14

FROM THE TIME the Marcomanni made their sensational march on Aquileia in 167 until the departure of Marcus for the same city nearly a year later, a sense of gloomy foreboding suffused the city of Rome. All were aware that Rome faced a grave crisis, and the emperor had to tack between stressing the urgency of the situation and not affecting the morale of Romans by anything that smacked of panic. He began by raising money to pay for new troops. Leading by example, he conducted a two-month sale of imperial effects and possessions, putting under the hammer not just sumptuous furniture from the imperial apartments, gold goblets, silver flagons, crystals and chandeliers, but also his wife’s silken, gold-embroidered robes and her jewels.1 Clearly the auction of imperial property was more a propaganda move than a serious fund-raising effort, but it did the trick in terms of public relations, especially when Marcus suspended all debts to the imperial treasury. To an extent he was lucky. The Germans seemed to have surprised even themselves by the success of their first raid, which left them uncertain what to do next. Had they continued to stay on Italian soil, Marcus could not have allowed himself the luxury of so much time in the bosom of his family. While they withdrew across the Alps to ponder their next step, Marcus was left with a vital breathing space in which to plan the counter-strike. Massive numbers of new troops were raised, partly to relieve the fall in numbers caused by the plague, partly as one strand of an obvious grand strategy of counter-attack.² There was an unusually large intake in the legions, and additionally Marcus was assembling new, special units, for which he recruited from slaves (as in the Punic Wars), gladiators and members of city police forces (especially in the Greek cities of the eastern empire); he even paid a substantial bounty to members of bandit groups, whether real or so-called, to abandon their precarious life of brigandage and serve with Rome instead.3 Altogether, the equivalent of about six modern divisions were recruited by these extraordinary methods. Additionally, Marcus withdrew troops from Britain to shore up the defences of Italy.⁴

Meanwhile Marcus kept the volatile Roman population quiet with a series of lavish games and spectacles, including one where 100 lions were exhibited, only to be shot to death by archers.⁵ Such diversions were more necessary than ever, for this was the most devastating period of what came to be known as the Antonine plague; its impact was so great that most of the praetorian guard, together with its commander, Marcus’s trusted colleague Furius Victorinus, perished in these years. Once again Marcus showed a sure touch for public relations, ordaining that all funerals for plague victims were paid for by the state.⁶ But perhaps his most urgent task was to try to protect Italy against a repeat invasion by the Quadi and Marcomanni. To this end, most of the year 168 was spent constructing elaborate defensive fortifications at the Italian end of the alpine passes – the so-called praetentura Italiae et Alpium.⁷ This task was entrusted to another member of Marcus’s inner circle: the ex-consul Q. Antistius Adventus Postumus Aquilius, commanding two legions, possibly the two new Italian ones that now functioned as a mobile reserve. Adventus was one of a tiny select group, including Martius Verus in Cappadocia and Avidius Cassius in Syria, who had special consular commands that cut across the usual boundaries and time limits; both Verus and Cassius, for example, served nine-year stints as provincial governors.⁸ The defences of the praetentura were powerful and prohibitive in the case of the classic alpine passes – the St Gothard, St Bernard, Simplon and Splugen – but did not provide a watertight barrier against northern tribes wishing to penetrate south, as the Julian Alps were not effectively sealed. In Roman times the Alpes Iuliae were far more extensive than today’s mountains with the same name. They extended from the Velebit range on the northern Dalmatian coast through the Cicarija and Brkini ranges north of Istria, the rugged plateau of Trnovski Gozd (Birnbaumer Wald) to the higher peaks at the eastern end of the main alpine chain, taking in the Steiner Alps, the Carnic Alps, the modern Julian Alps and the Karawanken range.9 Clearly no system of defences could make the Mediterranean hermetically sealed against invaders from beyond the Alps, as the events of 170 were to show. What the praetentura did do was ensure that such a threat was unlikely to recur from the Marcomanni and Quadi.

Another early sign that Marcus was an effective commander in war was his shrewd and careful personnel selection. The comites he chose as his effective cabinet during these crucial early stages of the Marcomannic conflict included Claudius Fronto (Lucius Verus’s former legate in Parthia), M. Valerius Maximianus, Pontius Laelianus, Vitrasius Pollio, Aufidius Victorinus and M. Nonius Macrinus, former governor of both Pannonian provinces. Aufidius Victorinus was the emperor’s strong right arm in Dacia and Claudius Fronto in Upper Moesia. Fronto, originally a close adviser in Rome, was swiftly appointed to Upper Moesia, now a praetorian province, when the crisis broke and soon assumed part of the command in Dacia as well (Dacia Apulensis).¹⁰ Scholars suggest that the latter development was a sure sign that the contagion of war had already spread to the mouth of the Danube and that the Iazyges were involved.¹¹ Both Fronto and M. Valerius Maximianus were to be heavily involved in the war against the Germans, but it is hard to track their precise movements during the campaign.¹² Actions more easy to identify are those of the two rising stars who had made their name in 167 when first contacts with the enemy were established. Claudius Pompeianus was the man who had defeated the Germans in the initial skirmish; hitherto unknown, he seems to have come from nowhere to ascend to the right hand of Marcus Aurelius in little more than two years. M. Julius Bassus, governor of Upper Pannonia, was the man who had held the abortive and disingenuous peace talks with the eleven tribes led by Balomar, King of the Marcomanni. War, as always, opens up vast opportunities for ambitious men, who would have languished in obscurity in peacetime; both Bassus and Pompeianus were in this instance major beneficiaries of this universal trend. Indeed, Pompeianus comes across as a Napoleon manqué. From an obscure family, he got his chance in war, climbed the greasy pole and ended by being offered the imperial throne twice, after the deaths of Commodus and Pertinax.¹³

Amid the flurry of military preparations in 168 we suddenly get a clear glimpse of Marcus himself. On 6 January he made an obvious gesture of amity to the praetorian guard on whom he relied so heavily in a speech whose words are preserved: ‘In order that our veterans may more easily find fathers-in-law we shall tempt them also with a new privilege, namely that a grandfather whose grandchildren have been born to a veteran of the Praetorian Guard shall enjoy the same advantages in their name as he would enjoy if he had the grandchildren from his own son.’14 By the spring of 168 Marcus was happy enough with his fund-raising and military preparations that he thought the time had come to make a morale-boosting visit to Aquileia; he also intended to ‘show the flag’ briefly on the other side of the Alps, to cow the Germans with the warning of the wrath to come. But he was unwilling either to leave his co-emperor Verus behind in Rome or to send him on ahead to the Danube, knowing his unreliability.¹⁵ He put it to the Senate, and easily carried his way, that both emperors were needed initially at Aquileia. Cynics said the imperial pair were only too willing to shake off the dust of Rome, as plague was more virulent in the densely packed capital than in the countryside. The two emperors set off with the praetorians, accompanied by Furius Victorinus, in April. Aged forty-seven and already an old man by Roman standards, Marcus for the first time in his life travelled beyond the immediate environs of Rome and southern Italy. Aquileia was delighted with its distinguished visitors, and Marcus made the city his base, sending out detailed instructions for the building of more forts along the frontier.¹⁶ As expected, Verus proved a problem. Interested in nothing but hunting, he received with elation the news of an interim truce signed with the Germans on the Danube and suggested to Marcus that he should return to Rome, as matters were settled on the frontier.¹⁷ But Marcus insisted that Verus accompany him to the Danube in a brief show of strength; he did not trust the Germans and thought the temporary armistice worthless – something that would hold only while it was convenient for the Marcomanni. Verus then thought of another excuse, namely that the recent death from plague of Furius Victorinus and numbers of the proletarians meant that they no longer had the strength to go to the Danube.¹⁸ Nevertheless, Marcus prevailed, although the trip to the Danube was the briefest possible.¹⁹ Marcus now intended to winter at Aquileia prior to a campaign in 169, but this time Verus was adamant that he had to return to Rome. Reluctantly Marcus agreed to accompany him; it was a fixed idea with him that he could not let Verus out of his sight.

It seems that Verus’s health was already giving cause for concern before he left for Rome, but at Altinum on the return journey he was mortally felled by the same kind of apoplectic stroke that had nearly done for him seven years earlier on the way to Parthia. He collapsed while riding in a coach with his brother and lingered for three days before dying.20 It was January 169. Inevitably, in a cultural milieu where it was thought impossible for any great man to die suddenly of natural causes and where all coincidences and acts of contingency were construed as conspiracy, poisoning was suspected. There were many theories, each rivalling the last one in absurdity.²¹ The most straightforward was that Marcus himself had had Verus poisoned, though there was no agreement on the means or instrumentality. That hardy perennial of ancient conspiracy theories – the knife used to cut up meat that was poisoned on one side only – duly made its appearance, though some said Marcus had employed a physician named Posiddipus to overbleed his fellow emperor, since bloodletting was then considered a panacea.²² A more outré theory was that Marcus’s wife Faustina had been Verus’s lover – technically an act of incest, since her daughter Lucilla was his wife; somehow Faustina blurted this out to her daughter, whereat one or other of the two women (or possibly the two in collusion) poisoned Verus with oysters to prevent this scandal from ever coming out.²³ The incest theory actually subdivides, with some making Faustina the secret killer and others Lucilla. Another version was that Verus betrayed the incest to Lucilla during pillow talk, and that when Faustina learned this she took her revenge swiftly, fearing that now the secret was out, Verus would try to do away with her. Yet a further variant is that Lucilla was the assassin, motivated by jealousy of Verus’s sister Fabia Ceionia, to whom she thought Verus was too close.²⁴ Even more far-fetched – and explicitly rejected by most classical authors – was the idea that Verus had been hatching a plot to assassinate Marcus, together with Herodes Atticus (who certainly had no particular fondness for Marcus) and other grandees, but that Marcus discovered the plot and staged a pre-emptive coup of his own by having Verus assassinated.25 The final entry in this ledger of implausible conspiracy theories is that Verus and Fabia were secret incestuous lovers who planned to assassinate Marcus; the plot was then betrayed to Marcus by the freedman Agaclytus, who got his retaliation in first.²⁶

All one can say after this welter of implausibilities is that, although we do not have the historical evidence definitely to rule out the many canards, none of them makes sense in a context where Verus was known to suffer from poor health, had nearly died once before and came from a notoriously short-lived family. It is not enough to posit that Marcus was relieved by his colleague’s death; he would have been less than human not to be overjoyed at being rid of someone who was increasingly a burden and who had never really grown into the role of co-emperor, preferring instead to be the eternal youth, hunting and carousing. Certainly Marcus felt that he could now administer the empire more efficiently, without an annoying veto from an ignoramus.²⁷ Yet in some strange way, hard to pin down, the death of Verus created a bad impression at Rome. Avidius Cassius, for one, suspected foul play, and his conviction was later to have momentous consequences.²⁸ Certain senators found some of Marcus’s less-than-laudatory remarks when back in Rome deeply critical of the departed Verus. It was true that Marcus took the opportunity to divest himself of some of the ludicrous titles that Verus had insisted on sharing with him after the Parthian war – Medicus most obviously. And, now that he was relieved of the burden of his hot-headed and outspoken ‘brother’, he allowed it to be known that the entire story current hitherto about the victory in Parthia was one of Verus’s fabrication; in reality, he, Marcus, had devised the grand strategy that brought Vologases to his knees.²⁹ On the other hand, Marcus directed a lavish funeral in Rome, deified his late co-ruler as Divus Verus Parthicus Maximus, and made generous financial provision for his relicts and extended family.³⁰ It was not Verus’s kin who suffered from his death, but his wife and his freedmen. Marcus had never been happy with the influence wielded by Geminus, Agaclytus and Coedes (the Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell to Verus’s Richard III), or by that of the ‘lesser’ freedmen Eclectus, Apolaustus and Pergamus and, in a notable clean sweep, purged them all except Eclectus (ironically the man who would later kill his son Commodus).³¹ Then, to her fury, he married off Verus’s widow Lucilla to the rising star Claudius Pompeianus. This infuriated both Lucilla and her mother, who despised Pompeianus as being both too old and an Antiochine of low birth. Outrage was added to insult when Marcus announced the new marriage before the formal period of mourning for Verus was over.32 That Marcus married his own daughter to Pompeianus shows that he had no very high opinion of his latest favourite. In his mind he was merely following his consistent policy of marrying off his daughters to nonentities who would never challenge him or his beloved Commodus.³³

Marcus had originally intended his stay in Rome to be short, for he planned a trans-Danube campaign for spring 169. Yet the impact of the plague was so severe that in the end he had to postpone his plans and eventually abandon all hope of closing with the Germans that year. It was typical of the otherworldly Marcus that, while enduring what seemed to most Romans the wrath of the gods, he could convince himself that the daily scenes of death and dying around him were essentially nothing and that moral evil was worse than the pangs of expiring in agony. He suggests that we should avoid evil like the plague ‘because it is a plague – a mental cancer – worse than anything caused by polluted air or a disease-racked climate. Diseases like the plague can only threaten your life; this one attacks your very humanity.’³⁴ Yet while he dilated on the ‘unreality’ of the physical world, he continued to tighten up training and discipline among the Danube legions, ready for the eventual invasion of Germany. He planned to make his incursion with his newly raised forces and some of the veteran legions, with a reserve formed by the two legions of Upper Moesia (IV Flavia and VII Claudia) plus the Dacian legion (XIII Gemina) based at Apulum.³⁵ Doubtless the Germans had their own secret agents who followed the preparations in Rome, for sometime that year they made a surprise offer to return large numbers of deserters and captives from the 167 raid on Aquileia.³⁶ Marcus read this as a delaying tactic and initially ignored it. He kept the Roman people amused and distracted with more public spectacles, but never had the common touch and could not be the darling of the mob. His simple wisdom in taking gladiators to fight at the front was interpreted by the common people as an attempt to cut down on one of their favourite amusements; it was said that he intended to take all who fought in the arena and turn them into desiccated philosophers.³⁷ In the ranks it was whispered that his study of Stoicism made him a harsh and unsympathetic disciplinarian.³⁸ Marcus himself had no illusions about his personal popularity, especially after a rumour circulated that the day before he departed for the wars he had lectured on philosophy to an audience of enthusiasts.39 Another similar canard was that he had asked to have his own book called Precepts of Philosophy published after he had left, just in case anything happened to him.⁴⁰ With great shrewdness he put the following words into the mouth of an imagined Thersites in the mob: ‘At last we can breathe freely again, without our master! To be sure, he was never harsh with any of us; but I always felt that he had a silent contempt for us.’⁴¹

Sometime in late September or early October Marcus finally departed for the front, having completed his preparations; he gave out that he would be away for about a year.⁴² It was too late for campaigning in 169, but it was hoped that spring 170 would finally bring the long-hoped-for Roman offensive. He based himself in Pannonia, where he spent the winter of 169–70 and opened negotiations with the Germans, seeking to detach flaky and unreliable tribes from the barbarian alliance. One of the first targets for his diplomacy was the Quadi, who offered to return 13,000 captives and deserters if they could have a secure peace.⁴³ Marcus did eventually manage to secure a temporary peace with the Quadi, which kept them out of the war for a while; it was agreed that the Marcomanni and their allies the Sarmatians would be denied the territory of the Quadi, and that the Quadi would return the 13,000 prisoners and deserters. But Marcus was not confident that this arrangement would hold, and his scepticism was increased when the Quadi returned only the sick, useless and aged among their captives.⁴⁴ Senior comites like Pompeius Sosius Priscus were with him, and to Pannonia too went the new favourite (and now son-in-law) Claudius Pompeianus, whose marriage to Lucilla had not pleased Roman public opinion either, since he was twice her age. So far 169 had been a quiet, yet not particularly successful year, combining as it did the unpopular marriage, the passing of Verus and the melancholy circumstances of the death of his son Annius Verus from a brain tumour. Marcus’s apparent partiality for his new low-born son-in-law revealed the meritocratic streak that sometimes surfaced in him alongside the innate conservatism, but Pompeianus was far from the only personality to enjoy a meteoric rise in the late 160s because of the German war. The German frontier proved to be a nursery for future emperors.

Among the breed was Publius Helvius Pertinax, another ‘new man’, destined to be a short-lived ruler during the ‘year of the five emperors’ in 193.45 A study of his career shows clearly the obstacles to success to anyone not born into the senatorial class, the ‘natural’ elite. Born in 126 at Alba Pompeiana in Liguria, north-western Italy, Pertinax was the son of a freedman – a fact always held against him by his snobbish critics. His father Helvius Successus was determined to give him a good education, so he was sent to Rome to study with the illustrious grammarian Sulpicius Apollinaris of Carthage. In Rome young Pertinax was taken under the protection of Helvius Successus’s patron, senator Lollianus Avitus, on whose estates Helvius’s family lived. Once ‘graduated’, Pertinax worked as a teacher for ten years, but, tired of low pay, he then joined the army and tried to secure one of the coveted posts as centurion. In this ambition he failed – the sources do not tell us why, and maybe it was simply because Lollianus Avitus did not lobby hard enough.⁴⁶ The best Pertinax could manage was a post as prefect of a cohort of Gauls serving in Syria, but commanding a 500-strong infantry battalion of non-citizen soldiers, with no tenure or future security, was hardly going to be a stepping stone to fame and fortune. It was now that Pertinax hitched his wagon to a much more powerful star – none other than Claudius Pompeianus. Despite falling foul of Attilius Cornelianus, Pertinax made steady progress during the Parthian war by means of hard work and innate talent.⁴⁷ He was then promoted to the Second Militia and sent to Britain, where he became one of five equestrian tribunes with Legio VI Victrix at Eboracum (York).⁴⁸ Given command of another unit, the First Tungrians, at Housestead in the middle of Hadrian’s Wall, he caught the eye of his commander Calpurnius Agricola, who secured him another promotion, to lead a cavalry regiment as praefectus alae (Third Militia) in Moesia. With Claudius Pompeianus already on the Danube as governor of Lower Pannonia, Pertinax could hope for further advancement, but openings at the next rank (as equestrian officer in the Fourth Militia) were rare. Thinking laterally, he used the patronage of Pompeianus to obtain the post of procurator of the alimenta system for the Via Aemilia region of northern Italy. This was the lowest rung of the procuratorial ladder, with a salary of 60,000 sesterces a year, but became a key position when Marcus and Lucius Verus made their headquarters at Aquileia in 168. Impressed by Pertinax’s administrative ability, Marcus promoted him to command the Danube fleet, at a salary of 100,000 sesterces a year. This was a top posting, for Marcus had detached ships from the fleets operating from Misenum, Ravenna and Britain to ensure that he had command of the Danube itself.49 Less than a year later Pertinax had doubled his income and risen still higher: to a position as special procurator for Dacia on 200,000 sesterces a year. He was right in the war zone, and well placed to impress the emperor further with his almost unique combination of administrative and military experience.⁵⁰

A very different personality and in a totally different sphere – who, nonetheless, like Pertinax, rose to Marcus’s favour on talent rather than aristocratic connections – was the physician Galen, destined to become Marcus’s personal doctor and the most famous scientist of the second century. Born in Pergamum in 129, he was brought up in comfort by his father, a wealthy architect with creative pretensions, who wrote verse and took his young son to philosophical lectures. A priggish schoolboy, disliked by his peers, Galen showed his intellectual distinction early, to the point where he was said to have refuted one of his philosophy teachers while in his early teens.⁵¹ Encouraged by this, Galen’s father Nikon intended him to be a professional philosopher, but events supervened. Galen very soon became a devotee of the god Asclepius, whose magnificent suburban shrine was near Pergamum. There he became acquainted with Aelius Aristides, the orator who had extolled the empire to Antoninus Pius in 144. Many people found the valetudinarian Aelius tiresome, but the young Galen was impressed by what he saw as a lifetime’s valiant struggle against illness; from this he proceeded to a general belief in the supremacy of mind over matter.⁵² Galen’s fanatical commitment to Asclepius eventually led him to believe that he had a hotline to the god; Asclepius began appearing to him in dreams, speaking to him and even recommending drugs and cures. Whether by a process of collective hysteria or by some other mechanism, Nikon also started dreaming of Asclepius, and as a result of one such experience he decided to direct his talented son towards medicine (this was in the winter of 146–7).⁵³ Galen then studied initially at Pergamum and later at Smyrna under a tutor named Pelops. He next sought out the noted physician Numisianus in Corinth, but, finding him lately departed for Alexandria, followed him there. Under his tutelage at Alexandria, Galen came to regard Hippocrates as the alpha and omega of medicine and to stress the importance of theory. His mastery of theory soon brought out an arrogant streak, which made him despise all doctors who were not saturated in the lore of Hippocrates and made all their diagnoses purely from books of cases.54 As a physician Galen first made his name by finding a cure for the Syrian sophist Pausanias, who had lost all feeling and function in two fingers after falling backwards out of a chariot.

Yet Galen was not just a skilled physician. He had a vast know ledge of mathematics and astronomy also. Renaissance man avant la lettre, he was a polymath with interests ranging from Aristotelian logic to the plays of Aristophanes.⁵⁵ A shrewd ‘horses for courses’ devotee of arcane knowledge, he used his time in Alexandria well, prowling among the shipping in the dockyards, learning from mariners how to navigate by the stars and mastering the minutiae of seaborne trade, with special reference to the cargoes of drugs and minerals transported around the Mediterranean.⁵⁶ Only at twenty-eight did he consider his education complete. Returning to Pergamum, he set up in practice, massively assisted by his father’s money. It was typical of Galen to claim personal credit for anything, including slices of almost supernatural luck; it followed that he denied that his family money had anything to do with his success, even though on Nikon’s death in 150 he inherited vast estates and a huge income, which allowed him to endow a medical library. Not having to practise for a living, he liked to boast that he never charged a fee – though he did not turn down lavish gifts bestowed on him by grateful clients. His first official post was as physician to the gladiators owned by the high priest of Asia; his wealth and status effectively enabled him to start at the top. He developed a method of treating thigh wounds and within four years reduced the deaths from wounds in the arena from sixty a year to just two. Combative, intellectually audacious, resembling Hadrian in his self-assigned ‘know-all’ status, Galen made a serious study of all philosophical systems, being particularly drawn to Platonism, but also extremely well versed in Stoicism.⁵⁷ But his arrogant assumption of effortless superiority made him many enemies, who alleged that he was a mere glory-hunter who subordinated science to his own pride, ambition and self-love; modern scholars on the whole tend to endorse this judgement.⁵⁸ Certainly bombastic, boastful and humourless as he was, Galen was not an attractive man.

It seems likely that his skills deserted him when it came to politics, for he backed the wrong political party in Pergamum during the acute ‘stasis’ or strife that affected the community, and in 162 departed for the bright lights of Rome. Disingenuously, Galen pretends in the autobiographical fragments of his extensive writings that he arrived in Rome as a poor, friendless immigrant, battling against a hostile world, with only his genius to declare. In fact his old philosophy tutor Eudemus, now in Rome, had access to the very highest circles and made straight the ways for his protégé.59 Moreover, one of his very first clients was Flavius Boethius, an oligarch of consular rank in the emperor’s inner circle. When Galen cured Boethius’s wife where all previous physicians had failed, Boethius introduced him to court circles. Very soon Galen was giving anatomy demonstrations to the inner circle of Marcus Aurelius’s most trusted senators. Correctly reading the runes when the troops arrived back from Parthia bringing the deadly plague, Galen departed for healthier climes in 166.⁶⁰ Yet it was typical of him not to admit the truth, but to claim that the envy of small-minded rivals and their detestation of his medical brilliance meant that he had to give up his anatomy demonstrations and eventually leave Rome altogether. From 166 to 168 the historical trail on Galen goes cold, but then in 168 he was ordered to join Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus at Aquileia.⁶¹ At this time he was far from being the top physician on the imperial staff and was left behind in Aquileia (not deemed to be one of the truly essential personnel) when Marcus set off back for Rome with Verus in January 169. He seems to have spent much of his time fulminating against the incompetence of the other doctors whom Marcus had around him.⁶² But Galen had clearly made his mark, perhaps from discussing Stoic doctrines with the emperor and perhaps from so perfectly endorsing Marcus’s strictures about rage. Galen had had two notable encounters with the deadly sin of anger. His mother was a shrew who ranted and raved at her slaves and even bit one of her servants. His father had taken him on one side and stressed that he should never emulate his mother; a slave should never be beaten in hot blood, but only after due thought and consideration.⁶³ Later Galen had an irascible Cretan friend who was travelling with him once from Rome to Athens. Just after they landed at Corinth the friend lost his temper with two of his slaves and set about them with a scabbarded sword, beating them over the head. The sword burst its scabbard and the naked blade seriously injured the two unfortunates. As soon as he saw the blood, the Cretan bolted, for he knew the rules on killing slaves.64 Under Roman law this counted as murder, unless the killing occurred during reasonable punishment administered in cold blood. One imagines Marcus taking quiet satisfaction from the moral of these narratives.

At all events, Marcus had not forgotten Galen, and in the summer of 169 ordered him to Rome prior to being posted to the Danube frontier. This was not at all what Galen had in mind. Always the survivor, he wrote bare-facedly to Marcus to inform him that Asclepius had appeared to him in a dream and told him in no circumstances to travel to Germany.⁶⁵ Amazingly, Marcus let him get away with this piece of flimflammery; or was he even more superstitious than we can imagine and placed some credence in this ‘manifestation’ of Asclepius? At all events, Marcus changed his instructions: Galen was now to come to Rome and be Commodus’s personal doctor.⁶⁶ Awarded this sinecure, Galen had plenty of time to read, write and pursue his polymathic inclinations. He branched out into dream interpretation, claiming to be able to diagnose diseases with its aid.⁶⁷ Later he tended the emperor himself, supervising the daily doses of theriac and winning from Marcus the accolade ‘first among physicians and unique among philosophers’.⁶⁸ Galen continued to treat Commodus until Marcus’s infamous son died in 192, and later acted as physician to the emperor Septimius Severus, before dying in extreme old age, probably in 216–17.⁶⁹ He had outstanding achievements in anatomy and pharmacology to his credit and rivalled Pliny the Elder as an omnivore, polymath and restless workaholic.⁷⁰ But he had many signal intellectual weaknesses, principally prolixity, windbaggery and lack of lucidity. In debate, truth came a poor second to the intellectual demolition of his opponent, and Galen would use all the low tricks of the intellectual charlatan, disingenuously employing the arguments of one philsophical sect, which he had elsewhere repudiated, to knock down the tenets of another.⁷¹ He had some of Marcus’s gullibility when it came to mountebanks and impostors, taking advice from well-known shady hucksters such as Simmias the thaumaturge, a crooked schoolmaster called Philogenus, and a ship’s doctor of the quack variety named Axius.⁷² Yet for all his faults, Galen raised the intellectual tone of Marcus’s court and is an invaluable source for the reign. Without his voluminous writings, our knowledge of these years would be considerably poorer.

While adventurers, opportunists and men generally on the make used the ‘window’ of the German war to climb the greasy pole, in his lonely eyrie on the Danube Marcus had to work out how best to crush the Marcomanni and what tactics and strategy to use. The size of the army he assembled for the campaign was huge, at least 100,000 strong and it may have numbered 140,000 (twelve legions of 60,000 men, plus one-third of all auxiliaries in the empire, or another 80,000 troops). We can trace the numerous vexillationes that he summoned from the legions III Augusta, III Cyrenaica, X Fretensis, XV Apollinaris and XII Fulminata (all in addition to the twelve legions stationed on the Danube), and also thirty-four cavalry wings and ninety-six cohorts of numeri and other irregulars. Altogether Marcus commanded the largest army ever assembled on the frontier of the Roman empire. Such high numbers have sometimes been queried, but are not seriously out of line when one considers that Caesar assembled 90,000 troops in 45–44 BC for the proposed conquest of Parthia, and Trajan headed 100,000 for each of his Dacian wars, while at Lyons in 197 when Septimius Severus fought Albinus there were 150,000 men on the field of battle.73 A curiosity of the Marcomannic wars was that this was almost the last appearance of the classic Roman legionary equipped with segmented armour (lorica segmentata) and curved rectangular shields. Early in the third century when there was a mass grant of Roman citizenship to aliens, the legions lost both their clear social status and their clearly differentiated appearance, with oval shields replacing the rectangular scutum and the segmentata falling into disfavour.⁷⁴ Problems of transport, supply, communications, logistics and commissariat for such an army and its horses were colossal, though no detailed facts and figures are available for this aspect of the Marcomannic wars.⁷⁵ Compounding Marcus’s problems were the absence of good roads on the other side of the Danube, the damp climate, the inhospitable terrain of bristling forests, vast mountains, dank moors and swamps, the vulnerability of Roman supply lines to guerrilla attack and the normal lack of a local food supply, which meant that the Romans would have to take all their victuals with them.⁷⁶

Facing them were maybe 70,000 Marcomanni and their German allies, plus the countless numbers of Sarmatians operating on the Hungarian plain.77 Surprise has sometimes been expressed that the Marcomanni, who cannot have numbered much more than 100,000 all told, should have been able to field such large numbers of warriors, but two factors are relevant. Many women fought alongside their men, and female warriors were found in full armour (albeit of a very basic kind) in the aftermath of a battle. Moreover, many tribes, like the Astingi on the lower Danube, operated as a mobile army with entire families on the march, enabling old men and young boys to take part in the fighting.⁷⁸ The Romans certainly respected the Germans as adversaries. Tacitus argued that a harsh landscape and climate had, by challenge and response, produced a savage people, physically huge with a natural penchant for battle, impressive with their ‘fierce blue eyes, red hair, tall frames’.⁷⁹ Although Marcus undoubtedly shared the general Roman view that all barbarians deserved to be killed or enslaved, especially if they resisted the will of Rome, it is likely that he perceived them with some ambivalence, as at once ‘noble savages’ and as precursors of a chaos world. On the one hand, they were naturally evil, treacherous, destructive, anarchic and benighted; on the other, they exhibited the old-style virtues of Cato and the Roman republic and had avoided the corruption and decadence of the empire. Marriage was strictly observed, with adultery and seduction frowned upon, infanticide regarded as evil; mothers suckled their own children, there was no ostentation at funerals, no usury, and freedmen were not allowed to rise high.⁸⁰ In military terms Marcus was confident of success. He planned to encircle the enemy using a subtle mixture of the legions and the Danube fleet and he did not fear defeat. Formidable as they were as individual warriors, the Germans could hope to beat the Romans only if they massively outnumbered them, encountered them on terrain exceptionally favourable to themselves or were faced by incompetents such as Varus in the Teutoburg forest. The only dispiriting thing about the coming war was that there were no fixed assets to attack and destroy – even Parthia had a supply of those – since the Germans did not live in towns.⁸¹

On the whole Marcus’s sanguine estimates were warranted. The Germans were afflicted by a number of severe military weaknesses. They were hopeless at siegecraft and had no idea what to do once they had surrounded a city or fortress.⁸² Their primitive technology and lack of iron meant they possessed few swords (though this defect was often remedied by collecting the weapons of Romans slain on the battlefield) and relied heavily on long spears as their principal weapon. Their armour was inferior and sometimes non-existent, and their archers few. Sometimes in desperation they were reduced to throwing stones at the enemy; even the cavalry did this. German horsemen were usually better than the infantry, but again few in number because few tribesmen, even among the more affluent Marcomanni, could afford to keep a horse.83 The natural Teutonic mode of warfare was the massed charge by infantry in a pitched battle; their cavalry often dismounted once battle was joined and fought on foot, keeping the horses ready in case they needed to flee. The Germans depended on a swift, wild rush in a wedge-shaped formation, with the nobler and better-equipped warriors in the front rank, hoping to break up the Roman line with the impetus of the first charge.⁸⁴ Unlike the Parthians, who relied on cavalry and sought to attack the Romans at their weakest point, for the Germans it was a matter of pride to attack the legions at their strongest, when they were drawn up and ready for pitched battle.⁸⁵ Partly this was a macho code whereby warfare was the only true avocation for a man, where noble youths hired themselves out as mercenaries when their own tribe was at peace, where even some sort of vague equivalent of Japan’s later ronin or lordless samurai could be discerned.⁸⁶ Partly it was because there was no organised military hierarchy: every tribe fought under its chief, who led by example and did not coordinate with leaders of the other clans. It stood to reason that a series of disconnected and sporadic assaults on the enemy’s line by various heterogeneous kinship groups and retinues was never going to prevail against the discipline of the Roman army.⁸⁷ As one expert on the ‘barbarians’ has noted, ‘[It was] little, if at all, more effective than the Achaean warriors of Homer would have been . . . It was useless to fight the imperial armies with the tactics and equipment of Achilles and Agamemnon.’⁸⁸

Given the propensity of the German tribes to engage the Romans in a frontal assault, to be clumsy forces incapable of subtle manoeuvre and to go for a once-and-for-all solution, they were dangerous only when united under a single charismatic leader, yet not even the prestige of an Arminius or a Maroboduus had been able to effect that. Could the Marcomanni do any better? Apart from the superior armour, weaponry, discipline and training of the Roman legionaries – German warriors would never do anything so ‘banausic’ as train for a battle – logistics, ideology and culture all worked against the barbarian tribes. Logistics made it difficult for them to fight a protracted campaign, and only the Chatti had anything like a standing army; significantly they were unique in that they came equipped for a full campaign when they went to war and did not just carry enough food to fight a single battle.89 Mostly the Germans dispersed after a battle, whether beaten or victorious. German culture and ideology were also counter-productive. They spent precious time carrying off their dead and wounded – a point of honour to them – and even after a victory liked to loot rather than pursue a stricken enemy.⁹⁰ Guerrilla warfare, too, was ruled out, not just by lack of resources and logistics, but by a dogmatic and blinkered warrior ethos. Slow and ponderous, the tribes took time to assemble their armies, which was why the Romans so often encountered them on their return from a raid outside Germany.⁹¹ Even the dark and gloomy forests, which the Romans feared so much and which were thought to be harbingers of evil, were never used as a secret weapon by the Germans. This was partly because they liked to live in depopulated desert areas with clear visibility around, so that they could not be suddenly raided.⁹² And it was partly because their long spears were unwieldy in the forest; if a mass of warriors was crowded together among trees, it followed that they could not emerge from cover to retrieve a lance or other weapon and could not therefore exploit any advantage they had over the Romans in fleetness of foot. It was only when the barbarians began to master the bow and arrow in the third century that they started to exploit the natural advantage of the forest.⁹³ Eschewing the forest, they liked to fight on the flat plain, trying to catch the Romans in open country surrounded by woods and marshes; using these as cover, they would then launch incessant, short, sharp attacks. Yet even then they usually ended up hurling torches and jars of liquid in frustration at some disciplined Roman testudo.⁹⁴

Yet over the three centuries since the encounter with Marius, the Germans did gradually learn things from the Romans, even if it took them an unconscionable time. In the early days one of their military weaknesses had been that they did not keep back a reserve, pinning everything on the first frenzied charge; this, after all, was why most of their early successes were gained by ambuscade. The only notion of strategy the Germans had was to guess the likely route of a Roman retreat and set multiple ambushes along the line of the supposed itinerary.95 The lack of a reserve was in part the result of an individualistic culture in which there was no notion of the common or greater good; rationality for the tribesman meant acting purely for oneself or one’s family.⁹⁶ Gradually the Germans learned bitter lessons from the Romans and came to appreciate the virtues of patience, discipline and keeping a reserve.⁹⁷ The greater the social change towards inequality and a full-time warrior class and the more contact there was with the Romans, the more formidable the Germans became in terms of weaponry, discipline, tactics and strategy. It was Marcus’s misfortune to encounter the Marcomanni when they were at the peak of their military efficiency.⁹⁸ The greater the economic surplus a tribe engendered by trade and mercenary service, the more it could afford to employ what were in effect full-time troops. That a successful pan-Germanic conspiracy – never before achieved by anyone, not even Marboduus or Arminius – should have emerged at almost precisely the same moment the Marcomanni were on the crest of an economic wave may be interpreted as the work of an unknown political genius. But it looks like the kind of historical determinism that, when it impacts on an unfortunate victim, can seem to exhibit all the symptoms of supernatural ill-luck. It is perhaps no wonder that Marcus sacrificed to every god imaginable.

That the new German alliance was more formidable in fighting skills than anything the Romans had previously encountered north of the frontier quickly became apparent in the first year of continuous warfare in 170. At the same time the extent of the German conspiracy became clear when Marcus found himself fighting on four different fronts: in Pannonia, Dacia, the lower Danube and the upper Rhine. Details of his own campaign in Pannonia are sketchy, but it is clear that when the Romans crossed the Danube to attack the Marcomanni, they sustained a major defeat in this sector with losses of 20,000 reported; among the dead was Macrinius Vindex.⁹⁹ Roman sources hushed up the defeat, but, if Lucian can be believed, this campaign had got off to an inauspicious, not to say risible, start. The charlatan Alexander of Abonoteichos, whose ‘oracles’ were still listened to by Marcus, had foretold a victory in 167, but when the disaster of Aquileia unfolded, he blithely stated the ‘god’ had not told him whether the Romans or the Germans would win it. This does not seem to have dented his credibility, for his next trick was to inform Marcus that he would win the campaign in 170 if he threw two lions into the Danube.100 This was done and the lions swam across the river to the far shore, where they were immediatedly clubbed to death by the Marcomanni, who took them for a new breed of dog or wolf. Most authorities accept as authentic this tale, which does not redound to Marcus’s credit, but some mitigate the emperor’s folly by saying that he obeyed Alexander’s oracle not because he believed it, but because he was under pressure from his superstitious troops.¹⁰¹ Quite where the devastating Roman defeat took place is unclear: some say that Marcus himself was not involved, that his forces were pinned down by the Marcomanni in Upper Pannonia and that the German victory occurred further down the Danube.¹⁰² Whatever took place on the battlefield, two factors seem to have aided the Marcomanni materially. In the first place, the Quadi acted as benevolent neutrals towards their fellow-Germans. While not formally abrogating their treaty with Marcus by openly appearing in the field against him, they provided sanctuary for the Marcomanni, confusing Roman commanders, much as Cambodia was later to confuse US generals in the Vietnam war. Marcus contained his anger and vowed to deal with the Quadi at a later date; his precarious peace with them held until the winter of 172–3.¹⁰³ Second and more significantly, the Marcomanni produced their trump card: the Sarmatians. The Iazyges, the most warlike branch of the Sarmatians and now occupying the Hungarian plain, suddenly appeared at the side of the Marcomanni, making it clear that Marcus had not just a pan-German conspiracy on his hands, but an alliance between the Teutons and these formidable raiders of the steppes.¹⁰⁴

The Iazyges were also involved in serious turmoil in Dacia in 170. In the winter of 169–70 Marcus seemed to have bought off a Sarmatian chief named Tarbus, who threatened to raze Dacia in flames unless he was given a huge bribe; this was perhaps an early version of the ‘shakedown’ procedures later used by Attila the Hun. Marcus paid him off, but Tarbus did not keep his side of the bargain and sent his men to assist an internal revolt in the province. In the fierce fighting that followed, Claudius Fronto was killed, the second notable Roman to become a war casualty that year.¹⁰⁵ But serious alarm was caused by the third major offensive in 170. In alliance with the Roxolani, the Iazyges’ Sarmatian cousins, the Costoboci tribe made a great trek from Poland south-west across the Carpathians to the lower Danube and Thrace. Thence they raided throughout the Balkans all the way to Greece, rampaging along a corridor 650 miles long, with plenty of leisurely plundering stops along the way; their vanguard got as far as Elateia in Boeotia and Eleusis in Attica.106 Not surprisingly this foray, which occupied most of the year 170, created a sensation almost as great as the raid on Aquileia three years before. The Costoboci met no opposition until Greece, but there they were defeated and thrown back by vexillationes under Vehilius Gratus, who did such a good job that Marcus promoted him and at once transferred him to Spain to deal with Moorish raiders there.¹⁰⁷ By early 171 the emergency in Greece was over, though there were still Costoboci stragglers in Epirus and Macedonia that year, some of whom had joined bands of brigands and others of whom made common cause with Roman deserters to form fresh bandit units. Roughly speaking, it seems that by the end of 170 the Romans had managed to regroup, restore their Danube communications and stabilise their position on the river frontier; above all, they had managed to hold the line of the praetentura.¹⁰⁸

The fourth front, the Rhine, was the least troublesome. Here another probe, presumably by the Chatti, was repelled by Didius Julianus, previously proconsular legate in Africa and now commanding Legio XXII Primigenia in Upper Germany.¹⁰⁹ But Marcus evidently considered the threat on the Rhine serious, for he dispatched his favourite and son-in-law, Claudius Pompeianus, to deal with it. Pompeianus used the opportunity to turn the tables on his political enemies. It seems that when Claudius Fronto was killed fighting the Iazyges, the anti-Pompeianus faction (not daring to confront him openly) attacked his protégé Pertinax instead and poured poison into Marcus’s ear to the effect that Pertinax was really to blame for Fronto’s death. Perhaps temporarily disorientated and discomfited by a series of defeats, Marcus listened to the calumny and dismissed Pertinax.¹¹⁰ Pompeianus immediately hit back by making Pertinax his field commander on the Rhine. When Pertinax won a decisive victory there, Pompeianus persuaded Marcus that his treatment of Pertinax had been a mistake. In a possible overreaction once he realised he had been hoodwinked, Marcus recalled Pertinax and put him in command of the Danube vexillationes. When his continued good showing in that post convinced Marcus that Pompeianus’s opinion had been correct, he made Pertinax a senator and also a praetorian so that he could command a legion.111 By the year 171 Pertinax had reached the top of the tree, commander of I Adiutrix in Raetia and Noricum. He in turn was then able to help his protégé Valerius Maximianus, a man whose career always seemed to run in tandem with that of Pertinax. Maximianus was given responsibility for escorting the supply caravans down the Danube to the armies in Pannonia. Thereafter he commanded detachments of the fleet. As Pertinax rose higher and higher, so did he. He was prefect of the cavalry detachments ala I Hispanorum Aravacorum in Upper Pannonia and later prefect of the ala Contariorum at Arrabona on the Danube (east of Brigetio).¹¹² Like Pertinax, he eventually became one of Marcus’s most trusted commanders. From the acorn when Marcus adopted a nonentity as son-in-law, and thus engendered the nexus Marcus-Pompeianus–Pertinax-Maximianus, the oak of two great military careers grew up.

All in all, 170 had not been a good year for the warrior Marcus and, although the Romans had not been routed or driven from the Danube, they had taken heavy losses. Unquestionably the German alliance won that year’s contest on points. In Rome the faint-hearted clamoured for Marcus to make a makeshift peace – any peace – and to cut his losses. But he was determined to stick it out, confident that in a long war of attrition, Roman discipline, stamina, resources and moral fibre would in the end tell.¹¹³ There are few direct references to the war in Marcus’s own Meditations, but one passage can perhaps be read as expressing his ambivalence about the ‘indifferent’ task he was engaged in, his contempt for the barbarians and perhaps a growing realisation that, in the long term, his most dangerous enemy was the Iazyges: ‘A spider is proud when it catches a fly, a man when he snares a hare, another when he nets a fish, another wild boars, another bears, another Sarmatians. If you test their principles, aren’t they all brigands?’¹¹⁴ Marcus certainly needed all his Stoic detachment at this juncture. The war was going badly and the desertion rate was growing alarmingly, contributing in turn to the increasing problem of banditry in the empire.¹¹⁵ Further evidence of Roman setbacks in this year comes from the coinage. The high output suggests the increasing amounts of money having to be paid for troops and the replacements for heavy casualties. Another sign that the treasury was having to withstand rude shocks comes from the progressive debasement of the silver content of coins that were being minted – a process that would continue until 173.116 Naturally, as in all wars, there were winners and losers. The war generated huge profits and fortunes for some Romans, as there were new roads to be built and old ones repaired, new ships to be launched and arms and armour to be manufactured, to say nothing of the horses, mules and draught animals to be supplied, the clothing, shoes and other artefacts to be sold, and the contracts for supplying food and materiel to the army, which lucky agents could win. Since all requisitioning took place on the Danube frontier, Rome and Italy were largely saved the impact of the war, except for the loss of family members in the army. Marcus took comfort from the lessons he had learned from a year of disappointment and concentrated the legions II and III Italica between Noricum and Raetia, the sector where the Germans seemed to have won their surprise victory.¹¹⁷

The year 171 saw Marcus vindicated in his determination to play the long game. Carefully and systematically he played the game of ‘divide and rule’, sowing dissension among the Germans, setting tribe against tribe, encouraging personal rivalries within tribes and above all hammering home the lesson that the Germans were engaged in a struggle they could never win. The solid German coalition had already cracked when the Quadi signed a peace treaty with Rome in 169–70, even if they were perfidious in keeping its terms. Their unilateralism underlined the moral that, at the limit, the tribes would always put self-interest ahead of anti-Roman hatred or pan-Germanic solidarity. Testing to see how many advantages they could derive from their officially neutral status, the Quadi once again raised the issue of incorporation into the Roman free-trade area or being granted most-favoured-nation status. Once again Marcus brusquely turned them down.¹¹⁸ The Quadi bided their time, waiting to see the outcome of his expected offensive against the Marcomanni, but Marcus was in no hurry to engage them. He could not risk another defeat, so he concentrated on building up his forces, always waiting for a mistake by the foe that would allow him to strike. In the meantime ‘divide and rule’ paid dividends. By the end of 171 the Costoboci, who had convulsed Greece and the Balkans the year before, were no longer a serious factor. Skilfully exploiting inter-tribal rivalries, Cornelius Clemens, governor of Dacia, managed to divert a migration by the Vandal tribes of the Asdingi and Lacringi into the territory of the Costoboci, and then tempted the Costoboci to attack the interlopers by promising Roman aid and subsidies. The Asdingi were at first successful, whereupon Clemens proved the arch-Machiavellian by gulling the Lacringi into attacking their ‘brothers’, who had become too powerful. He then encouraged the vanquished Costoboci to rise up and deal with the Lacringi. When the Costoboci won this engineered ‘civil war’, Marcus encouraged them to become loyal Roman allies by generous gifts of land and money. Thoroughly made over by the combination of stick and carrot, they proved loyal allies in the struggle against the Marcomanni.119 But the Roman ploy did not always work. Marcus’s ab epistulis Latinis, Tarruttienus Paternus, was given the mission to persuade the Cotini, a tribe that lived in the rear of the Marcomanni, to launch a sneak attack from behind. But the outraged Cotini beat up the envoy and threw him out, telling him he was lucky to escape with his life.¹²⁰

Overall, though, the ‘divide and rule’ tactics worked. More and more tribes put out feelers to Marcus, hoping to steal a march on the other Germans by getting special and exceptional terms. Even within the tribes that remained hostile there was dissension, with individual clans breaking rank and surrendering to the Romans. Sometimes embassies were sent directly by councils of the whole people, bypassing the tribal leaders.¹²¹ Gradually Roman successes grew and, with them, increasing confidence. The new military star Pertinax cleared every last German out of Raetia and Noricum, even though his enemies in Rome continued the snobbish whispering campaign against him, bruiting about his ‘low birth’.¹²² Another great coup achieved by the Romans in 171 was by Pertinax’s friend and colleague, Valerius Maximianus, who effectively ended the participation of the Naristae in the war when he slew their chief Valao in single combat – an exploit that seemed to recall the glory days of the Roman republic.¹²³ Having whittled away most significant Marcomanni allies, Marcus crowned the achievements of that year right at the end of the campaigning season when he caught the enemy as they crossed the Danube from Upper Pannonia into Bohemia, laden with booty. A complete Roman victory was the result.¹²⁴ It was Marcus’s first battle, probably his first close-up taste of heavy fighting, and he was completely successful. It was also the last time the Marcomanni were able to cross the Danube in pursuit of plunder. That the defeat was heavy can be seen from one significant detail. Marcomannic embassies usually consisted of one representative from each of the ten clans in the tribe, plus the war chief. This time the Marcomanni sent two leaders with shared powers and two warriors from the rank and file.125 Defeated in war and deserted by most of their allies, the Marcomanni grudgingly agreed a truce. As Marcus wintered for 171–2 in Carnuntum he was able to congratulate himself on a careful strategy efficiently carried out.¹²⁶ The year 171 had been as satisfactory as 170 had been disastrous. Roman spirits were buoyed, and the new mood of optimism found expression in the first issue of triumphalist coinage. Marcus was acclaimed on these coins as Imperator VI; other issues bore the legend Victoria Germanica.¹²⁷ It was a fitting commemoration of the ten years he had served as emperor.

The year 172 saw further Roman triumphs. This was the year when Marcus finally felt ready to take the war to the enemy and, in a major offensive, he invaded the territory of the Marcomanni. Coinage shows him crossing the Danube by bridge, accompanied by troopships on the river, and Cassius Dio confirms the details.¹²⁸ A brilliant campaign, with at least one further major defeat for the Marcomanni followed, with the Romans penetrating Moravia and western Slovakia above the Danube bend. Thoroughly worsted, the Marcomanni agreed peace terms that included the giving of hostages, the surrender of all Roman prisoners and deserters, a restriction on their right to assembly, a punitive ban on all trade with the Roman empire, and a ten-mile demilitarised zone on the northern bank of the Danube.¹²⁹ This may have been the occasion when the legionaries demanded a donative for their victories, but Marcus refused, saying that the money would have to be squeezed from the blood of the troops’ relatives and families.¹³⁰ This was a dangerous thing for him to do, given the heavy fighting, uncertain morale and high desertion rate among his troops, but it shows signs of an unexpected toughness. It certainly contrasts with the liberality of the four donatives granted in 162, 164, 165 and 167, but Marcus probably granted these mainly to placate Lucius Verus, who liked to pose as the soldiers’ friend. As sole emperor, Marcus took a much harder line with the army than as co-emperor.¹³¹ His one, dubious concession to the soldiers was to bring his son Commodus to the front and present him to them. On 15 October he gave his son the title ‘Germanicus’.132 It seems, however, that the legionaries genuinely were mollified by Commodus’s presence. Always personally courageous, he impressed the fighting men and became a kind of popular mascot.¹³³

That year was not an entirely unalloyed triumph, for on the Rhine, Didius Julianus had to fight off yet another incursion, this time by the Chauci who, based on the Elbe, mounted a seaborne attack on Gallia Belgica down the North Sea coast. Hastily raised auxiliaries saw off the invaders without too much difficulty.¹³⁴ With the Marcomanni humbled and the Quadi still maintaining their sullen, grudging and uneasy peace, Marcus’s next target was the increasingly dangerous Iazyges. These warlike nomads on the Hungarian plain vexed and tasked him far more than the Germans proper: he declared that since the Iazyges were inherently untrustworthy, he intended to exterminate them utterly.¹³⁵ Eyebrows may be raised at this declaration of genocide from a philosopher-king, but Marcus was always a Roman first, last and foremost, and such attitudes were common currency with the ‘master-race’, who evinced a particular antipathy towards foes that stretched them to the military limit; a similar view was in evidence towards the Jews during the Bar-Kochba revolt.¹³⁶ Without entirely abandoning his headquarters at Sirmium, Marcus set up command bases at Vindobona and Brigetio also; he was not always at the front, and sometimes in the years 172–5 could be found in Aquileia. But it made sense to shift his base into Lower Pannonia so as to cross the frontier onto the Hungarian plain below the bend in the Danube.¹³⁷ It took until the new year of 173 before Marcus was fully ready to chastise the Iazyges, but, once again, his enemies may have beaten him to the punch, for we hear of a great land battle on Pannonian soil in which the Romans scored a signal victory.¹³⁸ The coin issues for 173 show the switch from German to Sarmatian concerns, for the religious motifs of Jupiter and Mars embossed on them move from the theme of ‘Germania Subacta’ and ‘Victoria Germanica’ to Sarmatian themes. The legend ‘Securitas’, showing Marcus raising up a turreted Italy, appears on sesterces issued at the end of 173.¹³⁹

It was probably the defeat of the Iazyges, following hard on the humiliation of the Marcomanni, that finally snapped the nerves of the Quadi. They watched appalled as Marcus successfully broke up the grand coalition, setting German against German, easily swatting aside the military might of the Marcomanni. Now the Romans were prospering in their campaign against the Sarmatians. It must have seemed that an alliance with the Iazyges was their last chance and only hope. The war party among the Quadi began by expelling the pro-Roman ‘king’ Furtius, whom Marcus had imposed, and installing the pro-Sarmatian Ariogaesus.140 This was a clear abrogation of the treaty with Rome and a declaration of war in all but name. An enraged Marcus broke his own strictures about anger and put a price on Ariogaesus’s head: it was to be 1,000 aurei if the usurper was brought in alive, and 500 if his head was produced. Moreover, Marcus announced that the Quadi had joined the Iazyges as a tribe marked down for extermination and genocide.¹⁴¹ The Quadi sent their levies to join the Iazyges on a further raid into Pannonia, but sheer numbers and the euphoria of the alliance must have made the new allies incautious. Winter seems to have come early in 173, and the Danube was frozen when the Iazyges and Quadi headed back across the border into Hungary. Marcus had already proved that he specialised in perfecting river ambushes with his annihilation of the Marcomanni in 171, and now he repeated the trick with even more devastating effect. In what seems like a pre-echo of Alexander Nevsky’s famous battle on the ice with the Teutonic knights in 1242 (though on a far larger scale), he timed his attack perfectly and destroyed the enemy force.¹⁴² It was a great victory, and on this occasion Marcus agreed to be acclaimed as imperator for the sixth time by his troops, without waiting for the customary vote in the Senate. He probably did this to earn favour with the troops, having disappointed them over the donative. But it was typical of Marcus to play down all overripe triumphalism. Unlike Lucius Verus, he never had commemorative coins struck unless there actually had been a great victory. Even when victorious, he liked to speak of ‘mixed success’ and ‘cautious optimism’.¹⁴³ To put his modesty in perspective, it might be noted that the emperor Claudius, with at most one-seventh of Marcus’s military achievements to his credit, ‘allowed’ himself to be acclaimed no fever than twenty-seven times.¹⁴⁴

It should not be thought that the seemingly endless wars against the Marcomanni, Quadi and Iazyges were wholly affairs of set-piece battles, such as the four mentioned by Cassius Dio. Much of the fighting consisted of hard-fought skirmishes in dark forests and dank marshes, a brutal slugging affair, with no quarter given or asked. Marcus’s famous Aurelian column, later erected in Rome to depict his successes in the German wars, convey the reality only too vividly. Its iconography has been well described as conveying ‘visible tenseness, anguish in the muscles and facial expressions as Marcus inspects the captured or when a barbarian chief pleads for admission’.145 Among the horrors depicted on the column are barbarians begging for their lives; Romans clearing villages and massacring all the adult males; the gutting and torching of entire settlements; Germans praying to the gods for divine intervention and rescue; long lines of unarmed men being decapitated as they step up to the executioner’s sword; the mass murder of prisoners thrown into open pits, which they had been forced to dig themselves; head-hunting by Roman troops who display trophy heads to an admiring emperor; the abuse and murder of prisoners; the death-marches; the rape of women; the seizure of cattle and killing of infants.¹⁴⁶ Contemporary sensibility would have it that these horrors were painful for Marcus and were sadly portrayed on the column, but this is a strictly modern view. The horrors of war are outside the ambit of meaning to be found on a Roman triumphal monument, and Romans would have seen the atrocities as just punishment exacted by a dutiful emperor.¹⁴⁷ The correct analogy is not something like Picasso’s Guernica, but the matter-of-fact report of executions and mutilations of Gauls and Germans during Caesar’s Gallic Wars.¹⁴⁸ Evidence of a sort for Marcus’s attitudes can be found in Books Two and Three of the Meditations, written ‘among the Quadi’ on the Danube in 170–3, where death was omnipresent. He himself later refers almost casually to the severed heads, decapitated torsos and truncated limbs of the dead in war.¹⁴⁹ Roman iconography dealing with the war is concerned with far different things from alleged war crimes. We realise that Marcus’s victories have given Rome confidence, that the Germans are no longer feared, as in the past; Marcus is often portrayed as a heroic figure, a giant, with the barbarians as dwarfs.¹⁵⁰

The year 174 was notable for a two-pronged Roman offensive, one army directed against the Iazyges, the other given the task of crushing the treacherous Quadi once and for all. In June, Marcus himself was at the head of his forces when they again decisively defeated the Iazyges. By now the Romans regarded him as a man favoured by the gods. Also in June of that year, when hard pressed by the Iazyges, he was said to have summoned a thunderbolt from heaven, which destroyed an enemy siege engine. This was later built up as the ‘Lightning Miracle’ by Roman propaganda on the Aurelian column and on coinage, which shows Marcus in general’s uniform being crowned by the goddess Victory; in his hand he holds Jupiter’s thunderbolt, which the president of the immortals had presumably loaned to him to strike terror into the detested Sarmatians.151 It is possible that the story has some kind of basis in fact, with the emperor’s prayers for victory before the engagement being answered by an opportune lightning strike. Meanwhile, the campaign against the Quadi seems to have been entrusted to Pertinax, who came perilously close to defeat; all the evidence in the sources suggests that, of the three main enemies, the Quadi were, man for man, the most formidable. There followed an even more wondrous event, the so-called ‘Rain Miracle’. In July 174, about a month after Marcus’s victory over the Iazyges in the ‘Lightning Miracle’, Pertinax, commanding an elite task force, found himself surrounded by the Quadi and desperately short of water.¹⁵² The spectre of another disaster like that of the Teutoburg forest loomed. Realising that the Romans were prevented from reaching fresh-water supplies, the Quadi held back, waiting for them to become dehydrated and demoralised, and thus easy prey. By all accounts the day was blisteringly hot; the Romans had many wounded, they were exhausted, outnumbered and above all parched and thirsty. Suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, a cloud bank appeared as if from nowhere, and a summer storm sent a veritable monsoon of rain down onto the combatants. The Romans held their mouths up to the sky to gulp down the rain, then caught and stored copious amounts of the precious liquid in their helmets and inverted shields.¹⁵³ Seeing the enemy relieved from immediate peril by the downpour, the Quadi staked all on a mass charge. Furious fighting ensued, but the morale of the Romans was now high, convinced as they were that the gods were on their side. Even so, some of the legionaries were so obsessed with continuing to gulp down water that they allowed the Quadi to penetrate gaps in their ranks.¹⁵⁴ Cassius Dio speaks of a confused welter of blood and rain, with the Romans continuing to drink as they fought, and in the process glugging down blood (both their own and the enemy’s) along with the rain. Then the secondary manifestation of the ‘miracle’ occurred. The Quadi’s charge was broken up not so much by the stout Roman resistance as by a series of hailstorms and lightning strikes. Finally they broke and fled, leaving the field to the victorious legions.155

Since success has a hundred fathers and failure is an orphan, it is not surprising that virtually every religious sect in the Roman empire claimed credit for the victory, which we can unhesitatingly set down to Pertinax and a relatively small Roman force.¹⁵⁶ Prayers to the gods that turned the tide were claimed by a number of people with a hotline to the immortals, including Egyptian thaumaturges, Chaldean maguses and representatives of the official Roman religion. The Aurelian column and the imperial coinage clearly identify Jupiter and/or the divine Marcus as the miracle-workers, although the numismatic evidence is probably ultimately inconclusive.¹⁵⁷ An Egyptian priest named Anuphis (or Harnouphis) claimed that he was responsible, and that he had invoked several deities, but principally Hermes in his Egyptian guise as Hermes Aerios, a Romanised version of the native Nile god Thoth-Shou.¹⁵⁸ The Chaldean magus Julianus was another who put himself forward as prime mover, and his candidacy has likewise attracted scholars.¹⁵⁹ The real problem about identifying the god responsible as Hermes comes from the Aurelian column itself, which provides a series of sharp sketches as a guide to the ‘miracle’. The downpour is presented in godlike form as a frightening, semi-human figure with a gloomy, threatening face and long beard, straddling the battlefield and taking grim satisfaction in the mounds of barbarian dead and mangled horses beneath him. Since this deity is quite unlike any other Roman representation of Mercury (the Roman version of winged-footed Hermes), it seems likely that it may be a nature-god, perhaps the rain-bearing god of the north wind, Notus, who is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.¹⁶⁰ The most bare-faced attempt to appropriate the ‘Rain Miracle’ came from the Christians. They claimed that the prayers of the Christian soldiers in XII Fulminata had brought the rain, and that Marcus himself had later praised and congratulated the Christians for their role in this victory. Unfortunately, Christian propaganda was on this occasion rather too transparently fraudulent. The alleged letters from Marcus to the Christians are crude and obvious forgeries.¹⁶¹ As for the Twelfth Legion, it has been conclusively established that it was nowhere near the Danube at the time and was in fact stationed in Cappadocia, after sterling service in the Parthian war. The legend ‘Fulminata’ or ‘Thundering’ was a very old one, given because its emblem was Jupiter’s thunderbolt; it had nothing to do with the ‘Rain Miracle’.162 Nevertheless Christians and their apologists have been very reluctant to relinquish their hold on this ‘miracle’. It is of course not impossible that Christians were serving in Pertinax’s task force, though one would have expected any who had overcome the usual aversion to military service to be stationed in the East, since Christianity was a religion that spread to Rome from the Middle East.¹⁶³

After the victory of the ‘Rain Miracle’ Marcus was immediately acclaimed as imperator for the seventh time by his troops.¹⁶⁴ This time Marcus was reluctant to accept the honour, but acquiesced so as not to give offence to the legions. Scrupulous as ever, he realised that the ‘Rain Miracle’ was a minor engagement that had been inflated by propaganda far beyond its intrinsic importance. He knew he had the Quadi on the run, but still respected their fighting qualities.¹⁶⁵ For the rest of 174 he gradually wore them down with grim, slugging attrition; there were no spectacular pitched battles. The Quadi hoped the Marcomanni would rise again or that the Iazyges would relieve the pressure on them, but neither event happened. In fact by the end of the year the Iazyges were so hard pressed that the peace party momentarily got the upper hand. Their leader Bandaspus made overtures to the Romans – which Marcus contemptuously rejected – but, when this was discovered, the war party led by Zanticus imprisoned Bandaspus and renewed the war with greater vigour.¹⁶⁶ Yet they could make little impact on the legionary veterans, now convinced that Marcus was a great war leader and that victory was theirs. The Roman mood at the end of the Marcomannic wars was yet another vindication of the moral over the material, though of course one should not underrate the wearying effect on the enemy of what seemed like Rome’s inexhaustible resources. By early 175 the Quadi had had enough. They sued for peace on the same terms as the Marcomanni. Marcus granted this but made it clear that the Quadi were in net terms receiving harsher conditions by lightening the impositions on the Marcomanni, readmitting them to certain limited Roman markets and reducing the demilitarised zone to five miles instead of the original ten; this was the classic reward for good behaviour.¹⁶⁷

By April 175 the Quadi had signed the peace and were out of the military picture. Able now to devote all his resources against the Iazyges, Marcus announced that his new war aim was the total extermination of these vexatious nomads.168 In contrast to the German tribes, whom he planned to disperse throughout the empire, the Iazyges were roving horsemen who were in principle incapable of absorption in the Roman empire. It is important to be clear that Marcus did not at this stage contemplate two new provinces of Marcomannia and Sarmatia, as has sometimes falsely been alleged. This was an idea that came later – specifically on the renewal of the northern war in 178–80.¹⁶⁹ Geography and logistics worked against such an idea, because Sarmatia lacked the homogeneity of Bohemia and Moravia, with their boundaries well defined by highlands and hill ridges, or even of Transylvanian Dacia inside the arc of the Carpathians. Besides, those areas contained mines and minerals whereas the Hungarian plain, the heartland of the Iazyges, was in those days largely swampland. Such a province, if created, would have extended 200 miles from the Danube bend to the line of the Carpathians in modern Ruthenia, with a flank exposed to the unreliable Quadi and other tribes in Moravia and western Slovakia. Another reason why annexation of Sarmatia made no sense was that it was defensible only if Slovakia and Bohemia were also absorbed into the empire, thus resting the new frontier on the northern arc of the Carpathians, but this would have destroyed the peace treaties Marcus had already made with the Quadi and Marcomanni; it would have been feasible only if in 175 Marcus was still at war with all three enemies.¹⁷⁰

Little has come down to us about the final stages of the campaign against the Iazyges in 174–5, but the Romans must have made significant progress, for by June 175 Zanticus himself, the erstwhile warmonger, approached the Romans with a desperate plea for peace.¹⁷¹ Marcus, still set on his programme of extermination, would have none of it and was about to send the embassy away with a humiliating rebuff when the sensational news arrived that the empire in the East was aflame, and that Avidius Cassius had proclaimed himself emperor. This changed everything overnight. Quickly changing tack, but inwardly furious that the scheming Avidius had prevented him from destroying the Sarmatian menace for ever, Marcus granted the Iazyges peace on the same terms as the Quadi, except for settlement rights.¹⁷² The Roman propaganda machine presented the end of the war as a total triumph by Marcus, but he ruefully accepted that it was not; on the brink of total victory in the north, the problems of the East had returned to haunt him. Nevertheless, he was acclaimed as imperator for the eighth time and given the title ‘Sarmaticus’.173 To salve his wounded pride, Marcus also insisted on the return of all prisoners and Roman deserters in Sarmatian hands and the provision by the vanquished of 8,000 horsemen, to serve as mercenaries in the Roman empire at the emperor’s discretion. Similar levies were taken from the Quadi, Marcomanni and Naristae, earmarked for the imminent civil war in the east.¹⁷⁴ If the East could stymie his plans for total conquest in the north, Marcus would redress the oriental balance by calling in the power of the northern tribes. His forces were presumably also swelled by the vast numbers of prisoners and deserters returned by the Iazyges. The ancient sources speak of 100,000 such men and, even if we allow for the usual irremediable hyperbole over numbers by Greek and Roman historians, the numbers involved must have been huge.¹⁷⁵ This alone underlines how hard fought the northern wars were.

There were thus three main aspects to the general peace on the northern frontier signed in mid-175. The Quadi and the Marcomanni were kept away from the Danube by a ten-mile demilitarised zone (five miles in the case of the Marcomanni) and were forbidden to sail ships or otherwise voyage on the Danube itself.¹⁷⁶ Their chiefs were taken as hostages and dispersed throughout key points in the empire, following the example set by the deposed ‘king’ of the Quadi, Ariogaesus, who was already in exile in Alexandria.¹⁷⁷ The rank and file, together with the German prisoners already in Roman hands, were offered the option of working as indentured peasants on great estates within the empire, with the prospect of becoming free peasants at the end of the indenture period. It must be conceded that this was not an original notion of the emperor’s; the Julio-Claudians had already experimented with the idea.¹⁷⁸ This was supposed to be an economic quid pro quo for the denial to the Germans of full membership of the imperial free-trade area, but it was actually machiavellianism on Marcus’s part. Labour shortages arising from the war, and above all from the devastation of the plague, made Roman proprietors and leaseholders desperate for hands to work the estates.¹⁷⁹ The German labourers, who attained the status of peasants on Roman soil, after some years acquired Roman ways and attitudes, which drew them closer to Rome and ensured that their primary loyalty was to the empire rather than to Germany – and this too may have been part of Marcus’s intentions.180 The process was not always smooth: a large number of Quadi were transplanted to Ravenna and ended up having to be expelled after (allegedly) having tried to take over the city. Naturally absorption of Sarmatian nomads into the empire was not feasible, hence the demand for mercenary horsemen. It is noticeable that the Iazyges made no objection to a demand that must have gelded them militarily. Of the 8,000 horsemen handed over to Marcus, 5,500 were sent immediately to Britain, which suggests that the situation there was serious.¹⁸¹ It is likely that the British tribes seized the obvious opportunity presented by the German wars to rise in rebellion once more. All the evidence suggests that the Sarmatian horsemen in Britain were a striking success; some have even proposed that the presence of unusually armoured cavalrymen may have been the genesis for the legend of King Arthur.¹⁸²

Marcus personally handled all these complex negotiations and did so with great skill, ably concealing the extent of the crisis both from his own troops and the enemy envoys. His achievements in nearly six years of war were impressive – all the more so given his total lack of military background. He had shown courage, endurance and true leadership, and all of this while suffering grievously from continued ill-health. With reason, Cassius Dio said that ‘he not only possessed all the other virtues but was also a better ruler than anyone else who had ever been ruler’.¹⁸³ Marcus’s dispositions on the northern frontier, which he left so unwillingly, had been shrewd and his approach to the troubled province of Britain also commands admiration. He abandoned Scotland and the Antonine Wall, concentrating his strength at Hadrian’s Wall and reinforcing the legions with his shock force of 5,500 Iazyges. How significant a reinforcement they were can be gauged by the judgement, standard since Vespasian’s time, that just three legions sufficed to hold all of the north as far as Hadrian’s Wall, and only an extra legion to dominate the entire Lowlands of Scotland as far as the Antonine Wall.¹⁸⁴ A lesser man might have been tempted to use the Sarmatians to fulfil Antoninus’s dream, but not Marcus. Moreover, there were several desirable spin-offs from the Marcomannic wars, not least the outstanding performances by Claudius Pompeianus, Pertinax and Didius Julianus, who finally left his long and successful guardianship of the Rhine frontier in 175 to take up a consulship.185 Perhaps the most brilliant success of all was that of Valerius Maximianus, who now left for the East with the German contingents as the vanguard of Marcus’s counter-offensive.¹⁸⁶ Marcus also showed his sure touch by associating his wife and son with his victories and using them to dig himself deeper into the affections of his troops. Faustina, who had been at her husband’s side since the winter of 174, was acclaimed as mater castrorum – honorary mother of the entire army.¹⁸⁷ Commodus meanwhile was summoned from Rome (he left on 19 May 175) to adopt the toga virilis, the formal recognition that at fourteen he was now a man, not a boy. Since this was a ceremony usually performed at the Capitol in Rome, Marcus intended the gesture as a signal mark of honour for his legions. On 7 July – the day when according to Roman tradition, Romulus had mysteriously disappeared from the Earth – Commodus was inducted into the ranks of Roman citizens under the auspices of Rome’s founder. Having already been co-opted to all priesthoods, he was given the rank of princeps iuventutis, or leader of the knights, and his position as heir apparent was publicly proclaimed.¹⁸⁸ Avidius Cassius had justified his rebellion on the grounds that Marcus was dead and his son too young to succeed him. Marcus now intended to prove him wrong on both counts. It was time for the long journey to Asia Minor.