Chapter VI · (continued 2)

To Bithynia.Excited by this success, a second expedition of other but neighbouring Scythian bands was in the following winter directed against Bithynia. It is significant of the unsettled state of things that the instigator of this movement was Chrysogonus, a Greek of Nicomedia, and that he was highly honoured by the barbarians for its successful result. This expedition was undertaken—as the necessary number of ships was not to be procured—partly by land, partly by water; it was only in the neighbourhood of Byzantium that the pirates succeeded in possessing themselves of a considerable number of fishing–boats, and so they arrived along the Asiatic coast at Chalcedon, whose strong garrison on this news ran off. Not merely this town fell into their hands, but also along the coast Nicomedia, Chios, Apamea; in the interior Nicaea and Prusa; Nicomedia and Nicaea they burnt down, and reached the river Rhyndacus. Thence they sailed home, laden with the treasures of the rich land and of its considerable cities.

To Greece.The expedition against Bithynia had already been undertaken in part by land; all the more were the attacks that were directed against European Greece composed of piratical expeditions by land and sea. If Moesia and Thrace were not permanently occupied by the Goths, they yet came and went there as if they were at home, and roved from thence far into Macedonia. Even Achaia expected under Valerian invasion from this side; Thermopylae and the Isthmus were barricaded, and the Athenians set to work to restore their walls that had lain in ruins since the siege by Sulla. The barbarians did not come then, nor by this route. But under Gallienus a fleet of five hundred sail, this time chiefly Heruli, appeared before the port of Byzantium, which, however, had not yet lost its capacity of defence; the ships of the Byzantines successfully repulsed the robbers. These sailed onward, showed themselves on the Asiatic coast before Cyzicus not formerly attacked, and arrived from thence by way of Lemnos and Imbros at Greece proper. Athens, Corinth, Argos, Sparta, were pillaged and destroyed. It was always something that, as in the times of the Persian wars, the citizens of the destroyed Athens, two thousand in number, laid an ambush for the retiring barbarians, and, under the leadership of their equally learned and brave captain, Publius Herennius Dexippus, of the old and noble family of the Kerykes, with support of the Roman fleet, inflicted a notable loss on the pirates. On the return home, which took place in part by the land route, the emperor Gallienus attacked them in Thrace at the river Nestus and put to death a considerable number of their men.144

The imperial government of the Gothic period.In order completely to survey the measure of misfortune, we must take into account that in this empire going to shreds, and above all in the provinces overrun by the enemy, one officer after another grasped at the crown, which hardly any longer existed. It is not worth the trouble to record the names of these ephemeral wearers of the purple; it marks the situation that, after the devastation of Bithynia by the pirates, the emperor Valerian omitted to send thither an extraordinary commandant, because every general was, not without reason, regarded by him as a rival. This co–operated to produce the almost thoroughly passive attitude of the government in presence of this sore emergency. Yet, on the other hand, undoubtedly a good part of this irresponsible passiveness is to be traced to the personality of the rulers: Valerian was weak and aged, Gallienus vehement and dissolute, and neither the one nor the other was equal to the guidance of the vessel of the state in a storm. Marcianus, to whom Gallienus after the invasion of Achaia had committed the command in these regions, operated not without success; but the matter did not gain any real turn for the better so long as Gallienus occupied the throne.

Gothic victories of Claudius.After the murder of Gallienus (268), perhaps on the news of it, the barbarians, again led by the Heruli, but this time with united forces, undertook an assault on the imperial frontier, such as there had not been hitherto, with a powerful fleet, and probably at the same time by land from the Danube.145 The fleet had much to suffer from storms in the Propontis; then it divided, and the Goths advanced partly against Thessaly and Greece, partly against Crete and Rhodes; the chief mass resorted to Macedonia and thence penetrated into the interior, beyond doubt in combination with the bands that had marched into Thrace. But the emperor Claudius, who marched up in person with a strong force, brought relief at length to the Thessalonians oft besieged but now reduced to extremity; he drove the Goths before him up the valley of the Axius (Vardar) and onward over the mountains to upper Moesia; after various conflicts, with changing fortune of war, he achieved here in the Morava valley near Naissus a brilliant victory, in which 50,000 of the enemy are said to have fallen. The Goths retired broken up, first in the direction towards Macedonia, then through Thrace to the Haemus, in order to put the Danube between themselves and the enemy. A quarrel in the Roman camp, this time between infantry and cavalry, had almost given them once more a respite; but, when it came to fighting, the cavalry could not bear to leave their comrades in the lurch, and so the united army was once more victorious. A severe pestilence, which raged in all the years of distress, but especially then in those regions, and above all in the armies, did great injury doubtless to the Romans—the emperor Claudius himself succumbed to it—but the great army of the Northmen was utterly extirpated, and the numerous captives were incorporated in the Roman armies or made serfs.Renewed fortifying of the Danube–frontier. The hydra of military revolutions, too, was in some measure subdued; Claudius, and after him Aurelian, were masters in the empire after another fashion than could be said of Gallienus. The renewal of the fleet, towards which a beginning had been made under Gallienus, would not be wanting. The Dacia of Trajan was, and remained, lost; Aurelian withdrew the posts still holding out there, and gave to the possessors dislodged or inclined for emigration new dwellings on the Moesian bank. But Thrace and Moesia, which for a time had belonged more to the Goths than to the Romans, returned under Roman rule, and at least the frontier of the Danube was once more fortified.

Character of the Gothic wars.We may not assign to these Gothic and Scythian expeditions by land and by sea, which fill up the twenty years 250–269, such significance, as if the hordes moving forth had been minded to take permanent possession of the countries which they traversed. Such a plan cannot be shown to have existed even for Moesia and Thrace, to say nothing of the more remote coasts; hardly, moreover, were the assailants numerous enough to undertake invasions proper. As the bad government of the last rulers, and above all the untrustworthiness of the troops, far more than the superior power of the barbarians, called forth the flooding of the territory by land and sea robbers, so the re–establishment of internal order and the energetic demeanour of the government of themselves brought its deliverance. The Roman state could not yet be broken if it did not break itself. But still it was a great work to rally the government again as Claudius had done it. We know somewhat less even of him than of most regents of this time, as the probably fictitious carrying back of the Constantinian pedigree to him has repainted his portrait after the tame pattern of perfection; but this very association, as well as the numberless coins struck in his honour after his death, show that he was regarded by the next generation as the deliverer of the state, and in this it cannot have been mistaken. These Scythian expeditions were at all events a prelude of the later migration of peoples; and the destruction of cities, which distinguishes them from the ordinary piratic voyages, took place at that time to such an extent that the prosperity as well as the culture of Greece and Asia Minor never recovered from it.

The Danubian wars to the end of the 3d century.On the re–established frontier of the Danube Aurelian consolidated the victory achieved, inasmuch as he conducted the defensive once more offensively, and, crossing the Danube at its mouth, defeated beyond it not only the Carpi, who thenceforth stood in client–relation to the Romans, but also the Goths under king Canabaudes. His successor Probus took, as was already stated, the remains of the Bastarnae, hard pressed by the Goths, over to the Roman bank, just as Diocletian in the year 295 took the remnant of the Carpi. This points to the fact that beyond the river the empire of the Goths was consolidating; but they came no further. The border–fortresses were reinforced; counter–Aquincum (contra Aquincum, Pesth) was constructed in the year 294. The piratic expeditions did not entirely disappear. Under Tacitus hordes from the Maeotis appeared in Cilicia. The Franks, whom Probus had settled on the Black Sea, procured for themselves vessels, and sailed home to their North Sea, after plundering by the way on the Sicilian and African coasts. By land, too, there was no cessation of arms, as indeed all the numerous Sarmatian victories of Diocletian, and a part of his Germanic, would fall to the regions of the Danube; but it was only under Constantine that matters again came to a serious war with the Goths, which had a successful issue. The preponderance of Rome was re–established after the Gothic victory of Claudius as firmly as before.

Illyrising of the military force and of the government.The war–history which we have just unfolded did not fail to react with general and lasting effect upon the internal organisation of the Roman political and military system. It has already been pointed out that the corps of the Rhine, holding in the early imperial period the leading position in the army, yielded their primacy already under Trajan to the legions of the Danube. While under Augustus six legions were stationed in the region of the Danube and eight in that of the Rhine, after the Dacian wars of Domitian and Trajan in the second century the Rhine–camps numbered only four, the camps of the Danube ten, and after the Marcomanian war even twelve, legions. Inasmuch as since Hadrian’s time the Italian element, apart from the officers, had disappeared from the army, and, taken on the whole, every regiment was recruited in the district in which it was quartered, the most of the soldiers of the Danubian army, and not less the centurions who rose from the ranks, were natives of Pannonia, Dacia, Moesia, Thrace. The new legions formed under Marcus proceeded from Illyricum, and the extraordinary supplemental levies which the troops then needed were probably likewise taken chiefly from the districts in which the armies were stationed. Thus the primacy of the Danubian armies, which the war of the three emperors in the time of Severus established and increased, was at the same time a primacy of Illyrian soldiers; and this reached a very emphatic expression in the reform of the guard under Severus. This primacy did not, properly speaking, affect the higher spheres of government, so long as the position of officer still coincided with that of imperial official, although the equestrian career was accessible to the common soldier through the intervening link of the centurionate at all times, and thus the Illyrians early found their way into that career; as indeed, already, in the year 235, a native Thracian, Gaius Julius Varus Maximinus, in the year 248 a native Pannonian, Trajanus Decius, had in this way attained even to the purple. But when Gallienus, in a distrust certainly but too well justified, excluded the class of senators from serving as officers, what had hitherto held good as to the soldiers became necessarily extended to the officers also. It was thus simply a matter of course that the soldiers belonging to the army of the Danube, and mostly springing from Illyrian districts, played thenceforth the first part also in government, and, so far as the army made the emperors, these were likewise as to the majority Illyrians. Thus Gallienus was followed by Claudius the Dardanian, Aurelianus from Moesia, Probus from Pannonia, Diocletianus from Dalmatia, Maximianus from Pannonia, Constantius from Dardania, Galerius from Serdica; as to the last named, an author writing under the Constantinian dynasty brings into prominence their descent from Illyricum, and adds that they, with little culture but good preliminary training by labour in the field and service in war, had been excellent rulers. Such service as the Albanians for a long time rendered to the Turkish empire, their predecessors likewise rendered to the Roman imperial state, when this had arrived at similar disorder and similar barbarism. Only, the Illyrian regeneration of the Roman imperial order may not be conceived of as a national reorganisation; it was simply the propping up, by soldiers, of an empire utterly reduced through the misgovernment of rulers of gentler birth. Italy had wholly ceased to be military; and history does not acknowledge the ruler’s right without the warrior’s power.