of surrender’ dodge. The result was disaster in more senses than one, for some think that the plague that would overwhelm Rome in the following years was picked up by marauding legionaries in the temple of Apollo at Seleucia.¹⁰⁴

The Parthians were now well beaten, and the Romans, emulating Trajan, extended their dominion right down to the Persian Gulf, though their hold over the areas south of Seleucia were precarious; they really held narrow strips of cultivated land rather than defended frontiers as such.¹⁰⁵ Verus and Avidius Cassius thought that, whereas imitating Alexander and trying to go all the way to India was several bridges too far, they ought to outdo Trajan with their conquests. This was the genesis of the obscure Roman expedition into Media proper in the summer of 166. Ancient Media roughly comprised the north-west of modern Iran, with some extensions into Azerbaijan. To the north were the Elburz mountains and beyond them the Caspian Sea, but the heartland of Media was the area around modern Teheran and Hamadan.106 Media was important for two reasons: it was the agricultural core of the Parthian empire and it controlled the entire silk trade with China. Known for its profusion of sheep, goats, horses and clover, it possessed fertile plains that fed the realm. Its capital Ecbatana (modern Hamadan) was the terminus for the Silk Road that ran from China to Afghanistan and then due west from Herat to Ecbatana. Hamadan was thus the central node from which various subsidiary trade routes spiralled off to the south – to Syria via the Fertile Crescent, across the desert via Palmyra or south through Mesopotamia via Ctesiphon and Seleucia.¹⁰⁷

To strike deep into Media was thus to sever Parthia’s economic lifeline, and there was the added consideration that to sack Ecbatana, the traditional summer palace of the Parthian kings, would add to the tally of palaces in which Ctesiphon and Seleucia already featured. The incursion into Media was led by Avidius Cassius, commanding Legio III Gallica and VI Ferrata Palestina. Perhaps at some stage in the planning – and bearing in mind the ‘imitation of Alexander’ that always weighed so much with Roman glory-hunters – the fabled Caspian Gates featured as a target. In distinction to the modern location for the Caspian Gates (near Derbent in Dagestan in the extreme south-east of Russia), the ancient Gates were located near the southeastern shore of the Caspian (where Alexander had pursued Bessus of Sogdiana in the 320s BC). Pliny the Elder described them as follows: ‘[mountains] pierced by a narrow pass eight miles long, scarcely broad enough for a single line of wagon traffic, the whole of it a work of engineering. It is overhung on either side by crags that look as though they have been exposed to the action of fire, the countryside over a range of twenty-eight miles being entirely waterless.’¹⁰⁸ There was a ‘contradiction’, however, between the imperatives of ‘imitation of Alexander’ and economic motives. It makes most sense to assume that Avidius Cassius departed from Seleucia and struck almost due east and then north towards the Caspian, possibly following a route that would take him through modern Quom and Teheran. On the other hand, if Ecbatana (Hamadan) was his aim, he would have had a shorter journey north-east. The stark truth is that we do not know which of these routes he took. We can be certain of two things. Because of the snow and ice that beset Media from December to March, he would not have left before the beginning of April, which left him just three months of good campaigning weather. And the results of the invasion were highly disappointing.109 From the silence in the sources we may infer that Cassius ran into severe difficulties and retreated rapidly, but that this was immediately hushed up so as not to spoil Lucius Verus’s triumphalism. It all reinforced the ancient Roman aristocratic wisdom that it was mindless to attempt the conquest of Parthia: even if you conquered the realm, you would then need a gigantic army to hang on to the annexed territory.¹¹⁰

A sober analysis of Lucius Verus’s four-year Parthian campaign would conclude that it was in many respects a rerun of Trajan’s exploits fifty years earlier. But judicious conclusions were not Verus’s style: he wanted to be hailed as a unique warrior, even though he had seen nothing of the fighting. He showed no compunction in awarding himself the titles of Armeniacus in 164, Parthicus in 165 and, most bare-facedly, Medicus in 166.¹¹¹ Marcus Aurelius always had his doubts about the value of these honorific titles and accepted them for himself only reluctantly, so as not to humiliate his colleague: to refuse them would be tantamount to calling Verus a liar. Whereas a salutation as conqueror of Armenia was no more than a statement of the plain truth, to claim to have conquered Parthia and Media was, for Marcus, to be economical with the truth. He made his feelings plain after the death of Verus by swiftly dropping the latter two titles.¹¹² But Verus could not get enough of flattery and fawning for the renown he had won through the talents of Statius Priscus and Avidius Cassius. He made a shrewd choice in appointing Fronto as his official campaign historian. He ordered Avidius Cassius and Martius Verus to make all their documentation available and made it quite clear to Fronto what he required of him. ‘I am ready to fall in with any suggestions as long as my exploits are set in a bright light by you. . . One thing I don’t wish to point out to you – the pupil to his master – but to offer for your consideration, that you should dwell at length on the causes and the early stages of the war, and especially our ill success in my absence. Further I think it essential to make quite clear the great superiority of the Parthians before my arrival, that the magnitude of my achievements may be manifest.’113 This was very clever. Verus realised that he could not get away with claiming to have commanded the armies – everyone knew he barely stirred from Danae and Laodicea – but it would be hard to refute his thesis that he had prepared and animated an army in poor shape. The Verus–Fronto collaboration over the Parthian war was one of the most striking examples of ‘spin’ in the ancient world.

Fronto rose to the challenge magnificently, producing a masterpiece of sycophancy, an olio of exaggerations, half-truths and sometimes plain nonsense. The study of rhetoric had certainly taught the old man how to deploy both suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. The first thing to insinuate was that the Roman army in Syria had been in a lamentable state when Verus took over.

The soldiers at Antioch were wont to spend their time clapping actors, and were more often found in the nearest café gardens than in their ranks. Horses were shaggy from neglect but every hair plucked from their riders; it was a rare sight to see a soldier with arm or leg hairy . . . Pontius Laelianus, a man of character and a disciplinarian of the old school, in some cases ripped up their cuirasses with his finger tips; he found horses saddled with cushions, and by his orders the little pommels on them were split open and the down plucked from their pillions as from geese. Few of the soldiers could vault upon their steeds, the rest scrambled up clumsily by dint of heel or knee or ham; not many could make their spears hurtle, most tossed them like toy lances without verve and vigour. Gambling was rife in camp; sleep was night-long or, if a watch was kept, it was over the wine cups . . . The most demoralised of all, however, were the Syrian soldiers: mutinous, disobedient, seldom with their units, straying in front of their prescribed posts, roving about like scouts, tipsy from noon one day to the next, unused even to carrying their arms and, as one man after another laid them aside from dislike of toil, they were soon like skirmishers or half-naked slingers. Apart from scandals of this kind, they had been so cowed by unsuccessful battles as to turn their backs at the first sight of the Parthians and to listen for the trumpet as the signal for flight.¹¹⁴

Although some of the Syrian units may not have been fighting fit, much of this is stock cliché and standard Roman propaganda of the ‘West good, East bad’ variety. It was an a priori staple of Roman ideology that Italy represented stoicism, asceticism, martial valour and civic virtu while the Near East represented corruption, luxury and decadence.115 But Fronto soon moved beyond general stereotype to a personal paean to Verus. He claimed that the co-emperor marched on foot at the head of his troops, disdaining the burning sun and the choking dust, going bare-headed, visiting sick troops, enjoying an ascetic table with local wines, snatching fitful sleep. He went completely over the top in describing Verus as a veteran of battles, sieges and the storming of citadels, lavishing spoils on his men. Not mentioning the fact that Vologases’s feudal vassals had let him down, Fronto spoke of the Parthians as doughty, well-nigh invincible opponents. Soon came the inevitable comparison with earlier emperors, especially Trajan. Where Trajan had set out for his Parthian war with the veterans of the Dacian campaign, Lucius Verus had had either to raise new men by a levy or use reserve legions; by every conceivable index, Verus’s achievement in Parthia was superior to Trajan’s. Fronto also took the opportunity to have a go at his old bête noire Hadrian, a man, he alleged, energetic in all the wrong ways and about all the wrong things; he was never energetic about training armies.¹¹⁶ The extent of Fronto’s humbug and two-facedness becomes clear when we find him writing to Avidius Cassius, praising him not just for his unremitting vigour on the march, his unerring instinct for the right moment to give battle and his strategic genius, but also for restoring discipline among the Syrian legions, in flat contradiction to the account in the official history, which gave all the credit to Verus.¹¹⁷ But Verus, hardly surprisingly, was well pleased with his ex-teacher’s fawning endeavours.

June 166 marked the definite end of Verus’s Parthian wars. The Misenum fleet anchored off the mouth of the Orontes in late May, and a departure date was fixed for early July, giving the legions time to get back to the northern frontier before the winter snows.¹¹⁸ Claudius Fronto and his fellow-field commanders were retained in the East for the time being, all as governors of provinces and holding absentee consulships in 166 and 167.¹¹⁹ Marcus Aurelius vowed to watch the eastern frontier more closely in future, appointed Martius Verus to the governorship of Cappadocia and conferred on Avidius Cassius a special imperium in the East, making him a kind of viceroy.¹²⁰ The system of client kings was tightened. Mannus VII was placed on the throne of Edessa, which became a colony in all but name. Osrhoene became a vassal state again, while the free city of Carrhae was raised to the rank of colony. The only acquisition through conquest that the Romans held on to was Dura-Europos, though it is possible that garrisons were left at Nisibis in eastern Mesopotamia.121 As for the wider effects of the war, it can be said that it certainly cost the loyal inhabitants of Asia Minor dear. The sophist Flavius Damianus, secretary of Ephesus council, provided food at his own expense for thirteen months for a constant coming and going of armies, and there were similar stories elsewhere, mitigated to an extent by the fact that the presence of large numbers of troops stimulated demand for the products of the Greek merchants of Anatolia.¹²² There was heavy looting in the war zones: for example, the great statue of Apollo in Seleucia was taken back to Rome and placed in the temple of Apollo on the Palatine.¹²³ Most of all, though, Rome had demonstrated that it still had the resources to undertake major campaigns successfully and had definitively established its military superiority over the Parthians, though in a war so thinly chronicled there will always be sceptics about the extent of their success.¹²⁴ The devastating conquest of Parthia by Septimius Severus in the 190s was a kind of coda to Verus’s wars, achieving much the same results, but with even greater slaughter.¹²⁵ By the dawn of the third century AD the Parthian empire was on the ropes. But, given that it was replaced by a far more powerful and fearsome Persian dynasty, which would virtually bring the Roman empire in the East to its knees, the law of unintended consequences was never seen more clearly than in Lucius Verus’s ‘glittering triumph’.