IN THE EARLY SUMMER of AD 260, Sapor, the emperor of Persia, stepped on the back of Publius Licinius Valerianus, formerly emperor of Rome, to mount his horse. Or so it was alleged. What is beyond doubt is that Valerian, as he is more commonly known these days, had fallen captive to Sapor outside the city of Edessa in southwestern Turkey. A persistent rumor claimed that Valerian had been betrayed by his senior subordinates. That too may be true.
The empire at the time of Valerian’s capture stretched from Britain in the west to the Euphrates and the Jordanian desert in the east. Hadrian’s wall defined the empire’s northern boundary in Britain, while the Rhine and Danube were essentially the northern frontier from the North Sea to the Black Sea with one significant salient north of the Danube in the region of modern Romania. The Sahara defined the southern limit of the empire’s North African provinces, and the island fortress of Elephantine, just north of the Nile’s first cataract, was the boundary in Egypt. Although the peoples of the empire were as diverse in those years as are the residents of these regions in the twenty-first century, two languages enabled communication across these vast territories: Latin in the west—the area including England, Wales, France, Spain, Italy, southern Germany, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt—and Greek in the east—roughly modern Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Across their borders, the Romans faced generally hostile populations, of whom the most significant were the Franks and Alemanni, confederations of the Germanic peoples north of the Rhine, and, along the Danube, confederations of other Germanic peoples, of whom the most powerful would be the Goths. Sapor’s Persian state comprised modern Iran and Iraq and some territory now incorporated into the Central Asian Republics. To govern his lands and keep the empire’s enemies at bay, an emperor depended upon an aura of invincibility and the loyalty of senior officials who agreed to subordinate their ambitions to his own.
FIGURE 1.1
The triumph of Sapor. Sapor I of Persia is celebrated in this relief at the sacred site of Naqsh-e Rustam in modern Iran for his victories over three Roman emperors, one of whom, Valerian, kneels before him.
Source: Jenn Finn.
The consequences of Valerian’s capture were dire (see figure 1.1).1 But it is also the case that if the empire had not been shaken to its core in 260, the major actors in this book—Diocletian and his colleagues, then Constantine and his contemporaries—would most likely never have had the opportunity to prove their mettle. The Roman Empire of Valerian was still a deeply conservative institution in which power resided with members of families that had long histories in government. Diocletian and Constantine may not even have come from families with long histories as Roman citizens much less as aristocrats.
In the months after Valerian’s capture, the Roman Empire split into roughly three parts. France, southern Germany, Spain, and Britain declared fealty to the commanding general on the Rhine, who had risen in revolt and murdered the surviving son of Gallienus, the son of Valerian who had shared power with his father. In the east, those subordinates suspected of betraying Valerian swiftly set up a regime to challenge Gallienus while at the same time offering some resistance to Sapor’s armies as they ravaged the cities of southern Turkey. The Persian assault enhanced the damage done eight years before when Sapor had destroyed another Roman army and sacked Antioch in Syria, the principal city of the region. In the wake of the sack of Antioch a gentleman of Emesa (the modern Homs in Syria) named Uranius Antoninus had raised a force to resist the Persians, calling upon the local god, Elagabal (another character who will play a large part in the story that follows), who resided in the form of a meteorite in the city’s principal temple. Uranius Antoninus is mainly known to us now through a few lines in a contemporary oracle, and from the garbled account of a later historian, as well as from coins minted on his behalf. From these scant remains we may glean that he had some success, and his career exemplifies the point that powerful local forces could be gathered to support—or resist—those of an emperor.
Far better known to us is Odaenathus, lord of Palmyra, the great trading city in the Syrian desert, who rose up to fight the Persians in 260. He rallied the forces of his city, long enriched by the caravan trade, and proved a fierce foe to the Persians, inflicting severe defeats upon them as they withdrew from Roman territory; he continued to attack them as his new Roman ally, one Macrianus, attempted to enforce his claim to the throne of the empire for his sons by invading the territory of Gallienus in 262.
Gallienus had survived the Gallic rebellion, the disgrace of his father’s capture, and two revolts in the Balkans, this too in the year 260. He made short work of Macrianus, and, when Odaenathus disposed of his former allies’ surviving supporters in the east, Gallienus recognized him as the chief administrative authority in the region. Odaenathus appears to have been delighted, placing his new Roman title of corrector on par with the title he awarded himself after further victories over the Persians at a ceremony outside Antioch: that title was King of Kings, which was also the traditional title of the king of Persia. By the end of that summer the Roman Empire was blessed with an emperor based in Rome, an emperor in Trier in Germany, and a King of Kings in Palmyra serving as corrector of the east.2
Divided government was nothing new to the Roman Empire, which could be governed by a single person only under extraordinary circumstances. It was Augustus who had founded the imperial system within which Gallienus worked, and after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra in 30 BC, he had ruled as the leader of a coterie whom he had gathered to himself during the civil wars that began with the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. As his principal compatriots died off, Augustus had shaped a system of succession whereby each generation would produce several heirs designate. At his death in AD 14 his adopted son Tiberius, who had been his effective co-ruler for several years, succeeded him. Other arrangements followed, often depending on particular circumstances. At times, groups of favorites could be identified as playing the role of a cabinet that managed most of the day-to-day affairs; at others, as in the time of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161–180), a specific co-emperor was named.
Collective government meant that it was possible for children to hold the titular position of emperor—Nero (AD 54–68), for instance, was only seventeen when he took the throne, and several of the emperors in the decades before Valerian’s reign had been even younger. When he seized the throne after a brief civil war in AD 253, Valerian had associated Gallienus with himself as co-emperor and Gallienus’ sons had served as deputy emperors until their untimely deaths around the year 260. Moreover it was not without precedent for an emperor to be on dreadful terms with a co-claimant. Septimius Severus, who took the throne in 193, had first shared power with a rival for several years before destroying him in a bloody civil war.
What made Gallienus’ position unusual was not that he was associated with other significant authority figures, but rather, the state of his army. The Roman army that existed before 250 had been organized into units of heavy infantrymen (legions), numbering roughly 5,000 men when near full strength; they were supported by independent units—called cohorts comprising infantry or combined infantry and cavalry, and alae, or wings, if of cavalry alone. The army was recruited from across the empire, though with a tendency to favor troops from border regions or from military families. To be a soldier was a very fine thing. They were well paid, honored as partners in government, and often free to supplement their incomes by extracting “protection money” from civilians, or simply making off with their property. Since the time of Augustus they had enjoyed significant privileges upon retirement: chiefly immunity from taxation for themselves and their families and exemption from the public services that were required of most people of standing within a community. Soldiers, with their generous benefits, were men of some standing.
The immunities they enjoyed were a feature of the way rank was expressed in the Roman world. In theory, every man (women were not supposed to participate in the males’ spheres of public life, and they were never allowed to vote even in Classical states that were theoretically democratic) had duties to fulfill in accordance with his status in society. This was a principle of great antiquity both at Rome and in the Greek city-states, whose constitutions and concepts of citizenship were in some ways similar, and it exercised a profound influence over social organization throughout the empire. According to this theory, those at the bottom of the social scale were either slaves or manual laborers, or tenant farmers paying rent to the people whose land they farmed. As more humble folk (humiliores) they could not hold office and in most places could not vote; if they were charged with a crime they could be tortured into confessing their guilt during their trial and were subject to far harsher legal penalties than their betters. In addition there were free peasants, also regarded as among the humble, as were most shopkeepers and small-business owners.
People everywhere were assessed for taxation both on their persons and on any land that they worked (for tenant farmers taxes were included in their rent); they were also taxed on certain financial transactions. For people who owned enough land not to have to work, or for businessmen who employed others, the setup was different. Such people might be known as “respectable sorts” (honestiores) if they were members of the local curial class—the class that could hold office and serve on the city council. Eligibility for membership of a group like this was not set by any specific criteria: as one man put it in words that were as true when he uttered them in the sixth century as they would have been in the fourth, “A man who was great at Gaza would be of the middling sort at Caesarea, a peasant at Antioch and poor in Constantinople.”
Whatever their actual wealth, members of the curial classes, in addition to being taxed, were expected to pay for the public services needed to keep their community running. Some of these jobs were prestigious and rated as “honors”—for instance, the public priesthoods, especially the priesthood of the local version of the imperial cult, and administrative positions such as, in Latin, duumvir, one member of a board of two men who served as joint mayors, or curator, also, essentially, a mayor. Other jobs were grubby such as street cleaning and keeping the sewers in order; or dangerous such as the role of police chief; or unpleasant like making sure that people did not cheat each other in the marketplace; expensive such as funding games, or immensely time-consuming such as serving as a tutor for orphaned children, a task that involved managing the property of these children and making basic legal decisions on their behalf. Such services were seen as “gifts” to the people of the community and were known as munera (sing. munus) in Latin and philanthropeia in Greek.
The performance of these jobs was essential for maintaining the structures of urban life, and they were divided into three categories. Tasks classified as “personal” were those that people were supposed to perform “by mental application and bodily labor” without financial damage to themselves; “patrimonial” services required expenditure drawn from one’s property; “mixed” duties were plainly the most irritating category, since such tasks were both expensive and time-consuming.3 Those who performed tasks directly related to the government of the empire or to the advancement of civilization (a basic purpose of Roman imperial government, at least in theory) tended to be immune from civic munera. As time passed, the urge to acquire immunity from such duties became a routine feature of civic life. Germane to obtaining this immunity was the ability to land a position in the imperial rather than the civic administration—called, significantly, militiae, once a term that meant variously “abroad,” or “military service,” and by the time of Gallienus, any sort of “government service.” Once in that service, whether as soldier or as bureaucrat, the ability to secure immunities depended on one’s rank and branch of service. For a soldier serving in the emperor’s guard the basic term of service was sixteen years, in the legions it was twenty, and in the auxiliary forces twenty-five. As the length of service suggests, the ideal Roman army was rather middle aged, with the average age for a soldier around twenty-eight (assuming that the typical recruit was eighteen). The age structure of the army reflected a sense that what made the army good was hard training and length of service.
Gallienus’ biggest problem was that there were not all that many soldiers left at his disposal who would be in line to acquire the cherished immunities: the heavy losses of recent years meant that the Roman preference for legions filled with experienced soldiers was unrealizable. About a third of the Roman army had passed under the control of the rival empire in Gaul. About a quarter of the army, the part that had been stationed on the eastern frontier, was dead, in Persian captivity, serving with Odaenathus, or somewhat suspect for having served under Macrianus. That left Gallienus dependent on the imperial guard, stationed in Italy, and the troops of the Balkan army. It was the alliance that began to develop in these years between leaders of the Balkan armies, including men who might not have expected to rise to the highest commands in the Roman state, and of the traditional governing class—wealthy members of the imperial Senate from Italy, Africa, and the eastern provinces, people who traditionally held provincial governorships and other high offices—that would shape the future of the Roman empire. After Gallienus there would not be another Roman emperor from an Italian aristocratic family until the fifth century AD.4
We can’t now know to what extent Gallienus or those around him were aware that fundamental changes would be necessary if the imperial regime was to survive, but fundamental change began to occur in the 250s and 260s, and one of the most significant contexts in which it occurred was religion.
Decius (reigned 249–251) and Valerian had both taken rather extreme positions about the relationship between the empire and the gods, possibly in response to the perception, fueled by repeated military failure, that something was very wrong in that respect. In Decius’ case the immediate background was a civil war, which he had won, after a series of military actions the results of which had been at best ambivalent, and concerns stirred by his predecessor’s celebration of Rome’s 1000th birthday (there were those who thought that the arrival of a new millennium might portend catastrophic change). So it was, shortly after becoming emperor in 249, that Decius had issued an edict (a general order) commanding all Roman citizens and members of their families to sacrifice and then to obtain a certificate stating that they had done so by a specific date—probably a certain number of days after the edict was received by the local authorities responsible for drawing up the certificates and managing the actual sacrifices. Certificates surviving on papyri were clearly produced by official scribes to be signed by people as they made their sacrifices and by those who came with them to witness the act. The thinking behind the decree, whose implementation depended on the record-keeping apparatus of the tax system, seems to have been somewhat similar to that of an edict of Caracalla (ruled from 211 to 216) in which citizenship was granted to most inhabitants of the empire so that they could share in his joy at having been spared from “terrible danger”—a euphemism generated by his hatred for his younger brother whom he had had murdered in the arms of their mother. In both cases the people of the empire would join their ruler in celebrating what he saw as an important success and in correcting the errors of the past.
There is no obvious reason for thinking that the edict was motivated by a desire to eradicate the very small number who believed they formed a community distinct from believers in the traditional gods and whose consciences would prevent them from sacrificing. Records of the execution of Christians, the group in question, at this time suggest that they would be allowed to go about their business if they performed the sacrifice, and that many Christians did just this.5 In some communities, though, terrible conflict arose about how best to respond to the imperial order, as arguments for conscientious resistance were countered by the argument that if persecution came from the Devil, it was best avoided.
Valerian presented a much more serious problem than Decius had. He appears already to have been hostile to Christians when he seized the throne in 253, and four years later he issued an edict that attempted to force them to conform to the religion of Rome. His main concern seems to have been obedience, for when he ordered the arrest of prominent Christians, he also allowed them, if they sacrificed, to be set free. Exile or imprisonment were the punishments for failure to conform. At the same time, he banned meetings of Christian congregations and deprived them of the use of their cemeteries. His order went beyond Decius’ edict on sacrifices in singling Christians out, but not so far as the numerous bans on cults that had been imposed throughout Roman history in that it did not order the cult’s demise; people were clearly puzzled.
The Senate accordingly asked Valerian what they should do with people who had been imprisoned for noncompliance. Valerian’s response was brutal. Leading Christian men who persisted in their practice (he notes that there were senators among their number) were to have their property confiscated, and if they afterwards persevered in their beliefs, they would be executed. Christian women of high standing, too, would have their property confiscated, and members of the palace bureaucracy were to be sent to the mines as slaves. The edict remained in force until Valerian’s capture by Sapor, and one of the first acts of the Christian community at Rome when the news of his fate arrived was to elect a new bishop.
In 262 Gallienus officially reversed his father’s policy, issuing an edict of his own whereby Christians were guaranteed freedom to worship as they wished and restoring confiscated property.6 For the next forty years emperors would treat Christianity as a religion like any other legal religion in their empire.
A second change concerned the shape of the army. At some point—certainly before the mid-260s—a new cavalry force came into being that appears to have been designed as an elite central reserve. The men associated with the command of this unit in our admittedly rather pathetic sources for the period all come from outside the traditional aristocracy. At the same time, the customary dominance of the legion—hitherto commanded by members of the Senate—as the primary tactical force began to erode. Again the process is unclear, but what we do know is that soldiers cease to be depicted wearing the heavy metal armor of earlier centuries in favor of leather armor, and they appear to have adopted spears or lances as their primary weapon in place of the heavy javelins and short swords of earlier eras. Indeed, all the soldiers of this new model army look much more like members of auxiliary units in the old army, which were smaller and capable of more varied tactical deployment than were the legions.
Thus in the handling of both religion and the military, the reign of Gallienus reflects significant change from the previous decades. The devaluation of the legion seems also to have had a significant effect on the nature of the imperial government, as commands that were once prized by members of the Senate were downgraded or even eliminated. According to later tradition this resulted from an edict issued by Gallienus, but in fact it reflected shifts in the way the empire was governed that were accelerated in the wake of Valerian’s demise.
In the centuries between Augustus and the accession of Gallienus, a system of imperial government developed in which administrative function and social class had been closely aligned. Unlike local government where eligibility for office was locally determined, imperial government insisted on precise wealth qualifications. To be a member of the Senate, a person needed to have property valued at a minimum of 1,200,000 sesterces, a sum that at the end of the first century AD would produce an income roughly seventy-two times that of a soldier in the legions, and the vast majority of senators had property well in excess of the minimum. Then one needed to make a good impression on people and—unless one was spectacularly well connected—hold minor administrative or military positions in one’s early twenties. A young man who shone in this department could acquire his first senatorial office in his mid-twenties and thereafter a fairly regular series of positions would give him experience in military, financial, and judicial affairs. If he continued to succeed at this stage he could expect to hold a praetorship in his mid to late thirties (there were sixteen praetors each year compared to the twenty-five quaestorships, the post of fiscal adjutant that was the entry-level position for the Senate). After that he would take up a series of posts, which would likely include the command of a legion and the governorship of a province.
Success in military command and provincial administration, the respect of colleagues, and a certain amount of diplomatic skill in dealing with the imperial court could result in promotion to consulship, once the chief office of state. By the third century there might typically be eight consuls in any given year, holding office in pairs for three-month periods. The first pair, which might well include the emperor and an heir apparent or an especially favored individual who was being honored with a second consulship, was the “ordinary” consulship, in that the consuls in this group gave their name to the year. The other pairs were known as “suffect” or replacement consuls. After holding a consulship a man would be in line for a major provincial governorship, possibly including command of a substantial army, and various other important jobs. The culmination of a career like this might be the urban prefecture, a post that gained in importance during the third century as its holder was responsible for the civil administration of Rome, and emperors were very often out of the city. The reason for this was simply that the emperors of the time were expected to take personal charge of major military campaigns—hence Valerian wasting away in captivity.
The second branch of government had its origins in the fiscal administration of provinces where the Roman state owned land, and in the administration of the vast estates held by the emperor in what was known as the patrimonium, the inalienable property that passed from one ruler to the next. Augustus had tried to keep the administration of his property separate from that of state properties, but even by the time of Nero (AD 54–68), this had become impractical and the management of revenue-producing properties had fallen under the control of the palace. The agents of the palace were either freed slaves or equestrians, men from families with property worth at least 800,000 sesterces (though many would in fact have senatorial-size estates). The name of the order derived from ancient practice according to which the rich served as the cavalry (equites) in the early Roman army; it was a custom that rapidly fell into disuse when the Romans encountered enemies who fielded competent cavalry.
In the first century there was no hard-and-fast rule determining what sort of person would be in charge of a province, though estate management was largely the business of freedmen. The most famous procurator of all time—Pontius Pilate—was an equestrian, while another well-known procurator, Felix, was a freedman. Both governed Judea. In the later first and the second century, a more predictable system came into being through which people were regularly reviewed for promotion or reassignment and the top positions were held exclusively by equestrians. These positions were graded by salary at 60,000, 100,000, and 200,000 sesterces. Someone at the bottom of the scale was making more than a typical centurion in the legions, whose base pay in the second century was around 36,000 sesterces, but less than a chief centurion, who could rake in more than 100,000 sesterces a year.
Notwithstanding the modern images of a Roman centurion as a hardy chap promoted from the ranks, the typical centurion was a rich man who might pass from a military to a civilian post, but not expect to compete with members of the senatorial order unless he had risen to one of the most important roles in the state such as governor of Egypt, prefect of the grain supply, or commander of the emperor’s guard—the praetorian prefect. By the third century this last post was often a sort of prime minister; the one who held it might be an experienced jurist, since a mass of legal correspondence passed before his eyes; and two became emperor after an imperial assassination—in one case the prefect almost certainly had a role in engineering the killing, and in the other, he was accused of doing so.
During the regime of Valerian and Gallienus, the upper echelon was filled with members of the senatorial order, most of them from the wealthy areas of North Africa, Italy, and the Aegean rim. The prominence of Italy was inevitable given that no matter where they were from, senators were required to maintain estates there. The prominence of North Africa was partly a reflection of that region’s wealth and partly because the Severan dynasty, which had ended in 235, derived from Lepcis Magna (in modern Libya). Valerian’s own family was from Etruria, and his wife was the daughter of a man who had been consul in 207 and the sister of the first individual to be named prefect of Rome by Valerian.7
By the time of Gallienus’ assassination in 268, his regime looked very different. At that point he was engaged in the siege of Milan; ensconced against him there was Aureolus (his former general and formerly commander of the cavalry corps that had been created a few years before as a mobile reserve). The praetorian prefect, who in one version of the story was the prime mover of the conspiracy against Gallienus, was Marcus Aurelius Heraclianus—a significant name, for the vast majority of Romans who took the praenomen (first name) Marcus and the nomen (family name) Aurelius did so because their ancestors had received citizenship as a result of Caracalla’s edict of 212. We know that Heraclianus had a brother named Marcus Aurelius Apollinarius because another general, Traianus Mucianus, erected statues to them in his hometown in the Balkans.8 Another man with the significant post-212 nomenclature was Marcus Aurelius Claudius (Claudius II), described in one of our sources as a man “who, after the emperors, appeared to govern the empire.”9 According to one account of the assassination, other participants in the plot were Marcus Aurelius Marcianus, an important general; Marcus Aurelius Aurelianus (Aurelian, like Claudius, a future emperor); and the commander of a Balkan cavalry unit named Cecropius—it is he who allegedly struck the fatal blow. Another important member of the general staff was a man named Pompeianus the Frank, whose name is highly suggestive of a place of origin outside the empire near the vicinity of the mouth of the Rhine where the Franks then lived.10
FIGURE 1.2
Emperors of the mid third century. Shown here are Valerian (a), Gallienus (b), Claudius (c), and Aurelian (d). Source: Courtesy of Author.
The multiple accounts of the death of Gallienus look as if they were shaped by the politics of the next few decades, as Claudius would later be elevated to virtual sanctity (which he does not seem to deserve) while Aurelian, who would himself be murdered as the result of a plot that closely resembles one that figures in one of the stories about Gallienus’ demise, would be remembered as something of a thug. This too seems unreasonable, for it was Aurelian who, when he reunited the Roman Empire, was loath to slaughter his enemies.
Whatever the truth, the two things we know for certain are that Gallienus was killed in the summer of 268 and that the army chose Claudius to succeed him. Aureolus, who seems to have tried to surrender to his former colleagues, died in battle at Milan when his overtures were rejected.
Claudius was now confronted with a series of problems—not least, confusion in the east, where Odaenathus had been assassinated that spring and there had been a massive raid by tribes ordinarily resident north of the Danube. Then, in Gaul in 269, the regime had been thrown into chaos following the death of its leader in a military mutiny. During the two years or so that remained to Claudius, he managed to defeat the raiders in the Balkans, botch an opportunity to end the regime in Gaul, and alienate the Palmyrenes. In light of what might seem a rather mediocre record, it is perhaps not surprising that when he died in the summer of 270 as a Palmyrene army was invading Egypt he had not been able to secure agreement that the throne would go to his brother, who lasted about two weeks before falling victim to an army under Aurelian.11