THE ESSENTIAL TRAGEDY of Marcus Aurelius was that he, a reclusive and bookish would-be philosopher-king, had to spend his reign in continual warfare. No sooner had the Parthian campaign ended and Rome’s eastern frontiers been made secure than a far more serious threat appeared on the empire’s northern limits. Rome was haunted by three main ghosts from the past: the military debacle at Cannae inflicted by Hannibal in 216 BC; the slave revolt of Spartacus in 73–71 BC; and the spectre of the Germans in the barbarian wastes to the north. The German bugbear was the most terrifying of all, since it combined the element of military disaster associated with Hannibal with the chaos principle associated with Spartacus. No man could have been less equipped to deal with the crisis that now broke over the empire than Marcus Aurelius. For his own odd, prudential, political and psychological reasons, Antoninus Pius had denied his successor all experience both of military matters and of ‘abroad’ for more than twenty years of his adulthood. Marcus had never left Italy and scarcely ever stirred from the environs of Rome. Moreover, the opposite of Hadrian in so many ways, he seems to have had an intellectual disdain for travel. He thought that the only journey worth taking was an internal one. ‘People try to get away from it all – travelling to the country, the beach or the mountains. You always wish you could do. Which is absurd: you can do so anytime you like: simply go within.’1 This was a typically Roman attitude, but not a good mindset for one fated to spend frozen winters campaigning in the desolate northern wilderness.
Marcus was thus triply handicapped when the threat from Germany manifested itself in the late 160s, quite apart from the lack of training and experience that Antoninus had unpardonably left as his bequest to his heir and adopted son. Not only did he regard warfare as a contemptible activity, as did his great influence Epictetus, who suffered from the delusion that most wars (he instanced the Trojan, Persian and Peloponnesian wars as well as Trajan’s Dacian campaign) broke out by accident.2 As a Stoic, Marcus also considered defending the empire an ‘indifferent’ moral end; and as a ‘little Roman’ he shared Horace’s famous scepticism about travelling to foreign lands.3 He had to take what comfort he could from the gung-ho enthusiasm for war inculcated by another admired figure, Heraclitus, who said, ‘War is the father of all and the king of all . . . We should realise that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things must come into being and pass away through strife.’4
Roman encounters with hostile and dangerous German tribes went back 300 years, and the massive armed clashes at the end of the second century AD were considered the most serious crisis the Roman republic had faced since Hannibal and the Punic Wars. Large numbers – maybe 250,000 in all – of the Cimbri tribe, based in Jutland and southern Scandinavia, began migrating south in the years 120–115 BC; the reason is uncertain, with some historians opting for floods of biblical dimensions and others for a more generalised climate change.5 Moving into Gaul, the Cimbri heavily defeated the Romans at Boreia in 112 and, in the years 109–107, won three more battles against the legions. The seemingly unstoppable German tide reached its apogee at Arausio in 105, when the Cimbri defeated a Roman army 80,000 strong, because the two consuls (G. Mallius Maximus and Q. Serrilius Caepo) refused to cooperate. Some military experts claim that casualties at this battle amounted to more than 80,000 and that Arausio notched up the fourth-highest casualty rate in all one-day battles in recorded history before the twentieth century. With Rome at their mercy, the Cimbri and their allies did not go for the jugular. Instead, the Cimbri proper diverted into a protracted raid on Spain, while the Teutones marked time in Gaul. The German crisis, which shook Rome to its foundations, gave Gaius Marius his great opportunity.6 Learning that in the year 102 the Cimbri and Teutones intended to unite for an invasion of Italy by two different routes (along the Mediterranean coast and through the Brenner Pass), Marius marched against the Teutones while his consular colleague Q. Lutatius Catullus was given the task of halting the Cimbri in the Brenner. Marius annihilated the Teutones at Aquae Sextae, but Catulus botched his part of the operation. Marius was forced to march against the Cimbri in Cisalpine Gaul. There, the following year (101) he engaged them at Vercellae (seventy miles north-west of Milan) and annihilated them in a victory so crushing that the ancient sources (never to be trusted in estimating numbers) speak of 140,000 casualties. The completeness of the Roman victory can be gauged from one significant pointer. The German women killed their children and then slaughtered themselves to avoid slavery, so that a war that began with mass migration ended with mass suicide.7
Nevertheless, the memory of the Teutones and Cimbri was never far from the surface in the Roman collective unconscious and was played on forty or so years later by that self-publicist Julius Caesar, a past master of propaganda and the black arts of spin. Historians dispute whether Caesar, in his famous conquest of Gaul in the years 59–49 BC deliberately picked a fight with the German ‘king’ Ariovistus or whether he genuinely perceived German migration into Gaul as the prelude to another Teutonic tide washing into Italy. It is clear that he was determined to be the power in Gaul and that Ariovistus resented this and considered that Caesar had infringed on his sphere of influence. Inconclusive peace parleys petered out and then, in 58, battle was joined, with Caesar provoking the enemy to attack deliberately, having learned that German soothsayers had prophesied to Ariovistus that he could triumph only if he waited for the full moon.8 In the ensuing battle Caesar decisively defeated the enemy and massacred his routed foe in large numbers. Four years later there was a further defeat and rout of German migrants.9 Well aware of the role of Germans as bogeymen in Rome, in his Commentaries on the Gallic War, Caesar played the ‘Cimbri and Teutones’ card no fewer than five times. As with much of his classic work on the war in Gaul, Caesar was forever insinuating self-serving propaganda into his brilliant storytelling, in effect telling his fellow-Romans that he was saving them from the nightmare of the northern barbarians and skating over the objection that, when appointed to his command, he was not supposed to be operating so provocatively close to the Rhine.10 The value of Caesar’s writings for the historian of early Germany is the mention of a number of tribes operating with Ariovistus, who was leader of the Suebi: these include Harudes, Triboces, Vangiones, Nemetes, Sedussii and the people who would later be Marcus Aurelius’s bane, the Marcomanni.11
The German frontier remained relatively quiet for another forty years until the first Roman emperor, Augustus, decided on a policy of expansion across the Rhine. The reasons are obscure: it may have been simple glory-hunting by Augustus or, more seriously, he might genuinely have been concerned about secure frontiers. Some say that a salient motive was to protect the north–south amber route with its terminus on the Danube, at modern Vienna.12 In the year 15 BC Augustus sent his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus on a successful campaign against German tribes living near the Alps. In the year 11 Drusus waged an equally successful war as far east as the River Weser, and two years later moved against the peoples east of the lower Rhine: the Chatti, Suebi and Cherusci; this campaign, however, was less decisive. After Drusus’s death, Tiberius took over command of all Roman legions in Germany, and by AD 6 it was generally considered that the German tribes were either conquered or pacified. Then two events changed everything. The Marcomanni, now based in Bohemia, emerged as the principal power in Germany. Their leader, Maroboduus, who had been educated in Rome and trained with the legions, in effect set up the first German ‘state’ – a federation of tribes stretching from the Baltic to the Danube.13 But the Romans viewed this Marcomannic federation as a threat to their Danube bases at Noricum and Pannonia and prepared a campaign of conquest to stifle this German state at birth. Tiberius was switched from the Rhine to the Danube to oversee operations in AD 7, the command on the Rhine was given to P. Vinctilius Varus.14 The assumption was that the Romans had nothing to fear on the Rhine since the most powerful tribe there, the Cherusci, were pro-Roman. To a point that was true. Segestes, their peacetime leader, was pro-Roman. The Romans had perfected ‘divide and rule’ tactics when dealing with the German tribes. They liked to support one faction against another in the internal tribal power struggles, usually trying to detach the nobility from the common people so as to create a loyal native elite.15 But the Cherusci war chief, Arminius, who had been elected to that position in AD 6 at the age of twenty-six, had ambitions to rival those of Maroboduus. While not yet openly declaring himself Rome’s enemy – he too had served with distinction in the legions – he began surreptitiously to build up his own alliance of hawkish Cherusci and disaffected warriors from other tribes.16
The Cherusci lived on either side of the middle Weser as far as the Elbe. In September of the year AD 9 Varus, commanding three legions (17th, 18th and 19th) plus auxiliaries (20,000 men in all), was advancing through the forests that lay between the Ems and Weser rivers. Here Arminius and his men trapped Varus in a brilliantly laid ambush in the Teutoburg forest (near modern Osnabrück). When Varus saw that all was lost, he committed suicide. The 20,000 Romans were slaughtered to a man, either in the battle itself or by being sacrificed afterwards in gruesome rituals to the Germans’ gods.17 When told of the disaster, Augustus was inconsolable and was said to wander round his palace crying out to no one in particular, ‘Varus, give me back my legions!’18 Tiberius had to abandon his project to conquer the Marcomanni. This was the moment when, if Maroboduus and his Marcomanni had made common cause with Arminius and the Cherusci, the entire Roman client system beyond the Alps would have collapsed and Rome itself would have been in deadly danger from the combined forces. As it was, only the presence of the Roman fleet kept coastal tribes like the Frisians loyal. Arminius even sent Maroboduus Varus’s head as a supposed incentive to join him.19 But Maroboduus and Arminius hated each other, and neither was willing to concede eminence to the other. The upshot was war between the Cherusci and Marcomanni, which gave Rome the breathing space in which to recover. Arminius gradually lost his commanding position, being opposed by Segestes and the pro-Roman party at home and by Maroboduus abroad.
In AD 13, the year before his death, Augustus sent Drusus’s son Germanicus to command eight legions on the Rhine and retrieve the situation in Germany. For two years he and Arminius fought a series of inconclusive battles. Finally in AD 16 Germanicus won a face-saving, though not decisive, battle against Arminius, with the help of pro-Roman members of the Cherusci allied to Segestes.20 Tiberius, who wished to reverse Augustus’s forward policy in Germany, then considered that revenge had been taken and honour satisfied; he ordered general withdrawal and retrenchment. At the same time Segestes, who had been held prisoner by Arminius since the Teutoburg disaster, escaped to the Rhine, where he was retained by the Romans as a ‘pretender’ to leadership of the Cherusci; it is said that he had to endure the humiliation of watching some of his closest kin being paraded in triumph after Germanicus’s victory in 16.21 Maroboduus, after a protracted war with Arminius, also fled to the Romans and was kept by them in honourable retirement at Ravenna, again as a pretender to the kingship of the Marcomanni.22 With all his enemies dispersed, Arminius’s hour seemed to have struck. But he developed megalomania and aspired to be recognised as king of the Cherusci, even laying plans to replace the clan system with a quasi-feudal hierarchy of personal retainers, thus alienating the very ‘proletarian’ tribesmen whose help he had previously successfully called on against Segestes. In the year 21 Arminius was killed by his own people.23 Soon afterwards the Cherusci fell apart as a significant factor in German politics, racked by civil war.
Under Claudius and Nero the Roman presence in Germany tended to cluster around the Taunus–Wetteran salient and the Black Forest–Neckar river area (near the source of the Danube). Tribes who accepted the status of Roman clients in Nero’s reign included the Cherusci, the Vannian kings of the Suebi on the middle Danube and the Quadi and Marcomanni in Bohemia and Slovakia. The Romans built forts round the Taunus salient, on the Neckar and around the headwaters of the Rhine.24 The Rhine was ceasing to be a problem area as the power of the Cherusci declined. There was a bloody conflict between the Cherusci and Chatti (who lived to the south-west, around the upper Weser and the Diemel), which began in 85 and dragged on for years. At the end of it the Cherusci, erstwhile destroyers of Rome, had been fatally weakened and were henceforth of negligible importance.25 But, as if in compensation, a new threat arose on the Danube. The Sarmatian tribes (principally the Iazyges and the Roxolani), migrating west in large numbers from the steppes north of the Black Sea and debouching onto the Hungarian and Wallachian plain, threatened to overwhelm the Danube frontier. Before his death Nero was said to be planning an ambitious expedition into the Caucasus, aimed at eliminating the Sarmatians and the Alans once and for all. To this end he raised a new legion of Italian recruits, all at least six feet tall, which he called ‘Alexander’s phalanx’.26 Whether this was a serious response to a perceived threat, a piece of Neronian glory-hunting or a simple piece of kite-flying cannot be determined, for Nero himself was toppled in the year 68. In the confused maelstrom of the ‘year of the four emperors’ that followed, the Iazyges shrewdly backed Vespasian, the eventual winner, but the Roxolani made three separate raids against the empire, heedless of who would win the contest for the purple.27 Nevertheless it would be true to say that in the reign of Vespasian, who enjoyed the backing of most Germans and most major players along the Danube, the perennial Roman anxiety about the German menace abated.
Matters took a more serious turn under Domitian. While the Cherusci were fading away in the west, the Sarmatians allied themselves with the Dacians of Transylvania. Domitian found himself campaigning against Dacians, Sarmatians and the Suebi and devoting much of his military resources to the Danube. When he called on the Quadi and Marcomanni to supply troops for these operations, as they had to Vespasian, they refused, alleging that he was a treaty-breaker and had not honoured his commitments.28 The enraged Domitian struck back and eventually found himself at war with the Quadi and Marcomanni as well. The fact that he had been spectacularly inept at Danubian diplomacy did not stop him from elaborating the most grandiose and quixotic plans for encircling the Quadi, Marcomanni and Iazyges in a grand-slam strategy.29 The truth, however, was that Domitian’s campaigns were singularly unsuccessful. He was defeated by a coalition of Dacians, the Quadi and the Marcomanni, while the Sarmatians wiped out an entire legion. A victory he gained in a minor skirmish was a face-saver portrayed at Rome as a great triumph, but the reality was that Domitian had to pay the Dacian king Decebalus tribute to bring the war to an end.30
By the end of the first century AD two significant changes were visible on the German frontier: the switch of Roman resources from the Rhine to the Danube; and the increasing Romanisation of Germania, the name given to all the lands north of Switzerland to the North Sea and the Baltic and as far east as the Vistula. Augustus had stationed eight legions on the Rhine for action against the tribes between the Weser and the Elbe as part of his over-ambitious plan to extend the frontier to the Elbe – something that proved beyond Rome’s capacity. The Army of Upper Germany was based at Mainz (four legions) and the Army of Lower Germany at Cologne (another four legions).31 Indeed, in the period 13 BC–AD 70 it has been estimated that fourteen legions were stationed between the Alps and the Dutch coast.32 One hundred years later there was just one legion there, and nine on the Danube; by the time Marcus Aurelius became emperor, the number of Danube legions had increased to twelve. The switch from Rhine to Danube was partly the result of Vespasian’s principate and partly sheer strategic necessity. Since the Rhine legions had opposed Vespasian and backed his rival Vitellius, the emperor downgraded their importance, decreased their number and even sent them on suicide missions.33 The virtual euthanasia of the Rhine legions was aided by the one campaign that Domitian actually succeeded in: his war of 83–5 against the Chatti around Mainz, which finished them off as a major factor on the Rhine; what strength the Chatti had left they wasted in a war with another busted Germanic flush, the once-mighty Cherusci.34 The success of that war meant that the old military zones of Upper and Lower Germany could thenceforth be converted into two new provinces. This was the development that led Tacitus to his premature announcement that the German wars were now at an end. A limes or frontier was built – ultimately a kind of Hadrian’s Wall – between the Rhine north of Coblenz and the Danube valley near Regensburg. The frontier line was a narrow path planted with a barricade along which, at intervals, were forts.35
But it was not just Vespasian’s personal predilections that led to the switch from the Rhine to the Danube. Once the Sarmatians allied with the Dacians, the Romans responded by building a cordon of bases on the right bank of the Danube, all the way from Germany to the Black Sea. In the provinces of Raetia, Noricum and Pannonia the legions moved right up to the river bank and constructed bridgehead forts on the far side; later this system was extended to the lower Danube, with Poetevio (Pettau), Brigetio and Carnuntum as key fortresses. The defence of the Danube was more difficult than that of the Rhine, because of the abrupt angle the river makes as it turns south. Roman fleets put out onto the Danube and attempts were made to overcome the whirlpools and cataracts of the Danube Gorges and the Iron Gates, those notorious barriers to riverine navigation. Complete mastery of the Danube was not achieved until around the year 100, when Trajan’s engineers hacked out a road along the rock face of the lower (Kazan) gorge and, the following year, cut a three-mile canal to bypass the rapids of the Iron Gates below the exit from the gorges.36 These vast public works were undertaken in part because of the profits from mining, especially iron in Noricum, silver and lead in Dalmatia and Pannonia and copper, lead and silver in Moesia.37 The Roman effort to contain Germany’s warlike tribes was titanic. Some historians say that the number of Roman troops on the Rhine and Danube plus their auxiliaries amounted to some 200,000 men. It is possible that Rome at this juncture overrated the menace from the barbarians. Experts reckon the total population of Germany at this time was only about two million at the maximum, although Arminius was said to have assembled an army of 75,000 for his Teutoburg forest exploit. The Marcomanni – later to be Marcus Aurelius’s most steadfast foe – may only have numbered about 100,000 in all.38
Meanwhile the German tribes were becoming steadily Romanised. German society in the first century BC was primitive and clan-based, with the emphasis on communal ownership; the gap between rich and poor was not large. Primarily pastoralists, the Germans enjoyed a climate and corresponding vegetation that made it unnecessary for them to be nomads.39 Highly dependent on cattle, they ate little grain and made limited use of iron; they tended to live in open-plan villages, particularly detesting the kind of overcrowding that was routine in Rome.40 Clans would occasionally combine into larger units that the Romans identified as tribes (pagi), but the only real federations were in wartime. Relying on serfdom rather than slavery, the Germans tended to use females only as slaves; males they either killed or traded to the Roman empire as slaves.41 Feuds were widespread, but were usually settled by reparations in the form of sheep and cattle. Routinely cruel, the Germans practised various refinements of capital punishment, quite apart from the human sacrifice of those captured in war. Traitors and deserters merited hanging from trees, but cowards and criminals were plunged into marshes with weighted hurdles on their heads to endure a slow drowning.42 Largely an illiterate society, Germania was nonetheless distinguished by respect for women (whose intuitive and prophetic powers they prized) and strict sexual morality. Husbands provided dowries for wives and practised monogamy, with adultery being regarded as a great crime and punished accordingly. As Tacitus put it, there was ‘no arena with its seductions, no dinner table with their provocations to corrupt them’.43 Yet German society was no utopia and suffered from several drawbacks. One was the warrior ethos itself. Although Tacitus claimed that the landscape had produced a physically huge and savage people, which made the Germans particu larly dangerous – ‘neither Samnite nor Carthaginian, neither Spain nor Gaul, nor even the Parthians have taught us more lessons’44 – outside warfare there was no focus for their energies and ambitions. In peacetime there was no proper civil or political society, no cities, proper houses, cultural pursuits or even very much agriculture. The men were notoriously lazy, doing nothing but eat, drink, pick fights and take offence. They had no awareness of chronology or notions of time-keeping, which merely compounded the general idleness. Consequently much of the ferocity manifested in war went into their two great weaknesses: drunkenness and gambling.45
All this began to change as the Roman impact on Germania became more pronounced after 50 BC. The influx of wealth from trade with Rome and from money subsidies paid by the Romans to keep the tribes quiet made certain individuals wealthy and gradually displaced communalism with private property. Trade burgeoned as Roman merchants penetrated into Germany and even took up permanent abode among the tribes.46 The demand for Roman goods grew, imports increased, the wealth owned by individuals burgeoned and the economy became monetised, by trade, by wages paid to those Germans who served with the legions and by the subsidies paid to the chiefs. Trade in cattle and slaves with the Romans was important, but the dynamic new element was commerce in amber. Since the only source of high-grade amber was the southern shores of the Baltic, and it was in high demand at Rome, areas engaged in this long-distance trade, such as Pannonia, especially benefited.47 Salt, fur and hides were also exported from Germany, while imports included Roman ceramics, especially the finest red tableware or terra sigillata and the best Roman vintages, which were greedily devoured by wine-crazy Germans. As the demand for Roman goods increased throughout the first century AD, more and more Roman traders and money-lenders were found on German territory. Meanwhile German society itself became markedly more stratified, with something of a crevasse opening up between the wealthy nobles and the masses. By the end of the century the old clan system had virtually disappeared, displaced by a quasi-feudal grouping of rich aristocrats with their personal retainers.48
The new class-bound society was the entering wedge the Romans used to control Germany. Their policy was to tie the new aristocrats to them with money and trading favours, while dealing harshly with the have-nots.49 They liked to take hostages from the sons of the tribal leaders and then educate them in Rome, teaching them to despise their roots, then sending them back to subvert any anti-Roman trends among the tribesmen. The key to Maroboduus was that he had had such an experience at Rome, where he was lionised by Augustus.50 Roman strategy was to set up ‘kings’ to rule the tribes who would be pro-Roman stooges, preventing the possible anti-Roman policies that might arise if decisions were made in a full assembly of all the people, as used to be the case. These kings were given money to buy off the opposition and to spend on conspicuous consumption that denoted their new ‘royal’ status; they thus became creatures of Rome, in some cases more sympathetic to the interests of the Roman state than to those of their own people. For them the advantage was not just undreamed-of wealth, but the instrumentality to impose their will on the tribesmen as they had never been able to before.51 To cow the opposition expected from the masses, the Romans would threaten at the limit to invade and lay waste the tribal lands, though they rarely had to intervene; their client kings usually performed effectively.52 Even if a pro-Roman ruler actually was expelled by the masses because of unpopular pro-Roman policies, as happened eventually to Maroboduus, the Romans still had a card to play: they would keep the expelled puppet as a ‘king over the water’, ready to lead dissident factions against the new rulers if they did not come to terms with Rome; hence Maroboduus’s comfortable eighteen-year sojourn at Ravenna.53 The final weapon the Romans had was to refuse to ratify any new ruler they did not approve of, which meant the end of trading privileges and money subsidies and the threat of invasion. The Romans perfected ‘divide and rule’ in Germany, both by setting the different tribes at each other’s throats and by generating strife and class conflict within the tribes, setting feudal retinues and private property against the masses, who were dedicated to clans and communalism.54 The trick was to keep powerful tribes like the Marcomanni in a state of permanent chaos and near civil war, while at the same time ensuring that the Roman protégés never became powerful enough to bite the hand that fed them.55 It is no exaggeration to say that the combination of increased wealth, private property and the aristocratic–plebeian split engineered by Rome bade fair to tear Germania apart.56
These ‘divide and rule’ tactics could doubtless have been continued almost indefinitely, but at the end of the century the situation on the Danube was transformed by the Roman annexation of Dacia (roughly modern Romania). This was the work of the alcoholic, homosexual emperor Trajan, a Spanish Roman born at Italica near Seville in 53. Trajan had been adopted by Nerva in 97 as co-ruler, possessed tribunician power and held the title imperator, so the transition of power was the smoothest possible. He was on the German frontier when news of Nerva’s death came in, but decided against a new war of conquest in Germany as he needed time to establish good relations with the Senate.57 Yet he was already revolving in his mind a scheme to chastise King Decebalus of Dacia, who had meddled extensively in the Danube provinces of Pannonia and Moesia and had humiliated Domitian in the latter’s ill-advised campaign. Having secured the endorsement of the Senate for his plans, Trajan assembled the greatest Roman army ever seen – no fewer than thirty legions – and took the field against Decebalus in 101. The campaign was noteworthy for Roman discipline, ingenuity and engineering feats. The master engineer Apollodorus of Damascus built a roadway through the Iron Gates by cantilevering it from the sheer face of the rock, so that the Romans appeared to walk on water; then he constructed a great bridge with sixty stone piers to span the Danube. Then Trajan struck hard into the heart of Dacia. Rolled over in a lightning campaign, Decebalus surrendered, prostrated himself before the emperor, swore obedience and accepted the status of a client king.58
But as soon as Trajan returned to Rome, Decebalus began to backslide and raid across the Danube; he also got involved with hostilities with the Iazyges. Trajan concluded that he had made a mistake in making the treacherous Decebalus a mere client; his advisers whispered that the Dacian ruler was still too powerful and would have to be extirpated. While historians can see the rationale for the first Dacian campaign, the second has engendered diverse opinions. Some see Trajan as an unregenerate war-monger, simply looking for an excuse to settle accounts with Decebalus once and for all. Others stress the economic motive, pointing to the great wealth of Dacia’s gold mines; it has even been suggested that only the Dacian gold mines saved Rome under Trajan from financial disaster.59 Whatever the true motivation, the second Dacian campaign of 106 was waged as a war of extermination. Even by Roman standards it was nasty, brutal, murderous and barbarous, with atrocity and war crime rampant, and no quarter asked or given. Dacia could not withstand the might of eleven Roman legions and soon Decebalus was on the run. Finally cornered, he chose to commit suicide. Having been pardoned once, he had no desire to face the wrath of Trajan, knowing that this time he would be paraded in triumph in Rome before execution. Still, he had given a good account of himself and Rome had been pushed to the limit.60 Trajan proceeded to annex Dacia as a new Roman province – the first on the far side of the Danube. Most of the original inhabitants were either killed or enslaved, with a residue resettled elsewhere in the empire. Back in Rome, the emperor enjoyed a triumph that lasted 123 days, with lavish provision of gladiator shows, chariot races and animal spectacles in the arena. Massive wealth from the gold mines began to flow into Rome, financing a huge public building programme. Apollodorus designed a sculpted column 100 feet high, with twenty-three spiral bands filled with 2,500 figures – a complete picture of the Dacian war.61 The ancient writers claimed, with typical hyperbole, that Trajan took 500,000 slaves as a result of the Dacian campaign. Certainly there was a glut in the early second-century slave market, but a more likely explanation is the more realistically grounded figure of 97,000 slaves that accrued to Rome after the Jewish Bar-Kochba revolt.62
Yet in all this triumphalism it was forgotten that Rome had drastically altered the fragile dynamic on the Danube frontier. To begin with, the empire now shared a frontier with the troublesome and unreliable Sarmatians, who were officially clients. Rome also had to deal now with a German frontier that ran all the way from the Rhine to the Black Sea. Sometimes, when reading the annals for the years 100–60, it is hard to remember that Rome had any other preoccupation than the German frontier, and it requires an effort of imagination to call to mind major incidents elsewhere, like the Parthian wars and the Bar-Kochba rebellion. A tough nut to conquer, Dacia proved particularly troublesome to administer and at the beginning of Hadrian’s reign had been divided into three military commands: the heartland, Dacia Superior, under a praetorian legate; Dacia Inferior in the south-east facing the Wallachian plain, under an imperial procurator; and Dacia Porolissensis in the north-west, facing the northern part of the Hungarian plain and also under an imperial procurator.63 Both Dacia and the other Danube provinces were packed with Roman legions and allied auxiliary forces, particularly dedicated to blocking all passes into Transylvania from the Carpathians. The province of Pannonia alone contained four legions, three in Pannonia Superior facing the German tribes north of the Middle Danube and another one monitoring the Sarmatians in the East.64 These four legions, based at Vindobona (Vienna), Carnuntum (Deutsch Altenburg), Brigetio (Szony) and Aquincum (Budapest), dominated the entire middle Danube with a kind of chain of steel.65 The province of Moesia, a hugely important centre of Rome’s mining wealth, between the middle and lower Danube, was divided into Moesia Superior and Moesia Inferior and was typical of the entire theatre. Between the legionary garrisons all river crossing-places and fords were under surveillance by auxiliary units, using watchtowers; along the entire Danube was a series of observation posts and signalling points.66 Above the Danube gorge the legions of Moesia Superior deployed towards the west at Singidunum (modern Belgrade) and Viminacium (Kostillac) facing the Hungarian plain. The other Roman innovation was a determined effort to settle colonies of retired veterans, particularly in Pannonia; it is claimed that sixty-six new townships were created along the Danube during Hadrian’s twenty-year principate.67
Although there were a few rumblings from the most warlike German tribes, the Quadi and the Marcomanni in Bohemia and Slovakia, in the reign of Hadrian the German frontier properly so-called held up well. The power of the German kings was no longer their old status as sacred rulers, but simply their status as Roman clients, which gave them military power, cash subsidies and the promise of armed intervention if the anti-Roman opposition grew too strong.68 The primary duty of the legions of Pannonia Superior and Noricum was to watch and monitor the Quadi and the Marcomanni, and this they did effectively. Roman control of the Sarmatians was far less effective, even though the Iazyges on the Hungarian plain were hemmed in on three sides by the armies of Pannonia Inferior, Moesia Superior, Dacia Superior and Dacia Porolissensis; the Roxolani on the Wallachian plain were under similar surveillance from Dacia Inferior and Moesia Superior.69 Both the Sarmatian tribes chafed at the strictly controlled economic intercourse they were allowed with Rome and could not curb their ancient raiding instincts. Hadrian had to go in person to Moesia to deal with the threat from the Iazyges and Roxolani, in effect submitting to blackmail when the king of the Roxolani claimed his subsidy had been cut; Hadrian simply gave him another bite at the cherry without examining the books too closely.70 The Sarmatians had a worse reputation than the Germans, being regarded as inherently unfaithful and treacherous. There was much resentment at the costs of keeping them quiet, especially when the Roman tactic of supporting pretenders in the wings seemed to backfire. One Sarmatian ruler moved his entire household to luxurious exile at Roman expense on an island off Pola in Istria; it was whispered that he had deliberately engineered a situation where his people rejected him so that he could live a life of sybaritic idleness and send the bills to the empire.71 More serious critics contend that Hadrian’s Danube policy was self-defeating and contained the seeds of ultimate destruction. Hadrian tried to integrate the provinces instead of leaving them as secondary appanages to Rome, but this tended to increase the gap, and hence the friction, between those within the magic circle of empire and the ‘barbarians’ outside. It was not possible for Hadrian to align military frontiers effectively with provincial governments as long as there was a significant Roman presence, in the shape of financiers and merchants, on the other side of the limes. Paradoxically, Hadrian’s attempts to limit the empire and rationalise the frontiers may have created a time-bomb on the Danube.72
Superficially, the reign of Antoninus Pius was an era of peace on the Danube frontier, as elsewhere. Archaeological finds reveal a huge and thriving trade across the Danube, and this picture is confirmed by coin evidence.73 We learn that Antoninus ‘intervened’ to settle a friendly pro-Roman king among the Quadi. Auxiliary forces in Pannonia, Noricum and Dacia were strengthened, new roads built and stone forts constructed.74 From his dominant position on Antoninus’s council, Marcus Aurelius would have been well versed in the nuances of Danube policy. Yet, as elsewhere in the empire, the superficial peace and tranquillity masked deep-seated problems, many of which would burst into the open when Marcus was emperor. We know that there was trouble with both Dacians and Germans in the early years of Antoninus’s reign, if only because Aelius Aristides referred to them in his famous triumphalist speech of the mid-140s.75 But those who say that all the problems on the German frontier were the product of the opening years of Antoninus’s principate have to explain the ‘curious incident’ of the little-known campaign in Dacia Superior waged by M. Statius Priscus in 156–8.76 There are some other pointers to Danubian instability. Under Antoninus the frontier was advanced in the Odenwald–Neckar section of Upper Germany and Raetia, leading some historians to think that the empire was expecting major trouble with the German tribes even before Marcus came to the the throne.77 Others say that the ‘kings’ with whom Antoninus was angry on his death-bed included not just Vologases of Parthia, but German rulers as well.78 Yet another straw in the wind comes from Antoninus’s policy in Britain. There the dithering and uncertainty about whether to hold the line at Hadrian’s Wall or further north, at the Antonine Wall (roughly linking modern Glasgow and Edinburgh) did not reflect the situation on the ground in Britannia, but nervousness about the future course of events in Germany.79
Despite his pious obeisance to Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius knew that his predecessor had severely neglected the deep problems of the empire and particularly the northern frontier. The Marcomanni and Quadi were pressing for admission into the Roman empire, or at least into a free-trading ‘common market’ of associated nations in which they would confront no tariff walls. This was a concession Marcus would not permit, not least because it would have provoked dissension among the Danube legions, which had their own perks and scams to protect; we should never forget the perennial problem of corruption in Roman society, which was why, after all, Marcus abandoned the idea of tax-farming in the Danube provinces and handed the task over to the equestrian procurators.80 It says much for Marcus’s diplomatic skill that he managed to stall and deflect major trouble on the northern frontier while he brought the Parthian conflict to a successful end.81 There was no real sign of trouble in Germany in the years 161–5, for we can observe a regular discharge of veteran auxiliaries in these years, as well as legionaries being transferred away from the frontier. It is true that the Chatti launched a raid along the Rhine frontier in 162, but this was dealt with swiftly by Victorinus, governor of Upper Germany, whose subsequent three years as governor there were very quiet.82 The flurry of new road-building in the Danube provinces need not mean that Marcus expected major trouble there, since the accession of a new emperor was often celebrated with highway construction and the erection of milestones. But the infrastructure of the Roman Danube was certainly improved in this way, with roads being built from Aquincum to Brigetio and Sirmium and from Sirmium to Taurumum.83 The extravagant festivities held on Lucius Verus’s return from Parthia also argue against the perception of an imminent threat on the German frontier.
On the other hand, there is much evidence that Marcus divined a long-term threat to the empire on the Danube frontier and was taking unostentatious steps to deal with it. The unification of Dacia province, previously a tripartite administrative unit, was one straw in the wind. Marcus appreciated the opulence of Dacia – it boasted great wealth in timber, cereals, agriculture, salt, fruit, wheat, wine, cattle, sheep, horses, even bees and honey, to say nothing of the prodigious mines of iron, gold and silver, which had allowed Trajan to bring back 165 tons of gold and 330 tons of silver after his conquest.84 What concerned Marcus was the extreme factionalism and tribal splintering in the province. Dacia, a polyglot mixture of Germans, Thracians and Sarmatians, was a veritable tribal United Nations, with many distinctive groupings: the Apuli in central Transylvania, the Buridanenses in northern Moldavia, the Costoboci in the north-east of Moldavia and spreading out into the Ukraine, the Carpi east of the Carpathians, the Calipizi between the Dnester and Brg rivers, the Crobobosi in Dobruja, the Suci near the mouth of the River Oct, and the Tyragetae around the mouth of the River Dnester, to say nothing of the migrants who made Dacia their temporary home: the Sarmatians, Alani, Roxolani and Bastarnae.85 Hadrian’s division of Dacia into three provinces seemed to compound the problems rather than solve them. Marcus therefore united the three and formed a military ‘super-command’ of two legions to oversee the new province.86 The first governor of the new united Dacia was Sextus Calpurnius Agricola, summoned from Britain, where Marcus had sent him at the beginning of the reign to quell disturbances.87 It is interesting that Marcus, usually criticised for his supine conservative instincts, in this instance reacted dynamically and showed that he had the ability to improvise where necessary.
More serious evidence that Marcus was departing from the ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ policy of his predecessor comes in the remarkable fact of his raising two new legions. These were II and III Italica, notable not just as the first new legions raised since Trajan’s time, but because they were recruited from Italians and by this date there were virtually no Italians in the existing legions.88 II Italica was sent to Raetia in 165 and III Italica to Regensburg, making ten legions in all on the Danube frontier, with six of them on the upper Danube between Regensburg and Aquincum, just below the ‘bend’ in the river. Moreover, out of 440 auxiliary regiments deployed throughout the Roman empire, half were now stationed in the Danube provinces.89 The official reason for the creation of the new legions was to replace the missing IX Hispania (which had perhaps been destroyed in the Parthian war) and the XII Deitorarius, thought to have been annihilated in the Bar-Kochba revolt in Palestine. But all historical precedent – and Marcus Aurelius was certainly a creature of precedent – suggested that Roman emperors raised new legions only when they intended to go on the warpath.90 So what was Marcus’s intention with his two new legions? A pre-emptive strike into Germany worked against the Roman notion of just warfare. It is therefore likely that Marcus originally intended a war of annexation and conquest against the Marcomanni. To annex willing German tribes would have been a simple matter, but the problem was that the Marcomanni were not willing to submit to annexation; they wanted incorporation into the Roman empire on their own ‘most favoured nation’ terms. Marcus, it seems, had lost patience with them and privately acknowledged that his ‘divide and rule’ policies with them and the other German tribes had not worked.91 Two other possibilities have been suggested. One is that the conspiracy among the Germans which later came to light had been uncovered at an early date by Marcus, and he was therefore preparing for the inevitable war. The other is that Marcus feared the army was too powerful and interfered with his joint rule with the Senate; he accordingly intended to displace its energies in external warfare.92 Whatever the truth behind his motivations, his aggressive intentions seem clear. This explains the oddity whereby two legates were withdrawn from the war in Parthia while it was still in full swing. M. Claudius Fronto, commander of I Minervia and governor of Syria, and C. Iulius Verus (the driving force in the actual recruitment process) were both recalled from the East in time for the raising of II and III Italica.93
An examination of all the evidence suggests that Marcus had been planning an expansionist campaign against Germany from the earliest days of his reign and may have been recruiting for his new legions as early as 161.94 That he had not proceeded with his plans is obviously explicable by the conflicting demands of the unexpected war with Parthia, but other factors were involved. In the first place, despite assertions that Antoninus Pius had left the economy in a healthy state, repeated by many ancient historians,95 certain plain facts make it likely that Marcus’s financial situation was parlous. His immediate devaluation of the silver content of the coinage suggests that money was tight. Not wishing this to be generally known, Marcus depreciated the currency to pay for festivities and ceremonial expenses.96 Some say that the reason Marcus was unsure about the loyalty of the army was that, the Historia Augusta notwithstanding,97 he did not pay a donative of 5,000 denarii per soldier as this was beyond his resources, being five times greater than any previous donative. On the other hand, one could argue that the apparent discrepancy between the bulging treasury bequeathed by Antoninus and the apparent economic austerity just a couple of years later could be explained if Marcus really did award a donative at that level. Unfortunately, the links between public finances and war expenses on the one hand and the annona issue and level of booty uplifted from Parthia on the other are far from clear.98 If financial uncertainty as much as the war in Parthia delayed a planned Roman war in Germany, they were not the only issues. There is strong evidence of a famine early in Marcus’s reign, and we can probably date it to 162–5.99 Rome was just recovering from the effects of dearth when it was hit by plague, as the returning veterans brought the disease back from the East. Yet it seems clear that Marcus thought he had all the time in the world to prepare his campaign against the Marcomanni. He certainly did not anticipate a pre-emptive move by the Germans, at any rate if we can infer from the ‘laid-back’ attitude evinced by his continuing attendance at philosophical lectures.100 Unfortunately for Rome, the Marcomanni made their move first.101
Sometime in the winter of 166–76,000 Langobardi and Obii tribesmen launched a surprise attack on Pannonia.102 The curiosity of this was that these tribes had no common frontier with the Roman empire, and could only have reached the Danube with the collusion of the Quadi. The pretext for the attack was the self-evident absurdity that Rome had not paid them the agreed subsidies – a nonsensical argument since Rome had not only never paid them subsidies, but had never even had the most fleeting contact with them.103 The attack was easily swatted aside by a makeshift Roman force, principally cavalry commanded by Macrinius Avitus Catonius Vindex, who also drew on infantry stationed at Arrabona in Upper Pannonia; it may have been no more than a large-scale skirmish, with at most 2,000 men engaged on either side.104 Almost simultaneously the Chatti probed into Raetia, where they were dealt with firmly by Aufidius Victorinus, though once again it was an affair of skirmishes rather than pitched battles.105 Thus convincingly put in their place, these minor German tribes sent a deputation that represented eleven of their clans and which was received by M. Iulius Bassus, governor of Upper Pannonia. The significant aspect of this conference was that the German delegation was led by Balomar, King of the Marcomanni. The Romans bound Balomar over to guarantee the behaviour of the minor tribes, and all seemed satisfactorily settled by 5 May 167, when the records show a routine discharge of veteran auxiliaries in Lower Pannonia, suggesting that the temperature had cooled considerably.106 But this proved to be a false dawn. On 29 May the Dacian gold mines at Rosia Montana ceased working and the careful system of logging and archiving was abandoned.107 What was the explanation?
Suddenly the duplicity of Balomar was palpable. A huge force of Quadi and Marcomanni burst like a tsunami on the Roman empire. It immediately became clear that the Marcomanni had been the hidden hand behind both the initial probing raids and the farcical peace talks. After seizing the Dacian gold mines, the German host overran Raetia, Noricum, Moesia and Pannonia before crossing the Alps and devastating the amber route.108 The amber trail can in some ways be likened to the Silk Road in the East, as we can see if we reverse its normal direction. Starting from Aquileia in northern Italy, it ran to Carnuntum and Vindobona on the Danube and thence northwards to the upper valley of the Oder, and from there to the Baltic shore of Poland, with sidetracks diverting off the main route towards the Black Sea, Denmark, Sweden and the Baltic islands.109 The huge German army did not stray far from the beaten track, but relentlessly followed the route down to its terminus at Aquileia, burning, looting and raping as they went; 20,000 Roman citizens are said to have perished during this large-scale raid, though the alleged figure of 100,000 captives taken back to slavery probably does no more than indicate the usual hyperbole of ancient sources with figures and statistics.110 Numismatic evidence suggests that Carnuntum, Brigetio and Poetovio were not taken, though Opitergium probably was and maybe Emona and Celeia as well (though the unwalled city of Virunum, lying off the main route, survived undamaged).
The Quadi and Marcomanni sat down outside Aquileia, uncertain what to do next, as they lacked the siegecraft skills necessary to take a city of 100,000 inhabitants. Clearly the wealth of Aquileia was the magnet that drew them. Originally founded to check the advance of another northern people, the Gauls, in 181–80 BC, Aquileia had grown rich from the amber trade and the discovery of gold fields along the route, notably that near modern Klagenfurt.111 While the Germans pondered their next move, they were given a decisive check by one of Marcus’s new rising stars, Claudius Pompeius, who first made his name in this campaign. We do not have the details of his successful repulse of the raiders, but evidently they lost heart and nerve and retreated back over the Alps in short order. The Germans calculated, correctly, that as winter approached, their supply lines would become dangerously exposed; the route back to the Danube was long, arduous and precarious.112 Nevertheless, the damage done to Roman prestige was immense. Objectively, the output of the Roman mint fell 75 per cent below normal production levels (75 per cent fewer denarii issued) as a result of the German seizure of the Dacian gold mines – a catastrophic decline not explicable in terms of the outbreak of plague, since the output levels returned to normal the next year.113 Perhaps even more importantly, the Quadi and Marcomanni had delivered Rome a devastating psychological blow, calling forth the demons in Rome’s collective unconscious and reminding them only too forcibly of the Cimbri and Teutones. There was no greater monster in the Roman id than the thought of German tribes on the loose in Italy.114
What lay behind this sudden extreme turbulence on the German frontier? Why did Marcus Aurelius face a German crisis that no previous emperor had had to confront? The normal explanation is that some unusual factor operating in northern Germany – possibly climate change or over-population and subsequent land-hunger – triggered a process whereby ‘Goths’ migrated from their homelands and impacted on the Langobardi, who in turn shunted the Quadi and Marcomanni across the Danube.115 On this view, the Marcomannic wars were merely the first act in a long-running drama (the migration of the Goths) that would take two and a half centuries to unfold. The obvious analogy is with the old explanation of the mfecane in southern Africa in the early nineteenth century, whereby the rise of the Zulu nation under Chaka was said to have engendered a ‘crushing’ when the expanding Zulus pressed on neighbouring tribes who in turn migrated elsewhere, causing a general shunting dislocation and massive loss of life. But just as historians like Julian Cobbing have arisen to doubt this explanation for mfecane, preferring to concentrate on the impact of the slave trade, so in the case of second-century frontier studies many scholars have found the ‘Goths’ thesis implausible.116 The most persuasive studies of ‘northern barbarians’ show the Goths migrating from Scandinavia via Poland and the Dnieper early in the third century and not reaching even as far as the Sarmatians and the Alans in the Crimea until c. AD 250; indeed, some authorities roundly condemn the term ‘Goths’ in connection with Marcus Aurelius’s wars as absurdly anachronistic.117 Moreover, archaeological studies show areas of acute economic privation in northern and central Germany, but no mass migration of peoples as required by the ‘Goths’ thesis or even changes of agricultural methods or a switch of trade routes. Hoping to save something from the apparent wreckage of the ‘Goth-mfecane’ thesis, its proponents have sometimes switched tack and brought in the Alans as the original dynamic factor, providing the first push in the shunt.118 It is true that the Alans were a persistent menace on the frontier at this time, but there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that their socio-economic position altered significantly c. 160–80. The more one examines it, the less plausible the over-population/migration hypothesis seems.
Far more convincing is the notion of a massive conspiracy among the German tribes – the explanation that the ancient authorities themselves provided.119 This would explain so much that seems obscure: the transit of the Langobardi and Obii through the territory of the Quadi to launch the raids of 166–7, for example. This probe, the actions of the Chatti on the Rhine, the abortive peace conference and finally the mass German descent on Aquileia, would all make sense as part of a grand plan, testing Roman defences and resolve, alternating soft with very hard approaches.120 There is further circumstantial evidence from the amount of Roman armour and swords found in warrior graves as far north as Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, suggesting that tribes not even mentioned in the sources took part in the war on Rome.121 Whether Balomar, King of the Marcomanni, one of his counsellors or even the King of the Quadi was the mastermind is uncertain – the sources do not mention one great enemy of Rome, which is in part what has encouraged the rise of the migration thesis. What is certain is that Marcus Aurelius now faced a war with a massive German confederation along a front extending from the source of the Danube in the Black Forest to its estuary in the Black Sea. The dream of Arminius would finally come to pass, and this time the unknown mastermind would find his Maroboduus among willing German allies. The Germans along the Rhine and Weser – the Chatti, Chauci, Hermunduri – played a minor part in the conspiracy, limiting themselves to raids and avoiding pitched battles, though the Chauci did resort to their old trick of corsair raids on Gallia Belgica.122 The core and cutting edge of the German alliance was the coalition of the Quadi and the Marcomanni along the Danube front, but other tribes involved in the anti-Roman bloc were the Naristae, Suebi, Buri, Victuali, Cotini, Osi, Bessi, Cobotes, Bastarnae, Peucini and Costoboci, of which the Naristae were the most important.123 Originally the Quadi and Marcomanni lived in Moravia, Slovakia and Bohemia, with the Naristae and Buri as neighbours and the Celtic Cotini and Osi – the so-called ‘Elbe Germans’ – on the eastern fringes.124 The power of the Marcomanni had long been recognised by Rome, and Tacitus paid tribute to them, but with an important rider: ‘The fame and the strength of the Marcomanni are outstanding . . . nor are the Naristae and Quadi inferior to them; these tribes are, so to speak, the brow of Germany, so far as Germany is wreathed by the Danube.’125 From a Roman point of view, the appearance of the Quadi in the field against them was particularly disappointing, since this tribe – clients since the time of Augustus – had always been earmarked for special treatment and it had long been hoped that they had permanently turned their spears into ploughshares.126 However, there had been straws in the wind and relations became prickly around the time of Hadrian’s principate. The Romans always identified the Quadi as key players in Germany and, when Antoninus Pius appointed a new king over them, the event was thought sufficiently important to warrant a new issue of coinage, which ran from 140 to 144.127
Three separate but interlinking factors seem to have actuated the Marcomanni and Quadi to form the great anti-Roman coalition that convulsed the Danube frontier in the late 160s. A major help in the formation of a credible German federation was the melding of tribes into larger and larger units of ‘supertribes’ with the minnows as their vassals, in place of the old rough-and-ready chaotic independence of all from all – a trend particularly noticeable by the time Marcus Aurelius became emperor. So, for instance, the Cotini and Osi paid tribute to the Quadi, and the Buri to the Marcomanni.128 In previous times, Roman commanders and administrators had headed off any tendencies towards supertribalism by supporting the lesser tribes against the encroachment of the greater ones, but the departure of so many Roman personnel for the eastern front and the war with Parthia in 161–6 had created a unique window of opportunity for the big German battalions. Yet the power vacuum created by the Parthian war was not the only problem. Basically there was a ‘contradiction’ in the Roman system of clientage on the Danube that could never be resolved. The paradox was that to get a fixed system of clients, the kings or chiefs had to exercise tighter control and thus become more powerful, but this increased power in turn alarmed the Romans.129 The most powerful tribes were also those furthest advanced along the transition from the old clan system to the new quasi-feudal dispensation of great wealth and extreme socio-economic inequality. This can be very clearly correlated with proximity to the Roman frontier on the Danube. Whereas the northern Germans lived in primitive conditions like Yahoos or Morlocks, the Marcomanni by the time of Marcus Aurelius lived in stone houses.130 By contrast the Teutonic tribes of the Baltic shores (the Aestrii, Sitones, Fenni, and so on) still practised agriculture rather than commerce, had no houses but slept on the ground, and in some cases employed ‘primitive’ social systems like matriarchy.131 The correct model for the Marcomannic wars is not ‘civilisation against barbarism’, but a clash of convergent wealth systems, with the Quadi and Marcomanni seeking to put themselves on a level with the Romans and increase the distance in wealth between themselves and their benighted Baltic kinsmen. To put it in sociological terms, the model for the ‘revolution’ on the Danube under Marcus Aurelius was Tocquevillean rather than Marxian. To put it in Gibbon’s terms, proximity to the Romans on the Danube had corrupted the ‘noble savages’.
Why, then, were these economic aspirations of the Quadi and Marcomanni resolvable only by war, rather than by cooperation with Rome? It is necessary first of all to appreciate the spectacle of undreamed-of riches, which the Roman empire appeared to present to the German tribes. Unfortunately for themselves, the Romans had given the impression that the empire was awash with riches and easy pickings, groaning with gold and silver, but that these glittering prizes were available only to those within the tariff walls of the empire. By the time of Marcus Aurelius the Germans were bedazzled by the sumptuousness of the Roman way of life, by its ornate tableware, gaudy ornamentation and what seemed like a plethora of gold. To get inside this economic cordon and enjoy such riches was the abiding goal of the most advanced tribes, like the Marcomanni and Quadi.132 The ‘barbarians’ were becoming steadily Romanised: many Roman traders and even soldiers lived among them, the legions had all kinds of scams that benefited them and their hosts, and the Germans were especially impressed by the medical facilities available to the Roman armies.133 There was a vigorous trade between the legions and the Germans, for Rome always made sure that its officers and its military were well and regularly paid. The problem was that, outside the imperial free-trading system, taxes on commerce were high; by analogy with import taxes on the eastern frontiers of the empire, it is likely that the tax on the Danube was 25 per cent.134 The Quadi and the Marcomanni wanted to maintain their political independence while enjoying all the economic advantages of the Roman empire; for obvious reasons, emperors found this a non-negotiable demand.135 It was possible for small tribes to double-cross each other and even agree to break up as a unit and relocate inside the empire, provided they could attain the supposed El Dorado.136 This was not an option for the Quadi and Marcomanni. They wanted the economic benefits of empire or, at the very least, most-favoured-nation status. Marcus consist ently refused the demands of the Quadi and the Marcomanni; he would agree only to incorporation in the empire as ordinary subjects without tribal affiliations, and even that offer was pitched some time in the future. Because of the Parthian war, the Romans did not have the manpower to process mass immigration into the empire.137 Besides, Marcus made the calculation that the Quadi and Marcomanni were inherently unreliable. The probable result of granting them incorporation or most-favoured-nation status would be that they became a drain on imperial resources, a mere incubus – and a blackmailing one at that.138
The Quadi and Marcomanni reacted with indignation to the Roman refusal. They were always subject to market cycles and sudden shifts in the terms of trade, leaving the Bohemia–Italy trade nexus vulnerable. For this reason they envied the Rhine tribes, located in areas where the Romans coveted not just the products of agriculture, pasture and the forest, but the lead, zinc, coal, copper and stone available from the mines and quarries.139 And it was not just their economic interests that put them on a collision course with Rome. The Marcomanni aspired to be the rulers of Germany, with the lesser tribes as their satellites. Yet the Romans opposed supertribalism; their interest was in maintaining small tribal entities, which they could dispense with at any time it was inexpedient, and their main interest in the Marcomanni was as mercenaries.140 Unfortunately, Hadrian’s policy of aligning military frontiers with areas administered by provincial governments generated unintended consequences. With Roman agents and merchants roaming at will among the Danube tribes and often ‘going native’, a kind of symbiosis soon developed between Romans posted to the frontier and the tribes. By working for wages in Roman camps and trading directly in Roman markets, the Germans got a taste of the good life and they relished it. Paradoxically, the very attempt to limit empire may have precipitated conflict with the ‘barbarians’ outside. Contact with Roman technology, diet and lifestyles gave the Teutons confidence; as always, familiarity bred contempt. The Germans increasingly saw little to fear in Roman military technology and much to envy in their way of life.141 Certainly the Marcomanni were not inclined to be shut out from the imagined economic Eden without a fight. Their attitude was ‘If you can’t join them, beat them’. Somehow, by diplomatic stages lost in the mists of time, they persuaded the other German tribes that the Roman empire was a paper tiger, militarily vulnerable and easily conquerable. That the war was a long-odds gamble was clear from the inherent factionalism and political instability of Germany. Could such an unwieldy coalition hold firm against Roman counter-attack? Perhaps the unknown political genius who devised the alliance had such a high sense of injustice that he took the line of ‘Let the heavens fall, provided justice be done’.
The Marcomannic wars suggest once again that there is nothing new under the sun. The feeling of being economically strangled, of being denied autarky and a place in the sun, followed by disingenuous negotiations and a surprise attack on a great power with far more considerable resources seems an eerie pre-echo of the history of Japan in 1940–1. But from Marcus’s point of view, the ‘Pearl Harbor’ of Aquileia seemed to place the Roman empire in deadly danger and to pitch the Roman state into its worst crisis since Hannibal invaded Italy 400 years earlier. Contemporaries were alive to the obvious analogies with the Second Punic War.142 The raiders came from beyond the Alps; they had surprised Rome by winning a stunning victory; and their success seemed to suggest that the gods were angry. Marcus had already decided to hold a lectisternium to avert the omens presaged by the plague that was currently devastating Italy; now he decided to have an enhanced ceremony to win the gods over for his campaign against the Germans. The lectisternium – a propitiatory ceremony performed at times of great calamity and offered to the gods, represented by their busts and statues or other symbols – was another link with the Punic Wars, for after the defeat by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene in 217 BC the Romans had offered the placatory sacred meal to six pairs of gods (Jupiter/Juno, Neptune/Minerva, Mars/Venus, Apollo/Diana, Vulcan/Vesta, Mercury/Ceres) in ceremonies lasting three days.143 Marcus in effect doubled up on this procedure, since he had the evil both of the plague and the Germans to ward off. Evincing at once his deeply superstitious nature and his religious eclecticism, he carried out further ceremonies, not just those directed to the Olympians, but aimed at enlisting the possible help of other gods: Isis, Magna Mater, Mithras, and so on (but not, of course, Jesus Christ). He carried out all the non-Roman rites, summoned priests of every stripe and denomin ation, and purified the city by every known technique. He even employed Chaldean necromancers and assorted maguses and magicians.144 At the back of his mind was the thought that the plague, and possibly the German invasion also, was divine punishment for the blasphemy committed when legionaries removed the cult statue of Apollo Comaeus during the sack of Seleucia in the Parthian war.145 As a further prop for Roman morale he distributed the fourth congiarium of his reign. He had no doubt that, whatever military preparations he himself had made on the Danube, he was now engaged in a just war, for the Germans had struck first.146 But there was more. In Marcus’s mind he was involved in the most serious fight for survival that any emperor had ever had to deal with. Defeat could mean the end of Rome, the empire and all that was connoted by Roman civilisation.