065 - Burn It To The Ground

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Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 65, Burn It to the Ground. Last week, a 16-year-old Nero ascended to the throne and, after spending a brief period dominated by his mother and other influential advisors, emerged as his own man. Maybe that's too strong a reading, as it conjures up images of Augustus or Tiberius emerging as their own men, which implies a degree of independent competence that Nero never really attained, but he had definitely passed a point where it became dangerous to exert too much overt control over the emperor. If nothing else, Nero had to think he was the man in charge, even if his policies were usually influenced on the front end and executed on the back end by men with their own agendas. Not that these separate agendas were nefarious, mind you, a lot of that backroom influencing resulted in the reigning end of Nero's impulsiveness and making sure his grandiose declarations were always interpreted in as sound and practical a manner as possible. It would be a few years yet before the men who were a positive influence on the young emperor were replaced by men who encouraged Nero to embrace the darker side of his character for their own ends.

This week, though, I want to move away from the cutthroat politics of the imperial court and focus instead on the foreign pressures the empire faced during the first half of Nero's reign. Because right off the bat, Rome's enemies took one look at the untested 16-year-old emperor and decided that now was the perfect time to push Rome around. In the east, the Parthians took advantage of the situation to strengthen their position in Armenia, the semi-independent buffer state that had been the source of so much conflict over the years. While the Romans dealt with rising tensions and then eventually all-out war with the Parthians, a revolt in the newly acquired province of Britannia would break out, led by the warrior queen Boudicca, that would erupt with such ferocious energy that for a while Nero considered just abandoning the island altogether. Eventually, though, the uprising in Britannia would be put down and a settlement reached with the Parthians. Both conflicts left a lot of lingering resentment and unanswered questions about the future, but all in all, Nero's response to these threats earned him a solid C, maybe even a C-plus in foreign policy. He didn't gain any territory, but he didn't lose any territory either, though his critics did accuse him of essentially giving up Rome's hegemony over Armenia when the final deal with Parthia was signed, but I would argue that the agreement, which averted continuous war with Parthia, actually goes down on the credit rather than the debit side of Nero's ledger.

Trouble in the east began to bubble to the surface at the end of Claudius' reign, since at the time of Augustus a deal had been worked out between Rome and Parthia whereby Rome retained the right to appoint the monarch of Armenia, this nominally independent buffer state. The arrangement worked out fine until the early 50s AD, when the Roman-nominated king was overthrown by his own nephew. The nephew turned out to be a terrible ruler, and the people of Armenia soon grew to despise him. The new king of Parthia, Vologases I, saw what was going on in Armenia, and decided that he could make his mark on history by prying the country away from the Romans. So, skillfully parlaying disgust with the sitting king into support for a Parthian alternative, Vologases invaded Armenia and installed his own brother Tiridates on the throne. After a few years of back and forth between the rival claimants, the people of Armenia backed Tiridates, and in 54 AD the Parthians found themselves effectively ruling Armenia. 54 AD is also, of course, the year that Claudius died and Nero became emperor, making the eastern encroachment of the Parthians one of the first major tests of the new emperor's mettle.

Being young and wanting to make a mark himself, Nero was convinced to push back hard against the Parthians. To spearhead this pushback, Nero appointed a man named Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, a general who had made a name for himself battling the always active Germanic tribes during the reigns of Caligula and Claudius. Corbulo was made proprator, and later proconsul, of the provinces of Cappadocia and Galatia, and instructed to gather and train an army that could be put in the field against the Parthians should diplomatic overtures fail. As he gathered his forces, though, it became apparent that the bulk of whatever force he led would be drawn from the legions stationed in Syria. So, for the next few years, while Rome waited for Parthia to back down and Parthia waited for Rome to give up, Corbulo trained his men, going so far as to keep them encamped throughout the winter to get them ready for the harsh conditions they would find in mountainous Armenia. The basic demand of the Romans was simple. Tiridates had to travel to Rome and receive an official endorsement from the emperor. Otherwise, his presence on the Armenian throne would be considered illegitimate and an act of war. The Parthians hemmed and hawed, and so finally, in 58 AD, Corbulo was given the green light to begin pressing the Roman case by other means.

Tiridates had scattered his defense forces across Armenia to avoid the decisiveness that comes with a single large battle. So, rather than invading the country with a single column, Corbulo sent in dozens of small detachments and simultaneously ordered the Roman allied kings along the Armenian border to begin stirring up trouble. If he couldn't knock Tiridates out with a single punch, Corbulo was content to do it with a thousand cuts. At first, things went well for Rome, and in short order, the swarming legions caused Tiridates to demand a meeting. The two sides agreed to come together, but when the Armenians showed up with a thousand men and the Romans showed up with three thousand men, Tiridates got spooked and took off in the middle of the night, convinced that he was about to be ambushed. The Armenians then tried to cut off the supply line of the legions, the tactic that had brought Mark Antony to his knees, but Corbulo had studied his military history and made sure that his supply chain, though long, was well defended. Unable to make a dent against the Roman invasion, Tiridates fell back into a defensive posture, leading Corbulo to recall his own scattered forces and prepare them for a series of traditional assaults on the main Armenian strongholds. Encountering little real resistance, the Romans captured city after city on their way to the northern capital of Artashata, where Tiridates had holed up. The Armenian king dispatched everything he had against the besieging Roman forces, but he was unable to break their line. Tiridates was forced to flee and abandon his capital. Unable to garrison the city properly, Corbulo burned it to the ground.

The next year, the legions headed towards Tigranaserta, the capital of southern Armenia. It was a difficult road, and along the way, at least one plot to assassinate the hard-driving Corbulo was exposed. The conspirators, mostly allied Armenians who had grown tired of following the Romans, were all executed. The affair actually turned out pretty well for the targeted Roman general, not only because he survived, but also because when he arrived outside of Tigranaserta, it is reported that he launched one of the conspirators' heads into the city, reminding the leaders of the capital what happened to those who defied Rome. The ruling council voted to surrender without a fight. By the end of 59 AD, Tiridates was on the run, and Corbulo crowned Tigranas VI as the new king of Armenia. Having successfully ejected the Parthians from this key territory with only minimal losses, Corbulo was hailed as a hero back in Rome and became the most celebrated general of his generation. As a reward for his achievement, the victorious Corbulo was given the governorship of Syria, the most important province in the Eastern Empire, aside from Egypt of course. He left a legion garrisoned in Armenia to support the new king and headed south to his new assignment, believing the Armenian question had now been answered. But it was not to be so.

As it would turn out, Corbulo's victories came so easily because, while the Romans were intensely focused on the conflict in Armenia, Vologases and the Parthians were being pulled in a dozen different directions, dealing with nasty revolts both out on their frontiers and within their royal family itself. Stretched so thin, Parthia was unable to supply Tiridates with the resources he needed to successfully ward off the Roman assault. But in 61 AD, following probably ill-advised raids into Parthia by Tigranas VI, things changed. There was no way Vologases could ignore such an insult. Settling his other internal problems so as not to be distracted, the Romans soon discovered that they had earned Parthia's full attention. From here on out, things would not be so easy.

Just as things were about to get dicey in the east, a revolt in Britannia exploded with such force that Nero and his advisors seriously considered just giving up the island completely. At what point, they wondered, will it simply no longer be worth it to hold this cold and foggy island on the edge of the world? But as quickly as it started, the revolt flamed out. However, had Gaius Suetonius Paulinus lost the Battle of Watling Street, which, given how outnumbered he was, was not entirely out of the question, there is a very real possibility that the Romans would have withdrawn from Britain completely, altering the course of western European history in the process.

The trouble began in either 60 or 61 AD, no one seems sure of the actual date, when Prasutagus, the king of the Iceni, died. During the initial Roman invasion of Britain in 43, the Iceni, who hailed from modern-day Norfolk on the east coast of Britain, had either been one of the 11 tribes who surrendered to Claudius, or they had worked out an independent peace with the Romans not long after. However it happened, the Iceni had been able to maintain their independence and Prasutagus was set up as an official client king of the Roman Empire. In an attempt to keep control of his tribe within the family, Prasutagus filled out a will that left Iceni territory jointly to the Romans on the one hand, and his wife and daughters on the other. But when the king died, the Roman procurator of the province, a particularly rapacious character named Cetus Decianus, announced that patriarchal Rome did not recognize the rights of women when it came to inheritance. The claims of the Iceni were denied and their territory was annexed by Rome. To the Britons, who had no problem with women inheriting property or holding positions of authority, this was incomprehensible. It was right and good that the king's wife should rule upon his death and his daughters grow up to be queens. So when Boudica, the widow of the dead king, went about her business as usual and paid no more or less tribute to the Romans than before, she was shocked at the Roman reaction. Soldiers were sent to her village. Boudica was tied up and flogged while her daughters were carted off and raped. These ghastly acts committed, the Romans believed that they had put the upstart women in their place and thought no more of it, little realizing that they had just lit a fuse that was burning quickly down towards the powder keg that was Queen Boudica.

With the Roman governor of Britain, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, leading the majority of the British legions on a campaign on the Isle of Anglicy in Wales, Boudica took the opportunity to translate her fury into action. After convincing a neighboring tribe to join in the fun, Boudica gathered everyone up and declared war on Rome. The first stop was Camulodunum, the original headquarters of the Roman occupying force and site of a great temple built to the now divine Claudius. When Roman scouts brought back word that a huge force of Britons was headed straight for the city, the call for reinforcements went out. But with the bulk of the British legions occupied in Wales, the pro-curator Decianus decided that Boudica's revolt wasn't worth rearranging the remaining garrisons for and only sent an additional 200 troops to Camulodunum. Not surprisingly, 200 more troops didn't do the Romans in the city much good as Boudica's force had to be in the tens of thousands. I'm having trouble tracking down an accurate headcount for them. The Briton rebels easily crashed the gates, forcing the surviving Romans to make a last stand in the barricaded temple of Claudius, where, after two days of fighting, they were annihilated. Camulodunum was then burned to the ground.

After the scale of the danger posed to the residents of Camulodunum became apparent, a detachment of 2,500 men from a nearby legion were sent to reinforce the city. But by the time they arrived, it was too late. They showed up just in time to find the smoldering remains of Camulodunum and a horde of British warriors with their hackles raised and nothing else to do. The subsequent encounter, known as the Massacre of the Ninth Legion, did not, as you can imagine, end well for the Romans.

When news of the destruction of Camulodunum reached Suetonius in Wales, he immediately abandoned his campaign and marched straight for the new commercial center of Londinium, founded 20 years before and thriving nicely. But upon arrival, he assessed the situation and decided the new city was indefensible. With Boudicca marching straight for them, he abandoned the town and looked for a better position from which to direct his counter-attack. Boudicca had no trouble overrunning undefended Londinium. She burned to the ground and slaughtered anyone crazy enough to stay in the city after Suetonius left with his legions. Boudicca then marched on Verulamium, the site of modern St. Albans, and put it too to the torch. This string of victories was gaining Boudicca quite a reputation and disaffected Britons from across the country flocked to her banner. The Romans were on the run and with a little luck they might just be run off the island altogether.

But Suetonius was not ready to give up just yet. He managed to gather about 10,000 troops composed of portions of a few legions and irregular auxiliary forces and station them at a defensible position in the west midlands along a trade road known later as Watling Street. Though reports that Boudicca led 230,000 warriors is certainly an exaggeration, there is no doubt that the Romans were massively outnumbered. Tacitus reports that though Suetonius arrayed his men in a single line it was not enough to match the length of the far deeper British army. But Suetonius knew what he was doing and had placed himself at a spot where only so many Britons could attack at any one time, partially negating the huge numerical disadvantage he faced.

Boudicca roused her army with a speech imploring them to make this moment the last moment for the Romans in Britain and reminding them that she stood before them not as an aristocrat whose power had been usurped but as a free woman whose liberty had been denied. Victory would mean freedom, defeat would mean slavery. Unfortunately for the British, as we have seen so many times before, when it came to set peace battles out in the open the Romans were second to none even when they were outnumbered ten to one. When the British charged the Roman line formed into a wedge and drove into the oncoming mass of warriors. Before too long the British discovered the difficulty of breaking a disciplined Roman line and began to retreat. But Boudicca's army was not just an army, it was also a rolling caravan of her entire tribe and before the battle she had stationed the wagons and dependents who made up the rest of the troop behind the actual warriors. Now that the army was in full retreat they ran headlong into the stationary wagons and chaos ensued. Utterly snarled, the Romans were able to descend and go into slaughter mode. Of the 230,000 Boudicca led into the battle of Watling Street, 80,000 now lay dead on the plain. Roman losses were put at 400. Her revolt shattered, Boudicca drank poison to avoid capture.

Boudicca's rebellion very nearly caused Nero to abandon Britain altogether. Had she been able to lure Suetonius onto less favorable ground it is likely that her far superior numbers would have been able to overwhelm him. But in the end if there was one thing the Romans did really well it was running a savvy military operation, so the counterfactual just doesn't hold up. Having abandoned Londinium it was clear that the one thing Suetonius was not going to do was be lured onto unfavorable ground. Inevitably Boudicca's furious revolt was going to run into the cold careful planning of the Roman legions and like so many before her she would be destroyed by it.

Rome was pleased to hear the good news arriving from Britain that the uprising had been quelled, but they were simultaneously nonplussed by the news coming in from the east. Having set a Roman client back on the throne of Armenia, Corbulo had settled conditions in the east back into their natural state. But Tigranus VI, the new king of Armenia, immediately tried to upend the apple cart by raiding into Parthian territory. Where before the Parthian king Volgases had regretfully deemed the Armenian situation a low priority, invasions into Parthia itself were another matter. Reacting to the enraged pleas from his loyal subjects, the Parthian king settled his other business and turned back to the Mediterranean. He formally announced that his brother Tiridates was still the rightful king of Armenia and re-crowned him as such. A Parthian force then invaded Armenia and attempted to dislodge the Roman garrisons, but they were unsuccessful. Hoping to keep things civil, Corbulo met with Volgases and it was agreed that both empires would leave the disputed country while envoys from Parthia traveled to Rome and attempted to work out a deal. But by the spring of 62, no deal had been struck and hostilities were renewed.

This time, with Corbulo focused on protecting the key province of Syria from possible attack, Nero appointed a legate named Lucius Sicinius Pitis to spearhead operations in Armenia. The new commander took two legions and marched them straight toward Tigranaserta, which had been seized by the Parthians. But after a few easy but minor victories, he was forth to withdraw when winter came due to an unsteady supply line before reaching the southern capital. The ease of the first year's campaign had lulled Pitis into a false sense of security. When in early 63, this false sense of security was shattered, he quickly showed himself to be a pretty awful commander. Unable to make any headway against Corbulo's fortifications in Syria, which Volgases had been planning to invade, the Parthian king decided to abandon the attempt and just go for broken Armenia. So when the second Parthian army, which Pitis had not accounted for, suddenly appeared along the Roman-Armenian border where he was camped for the winter, Pitis panicked. Having sent his officers away on leave and having dispersed the rest of his troops across the countryside, Pitis was in no position to fight the Parthians. He hastily ordered the troops he had on hand to blockade the various passes in the mountains to prevent the Parthians from entering Roman territory, but this had the effect of only dispersing his already dispersed troops even more. The Parthians were able to easily overrun these small detachments, forcing Pitis to fall back into his fortified camps outside of Randia.

Facing imminent doom, Pitis was paralyzed. The most proactive thing he could think of to do was to call Corbulo for help. Having never liked Pitis to begin with, Corbulo took his sweet time gathering a relief force, but when the reports became sufficiently dire, he marched out half the men at his disposal and attempted to reach the besieged legions in time, but he would arrive too late. While enroute, Pitis had given up and surrendered to Volgases. The terms of the surrender were humiliating for Rome. The Parthian king demanded that the defeated army build him a bridge across a nearby river so his entourage could march over it victoriously. Then, according to some sources, he allowed the Romans to leave only after marching them under the yoke, which, as you recall from the Battle of the Coligne Gate during the Samnite Wars, was about as humiliating as it gets. The remnants of Pitis's army met up with the approaching legions led by Corbulo, and despite Pitis's pleas to keep fighting, Corbulo refused and led the whole force back to Syria, unwilling to risk getting entangled with the Parthians at a time and place of their choosing.

Having driven the Romans out of Armenia, Volgases sent envoys to Rome to work out a new peace accord. When the envoys arrived though, Nero and the Senate were shocked to discover the magnitude of Pitis's defeat. Though he had been communicating his ever-worsening position to Corbulo, Pitis had continued to send cheerful letters back to Rome, acting as if nothing was amiss. So when Parthian envoys showed up with news of Roman legions marching out under the yoke, the leaders of Rome had trouble fitting this revelation into their heads. For God's sake, the triumphal arch marking the defeat of the Parthians in Armenia was already halfway constructed. What are we supposed to do with a halfway built triumphal arch? Turn it into a giant swing set? Pitis was immediately recalled to Rome, and Corbulo was given emergency imperium over the entire Eastern Empire. His job was to whip the Parthians and make sure that it stuck this time.

Corbulo led a large force out of Syria and into Armenia to do just that, but before a battle could be fought, Volgases sent word that he wanted to deal. He knew full well that Corbulo was not Pitis, and that the Romans would not be taken so easily again. So the two sides met and struck a deal. Henceforth, Parthia would be able to appoint the monarch of Armenia, but their choice had to be ratified by the Roman Emperor. Tiridates then laid his diadem down in front of a statue of Nero the Romans had brought, and swore not to put it back upon his head until Nero had placed it there. In 66 AD, Tiridates then did travel to Rome to meet with the Emperor and accept his crown. Nero threw a huge party and made a big to-do about his right to crown the king of Armenia, but critics within the Senate and beyond believed the Emperor had done nothing less than hand Armenia over to the Parthians. Ratify the candidate that they nominate? What great power is that? But defenders of Nero saw it as a practical move that averted all-out war with the one power big enough to really challenge Rome. In closing out the ceremony, Nero even went so far as to close the rarely closed gates of the Temple of Janus, which signaled the arrival of universal peace.

Universal peace, though, never lasts long. Next week, just months after the gates swing shut, they will be opened again. The always simmering province of Judea will finally boil over, leading to what is now known as the Great Jewish Revolt. The historical implications of this brief conflict were vast, as the Romans both destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem and triggered a diaspora of Jews out of the east, with the survivors of the revolt fleeing to communities across the empire, which sowed the seeds for so much medieval and modern tension between Jew and Gentile.