• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 293 0

last Severan emperor, Alexander Severus, was murdered after failures on the Persian front, and innumerable third-century emperors faced usurpations in distant provinces as soon as they had turned their attention to the East. The rise of the Sassanians was therefore one of the catalysts for the third century’s cycle of violence. When, as had not been the case a hundred years earlier, a claim on the imperial throne could be contemplated by any powerful Roman and not just the great senatorial generals who had dominated the politics of the second century, then even a minor local crisis – a mutiny, say, or a Persian or barbarian raid – might prompt the local population or the local troops to proclaim a handy leader as emperor to meet the crisis. Having accepted the imperial purple, the new emperor had no choice but to defeat and replace whoever was presently claiming the title. Civil war was inevitable in those circumstances, and the pressures of civil war left pockets of weakness on the frontiers which neighbours could exploit. In consequence, for almost fifty years, a vicious cycle of invasion, usurpation and civil war became entrenched, as even the briefest survey of the mid third century will suggest.

Usurpation, Civil War and Barbarian Invasions

When Alexander Severus was killed in 235, rival candidates sprang up in the Balkans, in North Africa and in Italy, the latter promoted by a Roman senate insistent on its prerogatives. Civil war ensued for much of the next decade, and that in turn inspired the major barbarian invasions at which we have already looked, among them the attack by the Gothic king Cniva that ended in the death of Decius at Abrittus in 251. Decius’ successors might win victories over such raiders, but the iron link between invasion and usurpation was impossible to break. This is clearly demonstrated in the reign of Valerian (r. 253–260), who was active mainly in the East, and that of his son and co-emperor Gallienus (r. 253–268) who reigned in the West. Our sources present their reigns as an almost featureless catalogue of disastrous invasions which modern scholars have a very hard time putting in precise chronological order.[16] We need not go into the details here, and instead simply note the way foreign and civil wars fed off each other: when Valerian fought a disastrous Persian campaign that ended in his own capture by the Persian king, many of the eastern provinces fell under the control of a provincial dynasty from Palmyra largely independent of the Italian government of Gallienus. Similarly, every time Gallienus dealt with a threat to the frontiers – raids across the Rhine into Gaul, across the Danube into the Balkans, or Black Sea piracy into Asia Minor and Greece – he was simultaneously confronted by the rebellion of a usurper somewhere else in the empire. Thus Gallienus had to follow up a campaign against Marcomanni on the middle Danube by suppressing the usurper Ingenuus, while the successful defence of Raetia against the Iuthungi by the general Postumus allowed him to seize the imperial purple and inaugurate a separate imperial succession which lasted in Gaul for over a decade.[17] Even when Gallienus attempted to implement military reforms to help him counter this cycle of violence, the reforms themselves could work against him: he created a strong mobile cavalry that allowed him to move swiftly between trouble spots, but soon his general Aureolus, who commanded this new force, seized the purple for himself and Gallienus was murdered in 268, in the course of the campaign to supress him. As we have now come to expect, his death inspired immediate assaults on the frontiers, by ‘Scythians’ in the Balkans and across the Upper Danube into the Alpine provinces as well.

Again, a full list of invaders and usurpers is an arid exercise and one unnecessary here. The successors of Gallienus – Claudius, Aurelian, Probus, and their many short-lived challengers – faced the same succession of problems as their predecessor had done. Claudius successfully defeated an invading army of Scythians twice,