109 - The New Millenium

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 109 The New Millennium In 243 AD, 18-year-old Gordian III lost the man who had helped make the first few years of his reign a success. With Timositheus in place, the empire had enjoyed the fruits of a capable administrator without having to ingest the poisoned seeds that often accompany those fruits when they are provided by too powerful an underling. Had Gordian's father-in-law and praetorian prefect lived, there might have been conflict down the road as Gordian came of age, but we need not trouble ourselves with that question because that's not how it went. How it went was that things were going great for Gordian until Timositheus died and then everything went to hell.

There are a couple of different versions about what happened between 243 and 244 that led to Philip the Arab becoming emperor, but the basic facts are these, Timositheus died, Philip was appointed praetorian prefect, then Gordian died, and Philip became emperor. Other than that, the record is contradictory, but the different stories used to explain these basic facts break down into roughly three categories. 1. Philip was completely innocent in everything that happened. 2. Philip started out innocent but wound up guilty. And 3. That Philip was guilty right on down the line. To take the last first, the story goes that Philip and his brother Gaius conspired to kill Timositheus. That is, the mysterious illness that killed Gordian's father-in-law was actually poison. Then, once Philip was prefect, the brothers conspired to kill Gordian and have the guard elect Philip emperor. Call that version Philip the Archmachiavellian. Version 2 is that Timositheus died of natural causes, and it was only after Philip became prefect that he and his brother decided to make a play for the empire by killing Gordian. Call that version Philip the Opportunist. The last version is that Philip had nothing to do with either death and was as surprised as anyone to find the Praetorians elevating him to the purple. Call that version Gordian the Lucky. The Romans themselves clearly believed some combination of Philip the Opportunist and Philip the Archmachiavellian, and the characterization of Philip as a complete innocent likely wouldn't exist were it not for the curious case of the missing battle.

In early 244 AD, Persian histories describe a battle taking place in Mesopotamia between the Romans and the Sassanids that is almost nowhere described in the Latin record. The Persian version has it that Sharpur led an attack against the legions, and that not only were the legions defeated, but that Gordian himself fell in battle. It is easy to dismiss this version as being propaganda invented by Sharpur to embellish his own record, but it is not exactly out of the question that the Romans would try to bury the truth that the legions had been beaten and Gordian had been killed in battle, for propaganda reasons of their own. I'm not going to pretend like I can settle this issue myself, and officially the cause of Gordian's death remains unknown to this day. But as I said, the Romans themselves certainly believed that Philip assassinated the young emperor, and I'm going to stick with that interpretation. Besides, there is a very low likelihood that, covered up defeat or no, Gordian would have been anywhere near a battlefield at that point in his career.

So the generally accepted version among the Romans is that after the war with the Sassanids was shut down following the death of Timositheus, that Philip assassinated Gordian while the imperial court was traveling around near the Euphrates River. With the emperor dead, no one else ready to make an immediate bid for the throne, and Philip right there on the scene, the Praetorian Guard followed the precedent set by Macrinus' men and elevated their prefect to the top spot in the empire. Word quickly spread and before anyone could do anything about it, Rome had its second emperor of equestrian rank. The lack of a good credible record makes it hard to figure exactly the order of events and doesn't do much to explain how exactly Gordian died or why there was so little initial resistance to Philip's ascension, so at the end of the day, we have to simply accept the fact that Gordian died and Philip became emperor and that he then reigned for five years. We at least know that much.

Like his equestrian predecessor Macrinus, Philip was worried about having to deal with a war in the east right at the outset of his reign, and so shortly after becoming emperor, he brokered a more permanent ceasefire with the Sassanids. While Sharpur had been beaten soundly by Timositheus, Philip was wary of pressing the Roman case beyond the Euphrates, especially since he needed to head west and consolidate his hold on power. Plus, there is that missing battle out there that may or may not have been enough to convince the Roman high command to sue for peace. Philip sent ambassadors to the court of Sharpur in 244, and once again, the Romans agreed to purchase a peace that they had no interest in fighting for. Sharpur accepted the terms, either grateful for having been let off so easily or satisfied that the Romans were admitting a justified defeat, and for a while, the eastern front went quiet.

Philip left his brother Gaius in Syria, and granted all the authority a co-emperor might expect, Gaius then enjoyed a five-year run as the unquestioned ruler of the eastern empire while his brother took over the west. Philip was probably back in Rome at the end of 244 or the beginning of 245, and once he arrived, the senate granted him the title Augustus and named his son Caesar, two declarations I am sure that came only after suitable promises from Philip that he meant them no harm and suitable threats from the praetorian guard that maybe he did. At roughly this same time, the senate asserted just a little bit of independence by pushing through the deification of Gordian III over Philip's objections, objections that arose most suspected from Philip's guilt over how he had murdered the boy.

Philip's short reign would prove to be a microcosm of the wider crisis period within which it was set. His years in power were defined by internal rebellion and external invasion, and were it not for the fact that he oversaw Rome's one-thousandth birthday celebration, which we'll get to in a moment, his imperial career would lack any sort of truly memorable moment at all. This does, however, afford us a nice opportunity to turn our attention to one of those external menaces that would help make the crisis of the third century the truly existential emergency that it was. I am speaking, of course, of the Goths.

There is a lot of confusion out there about who exactly the Goths were, when they appeared, how they appeared, and who or what a Goth actually was, so I think it would be a good idea to try to pick apart a few of the theories about their origins so we can have as clear an understanding about this great northern menace to the empire as we possibly can. In time, the Goths would split into two main branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, the former being the ones who first sacked Rome in 410 AD, the latter being the ones who set up a successor kingdom in Italy following the fall of the Western Empire. But right now, they were still more or less a single unified people. The Goths first show up in the Roman record around 238 AD, just as the empire was dealing with its year of the six emperors. While the Romans were occupied with their civil war, this new barbarian horde scorched down from the Ukraine, right past the Danube, and sacked the city of Hystria, which was situated on the banks of the Black Sea. The size and the force of this invasion was so shocking that the provincial legions barely had time to react before the Goths had come and gone. For years, the assumption had been, occasional raids aside, that the tribes beyond the Danube were no match for the legions, and so, focused on the domestic situation, the Roman soldiers were simply not prepared to deal with the kind of aggressive threat the Goths posed. But now, they were all on notice.

There are two main competing theories about where the Goths came from. The first states that they originated in Sweden, who were pushed across the Baltic by a shifting climate sometime between 400 BC and 180, and then slowly migrated south until, by the 200s AD, they were firmly situated in the modern Ukraine. The other theory is that the Goths actually originated in the Ukraine, and that, like the Franks, became a military powerhouse when local tribes combined into a super-confederation, whose wide banner eventually supplanted their old tribal identities. Wherever they actually came from, by 238 AD, they were standing on Rome's doorstep, and more than ready to come banging through the door. There was a rumor going around, you see, that the Roman Empire was a paper tiger, that it was rich beyond imagination, and protected only by a reputation they had stopped deserving a long time ago. In just a few years, the Goths would come to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that Rome was in fact theirs for the taking, when they utterly routed a Roman army, led personally by the Emperor Decius, who would die in the fighting. But that's for next week. This week, we will simply note the opening forays of the Goths into Moesia and Dacia, both of which dealt with persistent raids after the Goths discovered how easy it was to march around the Roman border provinces.

Dacia especially stuck out like a sore thumb. Not particularly well settled or well garrisoned, Dacia was an easy target for the Goths. The Romans knew how difficult the province was to defend, going all the way back to Hadrian, who tried to abandon it following Trajan's death. But political pressure and the glorious memories of Trajan's campaign had kept the region on the far side of the Danube within the empire. But it would not survive the crisis of the third century. In the midst of Aurelian's campaign to rebuild the shattered empire, Dacia would become a strategic casualty. By that point, 270 AD, everyone recognized that the province had become little more than an unlocked backdoor into the empire, and its continued incorporation as a province was far too dangerous to allow a little pride in past glories to get in the way.

While Philip kept one wary eye on the Goths, he had to keep another on the internal revolts that kept springing up across the empire during his five years in office. There are reports of at least four separate instances of provincials, citizens, or soldiers attempting to overthrow Philip and Gaius. In the east, Gaius especially provoked revolutionary ire with his heavy-handed governance. Tax collection was harsh, and at least two of the revolts of the late 240s occurred in the east and were directed at Gaius. Some evidence even suggests that the last of these actually wound up claiming Gaius's life, but as with Gordian III, the actual circumstances of Gaius Julius Priscus's death remain unknown.

After four years of uneasy rule, everything finally came to a head in 248 AD. That year, a simultaneously delivered both the high point of Philip's reign and the beginning of the revolt that would eventually lead to his downfall. The high point came in April, a month which the Romans had long had circled on their calendars, as it was believed to mark the 1000th anniversary of Romulus's founding of Rome. The citizens of the capital expected a party, and Philip happily delivered a magnificent set of secular games to celebrate.

Now to our modern ears, the name might seem to suggest that the secular games were a set of games that had no religious overtones, but that's really just an ironic coincidence of naming, as the secular games were, like everything the Romans did, a highly religious affair. The secular games get their name from the Roman concept of cyclum, which represented the absolute upper bounds of a potential human life. When a cyclum cycle ended, which the Romans calculated to last 100-110 years, the reasonable belief was that there would have been a complete turnover in the living population in the meantime. That is, whatever arbitrary day you pick to start the cycle, when you go 110 years in the future, everyone who had been alive at the beginning, from the oldest man to the youngest baby, would be dead. The secular games thus held a particular fascination for the Romans, as they represented a set of ceremonies and celebrations that, theoretically at least, no one had ever seen before or would ever see again.

The origin myth of the games reached back into the misty days of the early kingdom, when a Sabine man, trying to save his sick children, was commanded to conduct nocturnal sacrifices to the Celtic god Decepator and the Greek god Persephone, both of whom were strongly associated with the underworld. Over the course of three days, he conducted the necessary ceremonies on the campus marshes, his children lived, and he was then left with instructions that the ceremonies should be repeated once per cyclum from that day forward. How closely the Romans held to this injunction is unknown, but when the high priests of Rome consulted the Sibylline books in 249, while the First Punic War was raging, they were told that the prescription for what ailed them was to renew the secular sacrifices. This set was dutifully followed up in the 140s AD, but then, when the cycle next came round, Rome was too caught up in the fall of the Republic to remember. After Augustus became emperor, though, he decided he wanted to throw games better than anyone had ever seen before or would ever see again, and got the idea to revive the secular games in 17 BC. He revamped the ceremonies, instructed the priests to sacrifice to proper Roman gods, and introduced daytime sacrifices to accompany the traditional nighttime ceremonies. He also introduced the games, the banquets, and theatrical performances that came to be most closely associated with the event. Augustus was not reviving an ancient tradition just to mumble some words at midnight. He wanted to throw the biggest party of anyone's lifetime.

After the secular games of Augustus, though, the theoretical underpinnings of the ceremony took a hit when Claudius decided to throw his own set in 47 AD. He had good reason to throw his games early, but Suetonius notes that Claudius was much mocked for announcing festivities that none had seen before and none would see again when plenty of people had been around when Augustus had said the same thing. The good reason for Claudius's secular games, though, was to celebrate the revolution of a different hundred-year cycle, as 47 AD marked the 800th anniversary of the founding of Rome, and Claudius didn't want the birthday to pass unnoticed. From that point on, there were two cycles of secular games, basically negating the whole not-before-not-ever-again mystique, but the various emperors were not going to let an opportunity to associate their name with this most rare of ceremonies pass. So one cycle followed Augustus and led to games thrown by Domitian in 88 and Septimius Severus in 204, and another cycle following Claudius and the birthdays of Rome, which led to games thrown in 148 by Antoninus Pius, and this last set thrown by Philip the Arab in 248. The next time either cycle came around, though, the empire was already undergoing Constantine's push to Christianize, and like a dozen other pagan celebrations, the secular games were neglected. So when Philip announced his games and said that no one would ever see their like again, he at least was telling the truth.

Philip's games included the usual sacrifices, accompanied by citywide theatrical performances and gladiatorial contests that saw a thousand men and God knows how many thousands of exotic animals, killing and being killed for the crowd's amusement. When it was all over, everyone agreed that the event had lived up to its billing. No one had ever seen anything like it before, and they could expect to never see anything like it again. Philip was the toast of Rome.

But Philip was not the toast of the province of Moesia. The troops along the lower Danube had dealt with the brunt of the initial Gothic invasions, and so far they had not had much success against this new barbarian menace. It appears that in response, the regular soldiers of the legions were clamoring to take the fight across the Danube and into the territory of the Goths. The invasion would offer the men a chance to exact some revenge for their lost honor, but perhaps more importantly, it would give them a chance to plunder a heretofore unknown source of wealth. The empire hadn't really had a good sizable influx of slaves since the Marcomannic Wars, and the thought of selling off a hundred thousand Goths into slavery was a mighty big incentive to fight another big war in the north. But Philip was content for now to keep the legions in their camps. A northern war might sound good when it's pitched by grunts and to grunts, but up in the high command, they understood that the likelihood of success was low, and the likelihood of doing irreparable damage to the northern defenses was high. But that didn't stop the grunts from talking, and in time, it didn't stop them from revolting against their cowardly leadership.

In mid-248, while Philip was back in Rome celebrating the capital's birthday, the legions stationed in Moesia rebelled, and declared a man named Tiberius Claudius Marinus Peccatianus their new emperor. There had been revolts before, but this one seemed particularly serious, as it involved the legions of such a critical region. As Philip and his advisors scrambled to come up with a response plan, though, a man took to the floor of the senate and declared that there was nothing to fear. The troops in Moesia, he announced, would quickly come to regret their hasty rebellion, and would probably kill their new leader in just a matter of days. With Philip thinking he might have to go so far as to resign his office just to restore peace, he was naturally intrigued by the certainty of the old senator's prediction, and thought the man a genius when, just a few days later, word came that the rebellion had in fact collapsed and Peccatianus was dead. This was how Gaius Macias Quintus Decius earned the everlasting love and respect of Philip the Arab.

Decius had been born in 201 in lower Pannonia, and had spent his entire life serving the empire as a distinguished senator. He had been consul in 232, and had served as governor of lower Germany, Moesia, and Hispania Terraconnensis, all key provinces with significant troop deployments. It appears that he was in Spain during the tumultuous year of 238, but had he not been, it seems highly likely that he would have been elected one of the twenty senators of the emergency council. During the early years of Philip's reign, Decius had been prefect of Rome, and by 248 there was really no one in the senate, with the possible exception of Valerian, more accomplished and respected than Decius. His bold and correct reading of the situation in Moesia only increased that standing. But just because the rebellion had collapsed, that did not mean that Philip and his regime were out of danger. The troops may have lost their nerve this time, but that did not mean that they had lost their nerve forever. Clearly, a firm hand was needed along the Danube to restore discipline and make sure that things like this didn't happen in the future. And who better to send on this mission than wise Decius, who seemed to know the troops better than they knew themselves. So Philip ordered Decius to Moesia, where he was to whip the legions back into shape and prepare them for the critical task of defending the empire from a gothic threat that looked only to be gaining strength with each passing year.

When looked at one way, that Decius was respected, capable, loyal, and smart, the decision to send him to Moesia was an obvious one. But when looked at another way, taking into account that Decius was easily more popular than Philip, and was about to be given command over the largest and best fighting force in the empire, the decision to send him to Moesia turns into an absurd blunder. In any event, the next time the two would face each other would be at the heads of opposing armies, so yeah, maybe Philip shouldn't have gone and done that. But that is for next week.

I want to close this week by addressing one little piece of historical trivia that was believed for centuries, but has since been more or less abandoned. The fact that Philip the Arab may have been the first Christian emperor of Rome. This rumor mostly took root as a result of Vesubius describing an incident in his Ecclesiastical history that has Philip attempting to visit a church shortly after becoming emperor, being denied entry by the bishop, and then confessing his sins to gain admittance. His subsequent toleration of Christianity, in contrast most especially to his successor Decius, served as further circumstantial proof that Philip was in fact a member of the flock. But weighing the scales down on the other side are big known facts, like Philip's embrace of his role as Pontifex Maximus, and the pagan ceremonies he officiated during the secular games, both of which would have been big no-no's had he been truly Christian. With regards to Philip's relationship with the church, I am content then to believe that given his upbringing in the Christianized East, that he probably had more sympathy to and connection with the Christian communities than most of his imperial colleagues, but it doesn't seem plausible that he himself was a Christian.

Philip's positive relationship with Christianity though, does offer an interesting insight into the subsequent persecutions of Decius, who would wind up issuing an edict shortly after he became emperor, demanding citizens of Rome offer sacrifices to the pagan gods. Decius may have issued his edict to get the troubled Roman Empire back on the right side of the gods, but he may also have issued it as a means of persecuting allies of Philip, as Decius looked to consolidate his own rule. Next week, we will explore the anti-Christian policies of Decius, but only after we cover his accidental rebellion against Philip. It seems that good Decius had every intention of restoring discipline to the troops along the Danube, but upon arriving, was greeted with an ultimatum that he either lead them in a new revolt or die right there on the spot. Loyal to Philip, but not suicidally loyal to Philip, Decius agreed to their demands and immediately about-faced and headed back to Italy, this time at the head of an army.