115 - Phase Two Complete

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Hello and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 115, Phase 2 Complete. As the 260s drew to a close, the political order of the Roman Empire had begun to settle a bit. Posthumus was in charge of the west, administering the provinces in Gaul and Hispania and Britain. While out in the east, Odonathus had carved out a sphere of influence for himself that kept the citizens of Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor free from worries about another Sasanid invasion. Probably steaming about the loss of influence on the outer rims of his empire, Gallienus nonetheless dedicated himself to the governance of the middle empire, and in addition to fending off the Goths, he tried to strengthen the internal economy and even promote some of the long-neglected arts and sciences. After so much chaos and uncertainty and violence, a new equilibrium had been achieved. It was not a perfect equilibrium. After all, none of the external menaces to the empire had been vanquished, they had just been temporarily stalled, and the empire itself, well, there were now three of them, weren't there. Not that it mattered, the new equilibrium is about to be shattered.

It was out in the east that the balance first began to slip. Odonathus, like a latter-day Alexander or Caesar, had come out of nowhere with a personality so strong and a skill set so superior to his contemporaries that it was almost like he was playing on a different level than everyone else. It is not hyperbole to say that following the capture of Valerian in 260, the eastern empire stood on the brink of permanent occupation. Maybe the still immense resources of the Roman empire would have fended off the Sassanids, but those resources had been halved by the breakaway of the western provinces and the rest were being spent on the defense of the Danube. There seemed to be nothing standing in the Persians' way. Sure, Macrianus and Ballista had run a fairly successful guerrilla defense, but was there anything anyone could put in the field to actually beat Sharapur in battle? The answer, as it turned out, was yes, and the answer was Odonathus. Right when it seemed like the end was nigh, the Palmyrene prince had swept in and not only delivered a decisive victory against the Sassanid army, but he held them at bay for the next seven years, just when moments before, it seemed that there was nothing that could even trip Sharapur up, let alone keep him home. Odonathus was, during the 260s, the indispensable man in the eastern empire. Without him, all would be lost. But of course, you know what de Gaulle said about indispensable men.

The backdrop for the final chapter of the life of Odonathus was the 267 invasion of the Roman Empire by the Goths. In successive waves they began pouring south by land and by sea, and no one seemed able to stop them. Thus far, Odonathus had naturally focused his attention on the east, as the Sassanids were his main concern. But seaborne Goths were now harrying the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor and threatening the lands beyond the Taurus mountains, which Odonathus considered part of his mandate. So for the first time, he began making preparations to leave the eastern front and head north to face the Goths. But he never would get to face them. The indispensable man of the east did not die in battle or succumb to plague or go out in a blaze of glory. Instead, it seems that he fell victim to an assassin who was inspired mostly by a personal humiliation.

The story that is most commonly related is that while off on a hunt with his royal entourage, Odonathus' nephew breached some bit of protocol. Maybe he took the first shot at something, or maybe he refused to allow some prized target to be taken by his uncle. Whatever he did, he was subsequently either chastised in too harsh of terms publicly, or possibly put in some kind of time out when the party returned home. Whatever his offense and whatever his punishment, it all led the nephew to burn with resentment, and at a family celebration a short time later, the nephew, probably by way of poison, killed Odonathus and his eldest son. The nephew's role in the sudden and shocking death of the Lord of Palmyra was soon discovered and he was put to death by Odonathus' now widow, Zenobia.

A variation of the story has it that Zenobia herself was behind the murder so that her son Vabolathus would have a clear path to power. In this telling, the older son who died along with Odonathus was from Odonathus' previous marriage and was thus standing between Vabolathus and the throne. Given the fact that this follows the familiar wicked stepmother trope that the Romans so loved, modern historians typically discount this version. Another version has it that Gallienus instigated the murder because he feared the growing power of Palmyra. But this too is usually dismissed for a number of different reasons, the main one being that the death of the Protector of the East opened up Gallienus' flank to the Sassanids right at the moment when he was preparing to go fight a major campaign against the Goths. Maybe if the murder had occurred when there was less imminent danger to the empire, we could indulge in that particular conspiracy theory, but really, Gallienus killing Odonathus at that moment would have been the height of folly.

In the immediate aftermath of Odonathus' death, there was a great deal of confusion about who was now in charge. Odonathus' authority had been a personally held grant from Gallienus, so did power now devolve back to the Roman governors, or did Odonathus' son inherit his father's titles? With everyone just kind of looking at everyone else, Zenobia stepped forward and simply acted as if her husband's death meant that of course Vabolathus would inherit all the power ceded to the family by Gallienus. But of course, since Vabolathus was still a young child, Zenobia herself would have to act as regent, which means that unless you have a mind to stop me, I am now in charge around here. With shrewd political sensibilities and the backing of one of her husband's top generals, an experienced soldier named Zabdis, Zenobia was able to assume all the powers Odonathus had claimed before any other rival could even muster a counterclaim.

Tied up on the Danube with the Gothic invasion, Gallienus couldn't spare the time or attention it would take to weigh in on the subject. He did send a trusted lieutenant east to make sure that the queen understood who was really in charge, but, signaling who she thought was really in charge, the emissary was treated with less dignity than a man of his rank would have expected, and he soon packed up and left in an angry huff over Zenobia's calculated haughtiness. This snubbing of Gallienus' man would eventually reveal itself to be the first step in Zenobia's long-term plan to establish a hold on what was slowly turning from the Eastern Roman Empire into the new independent Palmyrene Empire.

As I just mentioned though, Gallienus was too caught up with his own problems to deal with Zenobia's power play. Those problems were the same problems that Odonathus had been gearing up to face when he died, the massive Gothic invasion of 267. After watching some of their brothers achieve great success using a small fleet to pillage the Black Sea coast, a collection of Gothic tribes decided that what had worked on a small scale would work even better on a large scale. So they built or commandeered some five hundred ships, and in early 267 they set sail south from the estuary of the Dniester river, without much more of a plan than to see what came along and then take it. They made their way down the west coast of the Black Sea, and decided that they hadn't quite had their fill yet, so they passed into the Bosphorus with an eye on taking Byzantium. When the city proved to be a tougher nut to crack than they had hoped, though according to some sources they did indeed crack the nut eventually, they continued south through the Sea of Marmara, and then made an attempt on the city of Seziccus.

Gallienus and the Romans were not sitting around idly as this Gothic fleet sacked the coastal cities of the empire, and the imperial navy based in Ravenna was launched on a mission to sink the invading barbarians. The Roman navy caught the Goths as they were occupied with Seziccus, and the Goths, not being the best sailors in the world, were scattered by the much more competent Roman sailors. Though the naval battle in the Sea of Marmara was a decisive Roman victory, a sizable collection of Gothic ships managed to escape through the Hellespont intact, so, despite their best efforts, the Romans still found themselves scrambling after a Gothic army now loose in the Aegean Sea. As they sailed into the heart of Greece, the remaining Goths split into two groups, with one heading due south towards Crete and then Rhodes, while the other made for the mainland. It had been a good long time since the Greeks had had to deal with any kind of foreign threat, and the citizens of Athens and Sparta and the other old Greek city-states were shocked to find themselves suddenly scrambling to build walls around their cities in an attempt to fend off the Goths.

The defense of Athens was led by a man named Dexippus, who, in the tradition of Zenephan and Thucydides, was a historian as well as a soldier and a statesman. Though only fragments of his work remain today, back when they were all still whole, late antiquity scholars relied heavily on the Greek historian's writings, which means that we owe him a debt of gratitude for helping shed at least some light on the convoluted third century. When the Goths came knocking, though, helping some beleaguered future scholars was probably the last thing on Dexippus' mind. The Goths had appeared so suddenly that there was very little the Athenians could do to prevent the barbarians from overrunning their city, and Dexippus' fame as a soldier was earned not by preventing the Goths from sacking Athens, but instead by managing to revive the spirits of his neighbors and lead them in a decisive counterattack that finally drove the plundering Goths off. When they were done with Athens, the barbarians had headed south to the Peloponnese where they sacked, among others, the city of Sparta. But as they headed back north, they were met by an army of irregulars raised by Dexippus, who put the surprised Goths into a hasty flight and drove them north right into the waiting embrace of Gallienus' approaching army.

When he returned home, Dexippus found Athens was now a smoldering ruin, but, according to the famous anecdote, he also found that the great library had been left untouched. One of the Gothic chiefs had seen his men preparing to burn it down and put a stop to their plan, telling them that it was better to leave the Greeks preoccupied with their books so that they did not resume their previous warlike ways.

When the imperial navy had sailed off to confront the Gothic fleet, Gallienus organized an army comprised of his mobile cavalry, the Praetorian cohorts, and units from the Danube legions. While the Goths sacked Greece, Gallienus was speeding in from the west. He might not have been able to save the Greeks, but he could certainly smack down the marauding barbarians when they inevitably made their way back north to their homelands on the far side of the Danube. Now I'm sure you're as sick of hearing this as I am of saying it, but guess what? There's some confusion in the record about what happened next. The accepted version is that Gallienus intercepted the group who had been driven off by Dexippus and defeated them in a battle near the city of Nessus in Thrace. The problem is that Claudius Gothicus would win a very similar battle the next year, near the very similar sounding city of Nysus, leading some to suppose that something might have gotten mixed up over the years. Maybe Claudius was given credit for Gallienus' victory, both because Constantine wanted to promote Claudius' memory and because everyone else wanted to damn Gallienus', or maybe Claudius' victory was the real one, and someone transposed a year leading us to think that it occurred during Gallienus' reign, or maybe there were two battles, with Gallienus and Claudius each winning a key victory. That's the version I'm going to go with because it poses the fewest problems in trying to reconcile all the disparate facts and theories about what really happened. So in the history of Rome, both emperors will get their cookie.

Gallienus' victory was by no means a complete one though, and the Goths were allowed to head home unmolested as long as they gave up what they had taken and promised to take no more on their way back north. The emperor would not have long to bask in the glow of his semi-victory though, nor would he have the chance to follow up with the other Gothic hordes still loose within his empire. Unlike every other time Gallienus had marched out to battle, this time he did not follow the lead of his top general Aureolus. Instead, he left Aureolus in charge of the garrison at Milan with instructions to keep an eye on both Postumus and the Alamanni and make sure that neither took advantage of the emperor's absence.

As soon as Gallienus left Italy though, the only one who took advantage of his absence was Aureolus. For whatever reason, the emperor's favorite general decided that now was the perfect time to revolt. The motivations behind Aureolus' revolt are not at all clear, but broadly speaking there are two schools of thought. Either Aureolus had always been trying to throw in his lot with Postumus, see his suspicious failure to defeat the Gallic emperor previously, or this was an entirely new idea, brought on possibly by the fact that he had been relieved of his command as the captain of the imperial cavalry and left behind to mine the shop while everyone else went off to fight the Goths. The man who took command of the cavalry, incidentally, was the man who was about to succeed Gallienus, Marcus Aurelius Valerius Claudius.

When word came in 268 that his former right-hand man was now in revolt, Gallienus was forced to stop what he was doing, peel off most of the troops he had just raised to fight the Goths and head them back to Italy. His eastern flank was already badly exposed by the death of Odonathus, and now Aureolus was exposing his western flank to a possible invasion by Postumus. Luckily for Gallienus, Postumus appears to have never indulged in ambitions beyond what he had already achieved. Despite Aureolus begging for aid and even going so far as to use the mint in Milan to issue coins in Postumus' name, the Gallic emperor never lifted a finger to help Aureolus. There was just no profit in it. If he threw in with the usurping general, he risked everything that he had built. But if he did nothing, well, he risked nothing. And so he did nothing.

When the imperial army returned to Italy, Aureolus and what troops he had at his disposal rode out to meet them, but they were easily routed and forced to flee back behind the walls of Milan. Gallienus settled in to lay siege to the city that he had just helped put on the map, and while he waited for Milan to fall, his officers began to talk amongst themselves. Though I did say last week that much of the supposed dissatisfaction with Gallienus can be traced back to the biases of the senatorial class, that does not mean that there was no dissatisfaction at all. It appears that a cabal of officers, many originating in Illyria, had begun to grow disenchanted with Gallienus' leadership. Just because defending the borders from invasion while simultaneously bringing Postumus and the Palmyrenes to heel seemed really hard, well that did not mean that it was impossible, and many of the career soldiers in the upper ranks believed that if they had a chance, that they could do a better job than Gallienus. Now this is of course a common belief among, well, anyone who isn't actually in charge, but in this case it may have been true. Aurelian, who was dealt almost exactly the same hand as Gallienus, was able to do in just four years what Gallienus had been unable to do in eight. So eventually, all this insubordinate talk became serious and a plot was hatched.

We will probably never know exactly how Gallienus was assassinated, nor who exactly was in on the plot, but the most dramatic account has it that the murder was the result of a clever ruse. Late in the evening, one of the conspirators burst into Gallienus' tent to tell the emperor that Aurelius was leading his men out of Milan on a night raid. Not even pausing to don his armor, Gallienus rushed out of his tent and mounted his horse to go assess the situation for himself, but as soon as he was caught alone and exposed outside the camp, he was cut down by the waiting assassins. It is of course debatable whether this particularly fantastic story is true, but there is no doubt that a conspiracy of top officers got together and killed Gallienus, maybe by the sword and maybe by poison, in 268 AD. Later revisions to history have Gallienus recommending Claudius as his successor, though it seems highly unlikely that Gallienus really spent his dying breaths making noble suggestions about the best man to succeed him. Gallienus was 50 years old and had been emperor first with his father and then by himself for a remarkable 15 years.

When Gallienus died, the officers did indeed rally around Claudius, the captain of the cavalry, which may help explain the later stories about, wink wink, Gallienus recommending Claudius for the job, and then the senate fell quickly into line. If Aurelius thought the death of his former master would mean that he could extract himself peacefully from Milan though, well, he was in for a bit of a surprise. Far from granting Aurelius amnesty, Claudius made it clear that everyone inside the city walls was as good as dead if Aurelius' head wasn't brought to him immediately. So inside Milan, a similar conspiracy of officers dispatched with their chief, and then they came out to make peace with the new emperor, who, once Aurelius was dealt with, was feeling pretty magnanimous. He went so far as to order that Gallienus' family should not be harmed in any way, but the order didn't make it to Rome in time to stop the revenge-minded senate from executing Gallienus' brother and Gallienus' son.

Up in Gaul, a posthumous watched all of this with a mixture of satisfaction and concern. He had to have been pleased with himself for avoiding getting tangled up in the fight between Aurelius and Gallienus, which had now led to the assassination of both men. But a new leader in Rome meant new policies, and posthumous had to have known Claudius if not personally, then at least by reputation. And if Claudius' dissatisfaction with Gallienus in any way stemmed from the emperor's inability to reclaim the Gallic provinces, well, that didn't bode well for posthumous at all. Fortunately, he would never have to face Rome's final attempt to recapture the west. Unfortunately, it's because he wound up, in the end, sharing the fate of Gallienus and Aurelius and Odinothus.

Gallienus' rule had been mostly unopposed, but brief revolts or mutinies had flared up here and there in keeping with the times. In either 268 or early 269, one of his officers along the Rhine decided to make a bid for the throne, and had himself declared emperor at his home base in Mainz. Posthumous quickly raised an army and marched in to put the usurper down, and in short order the revolt was squashed. The problem for posthumous was that now his soldiers wanted to sack Mainz, to punish the city for its disloyalty, yes, but mostly to carry off the wealth of the city for themselves. But posthumous was the emperor of everyone, and it really wouldn't do to let his army just go and sack one of the key urban centers of his domain, so he ordered the city left untouched. This ticked off his men something fierce, and in a fit of rage they cornered posthumous and killed him.

The rash murder left the Gallic Empire without a leader, and after some confusion, one of posthumous' officers, a man named Marcus Aurelius Marius, finally stepped forward and attempted to seize power. But he only lasted a few days before being brushed aside and killed by a man named Victorianus, who came from an extremely wealthy family, and whose mother apparently opened up the family bank accounts to buy her son the throne.

The near simultaneous deaths of Odinothus, Gallienus, and posthumous brought to a close the second phase of the crisis of the third century. At the beginning of phase three, their successors will duke it out to see whose vision of the future will reign supreme. In the east, Zenobia dreamed of creating a permanent, independent Palmyrene Empire. In the west, Victorianus dreamed of simply trying to hold together what posthumous had built. And in the middle, Claudius and his soon to be successor Aurelian, dreamed of reunification. All three would have to deal with persistent threats to their frontiers, from the Sassanids and from the Goths and from the Franks and from the Alamanni, all of whom dreamed their own dreams of what the fate of the Roman Empire ought to be.

I hate to do this so soon after taking a week off, but there will be no episode next week, as the history of Rome is heading down south to San Antonio, that Chiron misses the history of Rome as she runs her half marathon. But we will of course be back in two weeks, for the short reign of Claudius, and then the totally impressive reign of Aurelian, who has fast become one of the history of Rome's most favorite emperors.