111 - Phase One Complete

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Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 111, Phase 1 Complete. The Battle of Abritus forced the Romans to deal with something they had never before had to face, the death of an emperor in battle. Up until now, emperors had died of natural causes or they had been assassinated or they had committed suicide, but never had they fallen to an enemy sword. The gods struck down emperors, or the Romans struck down emperors, or emperors struck down themselves, but they were not knocked off by some common barbarian warrior. It simply wasn't done. But while this humiliating blow to the national psyche was immense, the Romans did not have long to dwell on their misery, because there was one big practical problem the death of Decius had left them with.

Who would rule now? The elevation of Decius' son Herennius to the rank of co-emperor just a few months earlier was supposed to have solved this problem, but he too had died at Abritus, leaving the empire not just without a leader, but without a leader in its darkest hour. To extract the empire from this predicament, the senate and the army both came up with solutions to the problem of who would rule. Unfortunately, they were different solutions. The army naturally chose to elevate one of their own, specifically the senior ranking officer left on the scene after the disaster at Abritus, Gaius Vivius Trebonianus Gallus. Back in Rome though, the senate chose to stick with the hereditary rights of Decius' family, and elected Gaius Valens Hostilianus Messius Quintus, Decius' youngest son, who had been left behind in Rome while his father and brother had gone off to fight the Goths.

The big justifiable fear after Decius' death was that some kind of civil war would break out, at a moment when a lack of internal unity might prove fatal. And with the senate and armies backing separate candidates for the throne, that seemed to be the deadly path Rome was headed down. But the inevitable confrontation between Hostilian and Gallus never arrived, in part because Gallus decided that circumstances demanded that someone take the high road and offer a compromise. Sitting in a tent out near the Danube, surrounded by the remnants of an army that had just been annihilated by the Goths, Gallus recognized that this was no time for a civil war. If he wasted the time and energy of what was left of Decius' army on some power grab, the Goths could just sweep down, conquer the middle empire, and split Rome in half. So while he made it clear to the senate that he planned to accept the army's acclaim, he also made it clear that he had no problem with Hostilian serving as his co-emperor.

He was able to come to this magnanimous conclusion because, one, he had always been on excellent terms with Decius and his family, and did not instinctively see Hostilian as a rival, and two, the age difference between them—Hostilian was still a teenager—meant that Gallus would always be the senior Augustus. Accepting Hostilian, then, was more like accepting an heir than a true colleague. Plus, it's not like the Moesian legions were in any condition to force their demands on anyone.

Though it seems a bit crazy to think about, Trebonianus Gallus was a rare figure at this point in Roman history. He was an emperor of fully Italian extraction. Since the fall of the Flavian dynasty, the imperial office had been populated by Spaniards and Africans and Thracians and Illyrians, but only on a few rare occasions was the emperor of Rome actually an Italian. Now, of course, we can't read too much into this, as many of these emperors—the Trajans and Hadrians and Severans of the world—either came from Italian families transplanted into the provinces, or from provincial families who had married into important Italian clans. But still, it is worth noting that an emperor born in Italy to an Italian family had, by the third century, become something of an endangered species.

Gallus was born into a senatorial family of Etruscan origin, and had spent his life working his way up the cursus honorum, serving in civilian and military posts across the empire. At some point, he became an associate of Decius's, and when Decius became emperor, he immediately appointed Gallus to govern the province of Upper Moesia. The appointment underscores the close working relationship between the two men, as the governorship of Upper Moesia was no honorary ambassadorship to Tahiti. This was, after all, a territory not only being harassed by the Goths, but which had also been ground zero for the rebellion that had put Decius in power in the first place. The degree to which Decius trusted and respected Gallus is obvious, and the new governor quickly became trusted and respected by the men under his command as well.

A full bronze statue of Gallus still exists, that depicts a large, barrel-chested man with close-cropped hair, cutting an imposing figure. He was not some aristocratic dandy the Moesian legions could hope to push around. Not that they had time for such bullying. Gallus took over in 250 AD, and for the next eighteen months he led the Roman response to the increasing Gothic raids. Sometimes he was successful, and sometimes he wasn't, but no one could argue that Gallus wasn't exerting maximum effort in an attempt to stem the barbarian tribe.

When Cuneva invaded with a full force though, the Moesian legions were simply unable to do anything to stop him, and Gallus was one of those provincial leaders who told Decius in no uncertain terms that the lower Danube needed reinforcements and fast. He then served as one of Decius' key generals during the campaign against the Gothic king, and wound up being one of the few to escape from a British alive. As I said at the end of last week's show, Gallus took over what was left of the legions and came to an understanding with the victorious Cuneva. The Romans would not hinder the Gothic retreat back across the Danube, and henceforth payment would be made annually to the Gothic king to prevent him from attacking in the future. Though later Romans would castigate Gallus for this ignoble peace, modern scholars seem more than willing to give him a pass. He was in an incredibly difficult position, and doing the best he could to save the empire from further humiliation. The rumor that he and Cuneva were in cahoots started up a few years later, but no one at the time, and no one now, really believes that those smears hold much water.

The men of the shattered legions who had just elected him emperor certainly didn't think he was a traitor who had just gotten most of them killed, otherwise they would have torn him limb from limb, rather than giving him the keys to the empire. The peace deal with Cuneva is evidence that Gallus was of a mind to walk the Romans away from the battle of Abritus without making things any worse than they already were. But the external threat posed by the Goths was not the only source of potential peril. Gallus also had to make a choice about how to deal with the senate's elevation of Hostilian. In this too, Gallus showed that he was more interested in making sure things didn't get worse than he was in just about anything else. So he sent a letter to the senate informing them that their choice of Hostilian was a fine one, and that he would be happy to share the imperial insignia with the son of Decius.

The senate was no more disposed to start up a civil war than Gallus was, and immediately accepted the compromise. With the Goths temporarily sated, Gallus and a few key advisors made their way back to Rome to meet with Hostilian and the senate, so that together they could work up for a plan on how to stabilize the empire, which was clearly teetering on the brink of something. When he arrived back in the capital, Gallus and Hostilian were acclaimed as the co-Augusti of Rome, and Gallus' son Volusianus was named Caesar and eventual heir to the throne.

The partnership between Gallus and Hostilian, though, wouldn't last a year. In the summer of 251, Hostilian mysteriously vanished from the historical record, and we can only guess at what happened to him. Gallus' conspiracy theorists claim that the young Augustus had been offed by the evil betrayer of a Britess, but the consensus opinion seems to be that Hostilian fell victim to a new plague that had chosen this inopportune moment to appear on the scene, the Cyprian plague, so named because its effects were described in detail by St. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage. As with the Antonine plague, there is some debate over which particular disease ravaged the empire for the next twenty years, but again, as with the Antonine plague, smallpox appears to be the likely culprit.

If there is one recent cliché that I have really come to loathe, it is the cliché of the quote, perfect storm. Everyone these days wants to describe everything as a perfect storm, making it hard to distinguish when an incredibly rare confluence of events produces something historically destructive, and when someone just wants to use the phrase, a perfect storm, to lend whatever minor crisis they're describing some dramatic heft. Really, I promise you, the overuse of a perfect storm is a big pet peeve of mine. With that in mind, the crisis of the third century was a perfect storm. The empire was already being ravaged by external pressures stronger than it had known in centuries, violent internal political division, economic depression, soaring taxation, and now on top of everything else, a massive plague was breaking out. You guys, this is what a perfect storm looks like.

At the height of the Cyprian plague, which ran from 251 until sometime after 270, 5,000 people died every day in Rome, and the bodies piled up faster than they could be buried. Manpower shortages inevitably resulted in the fields and in the army barracks, leading to further economic depression, famine, and anemic border defense. This at a time when the last thing the empire could afford was economic depression, famine, and anemic border defense. Besides Hostilian, the plague would eventually claim the life of the Emperor Claudius Gothicus as well, a man who was well on his way to leading Rome out of the darkness when he died prematurely in his camp. Really, I will never stop marveling at how the Roman Empire was able to survive the third century. Everyone always wants to know why Rome fell, but I think the more fascinating question is how it managed to survive as long as it did. Over the course of the next few episodes, I hope to get to the bottom of that particular mystery. Seriously, these were bad times that the Romans should not have lived through.

Though the Romans had been focused for the last few years on the threat in the north posed by the Goths, it was during the short reign of Gallus that they were reminded that the Sassanids still posed a major threat in the east. Sharpwort had been biding his time after making peace with Philip the Arab back in 244, but once word trickled over to the Sassanid king that the Romans were getting battered around by a Gothic invasion, it did not take him long to call an army back into the field and point them west. The strength of Rome was at a low ebb, and now was the perfect opportunity to maybe peel off some of that old Persian territory his family had been coveting all these years. The results of Sharpwort's campaign would prove as disastrous to the Romans as Cuneiva's campaign had just been, and when the Romans finally got around to responding, the results of that campaign would prove to be even more disastrous still. Bad times. Bad bad times.

As is so often the case in Roman history, Armenia lay at the center of this latest outbreak of hostilities between east and west. The chronology on all of this is a bit muddled, but it appears that Sharpwort used a dispute over Armenian succession as a pretext for invading the buffer kingdom. After marching around unopposed and placing his own man on the throne, Sharpwort then shocked everyone by directly invading the Roman province of Syria. As had just happened in the north, the eastern legions were so used to simply keeping watch without any real fear of direct attack that the sudden invasion caught them completely by surprise. Sharpwort captured key legionary garrisons and sacked important cities, including, amazingly, Antioch itself. After his string of victories, Sharpwort chose to withdraw from Syria as winter descended rather than attempt an occupation at this early stage in the game. Rome may be weakened, but it certainly wasn't defenseless.

The easy success of his initial foray into Roman territory, though, had to have had Sharpwort's mouth watering. Back in Rome, the surprising news of this marauding Sassanid army was met by an equally surprising reaction from the Emperor Gallus, relative indifference. He ordered the Syrian legions to regroup and defend themselves properly the next time Sharpwort came calling, but other than that, he made no move to travel to Syria himself or to raise emergency reinforcements to help shore up the eastern front. This latter bit is at least somewhat understandable, as the north was already stretched dangerously thin and the plague was making recruiting difficult, but there's no getting around the fact that Gallus did not seem much moved by the danger posed by the Sassanids. Perhaps had he lived, he would have done as Valerian eventually did, and led the counterattack personally, but Romans at the time whispered that perhaps there was more soft Italian in Gallus than he liked to let on, and that the luxuries of Rome were seducing him away from his responsibilities. Discontentment with Gallus, as you can imagine, began to grow apace from this point on.

With all this swirling around, bad news once again came down from the Danube in 253. Cuneva let it be known that he was unhappy about the payments he had been promised, and if Gallus didn't do something about it, the Gothic king was going to consider their peace treaty null and void. It is unclear whether the Romans were actually withholding the funds they had promised, or whether Cuneva was simply trying to extort more cash from his weakened opponent, but the word went back up to give the Gothic king no more than he had already been given. Cuneva, insulted, made preparations for a new invasion of the empire.

After Gallus left for Rome, the man put in charge of the northern border was Marcus Aemilius Aemilianus, a general of North African extraction, who had been appointed to a legionary command in Moesia by Decius, and promoted to overall command by Gallus following the disaster at Abrittus. Aemilianus faced the frightening prospect of dealing with the same Gothic army that had just whipped the Romans handily, only this time with fewer men and more raw recruits. The odds, needless to say, were not in his favor. When Cuneva did cross the Danube in 253, though, the Gothic king let his arrogance get the better of him, and Aemilianus was able to surprise the Goths and deliver a smashing victory for the legions. This time it was Cuneva who found himself leading off the wounded remnants of a once mighty army, and the world was reminded that the Romans were not done for yet.

Aemilianus was an overnight sensation, and for having done what two emperors had been unable to do, the exuberant troops honored their general the best way they knew how, they proclaimed him emperor. And if you think that by acclaiming their fourth emperor in just five years, the Moesian legions were hitting the peak of their fickleness, well, let's just give it another three months.

The news that the men who had proclaimed him emperor were now proclaiming someone else emperor finally roused Gallus from his apparent slumber. He sent an order up to Valerian, the commander of the upper Rhine, and the man Decius had tried to make censor, demanding that Valerian lead his troops to Italy at once to help Gallus smack down this would-be usurper. The emperor then induced the senate to declare Aemilianus an enemy of the state, and he gathered up a defense force and marched north to prevent the Moesian legions from entering Italy. But Aemilianus was well aware that time was of the essence, and while Gallus gathered his defenses, the Moesian general was already marching on Italy to cement his claim to the throne. The Danube legions had been weakened by war and disease, and if Aemilianus was to have any shot at all at unseating Gallus, he needed to strike before the emperor could muster all the forces at his disposal. If he was thinking in particular about the Rhine legions, then he was right to move fast. By getting to Gallus before the Rhine troops did, he was able to emerge victorious from something approaching an equal contest. Not that it did him much good. Fast or slow, when the Rhine legions did arrive, Aemilianus found himself done for anyway. But we'll get to that in a minute.

Aemilianus was already in Italy, and speeding down the eastern branch of the Flaminian Way, when he was finally met by an army led by Gallus and Volusianus. There are two accounts of what happened next. The first states that Aemilianus defeated Gallus after a short battle, and that Gallus and his son then fled north, to await the coming Rhine reinforcements. Their way was then cut short by members of the Praetorian Guard, who saw the winds shifting in Aemilianus' favor, and figured that they could get in good with the new emperor by bringing him the head of the old. They murdered Gallus and Volusianus, leaving Aemilianus' path to the throne clear. The other account is that there was no battle at all, and that Gallus' troops defected to Aemilianus before a single spear was thrown, leaving Gallus and Volusianus alone and unprotected, at which point they were executed by Aemilianus. Whichever way it happened, by the end of August 253, Gallus was dead. He was 47 years old, and had ruled the empire for two years.

The death of Gallus ushered in the glorious reign of Emperor Aemilianus, which began the moment Gallus died, and ended the moment Valerian arrived in Italy with the Rhine legions. This glorious reign probably lasted about a month. When the new emperor arrived in Rome, he was greeted coolly by the senate. Gallus had not been their first choice to lead the empire, and they were probably no more pleased with his lingering in the capital than anyone else, but he had gone out of his way to avoid civil war by proposing joint rule with Hostilian. Civil war was the last thing the empire needed, and here now was a man who had gone ahead and started one anyway.

Gallus was not unaware of his standing in the capital, so when he arrived he went to great lengths to convince the senate of his benign intentions. He told the senators that he saw himself merely as a general, and that he had neither the time nor the inclination to be the political, economic, and moral leader of the empire. That he said would be the senate's responsibility. He himself would be too busy defending Rome from its foreign enemies to worry about politics. He planned, he said, to be but an instrument of the empire, and more specifically, an instrument of the senate. Their egos now more than satisfied, any opposition to Aemilianus washed away as they contemplated this enticing new dynamic he had proposed. A partnership, between the military and the civilian authorities, rather than all power being claimed by a single man. It was a positively intoxicating thought for the power starved senate.

But like I say, the glorious reign of Aemilianus only lasted a few weeks. Valerian had never stopped moving south after the death of Gallus, and he now entered Italy in mid to late 253, with an eye not on saving Gallus, but revenging him. Gallus' position was now reversed, and just a few weeks after marching down the Fleminian way to confront Gallus, he found himself marching right back up it again to confront Valerian. On the same eastern branch of the road, though a bit further south, the two commanders met at the heads of their respective armies. Overawed by both the larger force from the Rhine and by the reputation of Valerian, the Moesian legions once again abandoned their master in favor of another, and defected en masse to Valerian. In the process of this defection, Aemilianus was cornered and killed by his own officers, so that there would be no misunderstanding where their new loyalties lay. Aemilianus was in his early forties, and had enjoyed the novelty of calling himself emperor for just about three months.

The death of Aemilianus closes out the first phase of the crisis of the third century. This first phase, running roughly from 238 to 253, set the tone for the remainder of the crisis. The legions elevating and abandoning emperors, the Goths invading from the north, the Sassanids invading from the east, the Cyprian plague sucking the life out of Rome's army and in general, the bonds that had held the empire together fraying to the breaking point. During the middle phase, all of these factors would combine to explode Rome into an anarchic mess.

Lasting from 253 to 268, this middle phase will be defined by the reigns of Valerian and his son Gallienus. Now in the context of the times, the 15 year combined reign of Valerian and his son seems to indicate a level of stability, but in fact, it masks instability on a scale that would only be matched during the final decades of the 400s AD as the west fell apart completely. Those of you who have read ahead know that not only did imperial usurpers rise and fall faster during this middle phase of the crisis than at any other period in Roman history, but also that beginning in the 260s, the empire would actually spend about 15 years divided into thirds, after new kingdoms in the northwest and east successfully broke away from Rome.

The final phase of the crisis, which lasted roughly from the death of Gallienus in 268 until the elevation of Diocletian in 284, was the recovery period, during which a series of vigorous emperors from Illyria battled back through the chaos to re-establish the supremacy of Rome both internally and externally.

Next time, we'll open the middle phase of the crisis with the elevation of Valerian and his son Gallienus. Though Valerian was at the time one of the most respected men in the empire, his destiny was unfortunately to go down in history as an imperial embarrassment. To his credit, he immediately opened up a war in the east to punish the Sassanids for their sack of Syria, but when he was captured alive by Sharapur in 260, his name became synonymous with the general felling of once mighty Rome. There will be no episode next week, as I am headed down to the Austin City Limits Music Festival, but we'll be back in two weeks to see just how bad we can make things for the Romans.