The Provinces of the Roman Empire 16

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 16

The vigorous and prudent emperor, to whom the dominion now had fallen,

broke at once with the Palmyrene co-ordinate government, which then

could not but have and had as its consequence, that Vaballathus himself

was proclaimed by his people as emperor. Egypt was already, at the

close of the year 270, brought back to the empire after hard struggles

by the brave general Probus, afterwards the successor of Aurelian.[112]

It is true that the second city of the empire, Alexandria, paid for

this victory almost with its existence, as will be set forth in the

following section. More difficult was the reduction of the remote

Syrian oasis. All other Oriental wars of the imperial period had

chiefly been waged by imperial troops having their home in the East;

here, where the West had once more to subdue the revolted East, there

fought once more, as in the time of the free republic, Occidentals

against Orientals,[113] the soldiers of the Rhine and of the Danube

with those of the Syrian desert. The mighty expedition began,

apparently towards the close of the year 271; without encountering

resistance the Roman army arrived at the frontier of Cappadocia; here

the town of Tyana, which barred the Cilician passes, gave serious

opposition. After it had fallen, and Aurelian, by gentle treatment of

the inhabitants, had smoothed his way to further successes, he crossed

the Taurus, and, passing through Cilicia, arrived in Syria. If Zenobia,

as is not to be doubted, had reckoned on active support from the side

of the Persian king, she found herself deceived. The aged king Shapur

did not interfere in this war, and the mistress of the Roman East

continued to be left to her own military resources, of which perhaps

even a portion took the side of the legitimate Augustus. At Antioch the

Palmyrene chief force under the general Zabdas stopped the emperor’s

way; Zenobia herself was present. A successful combat against the

superior Palmyrene cavalry on the Orontes delivered into the hands of

Aurelian the town, which not less than Tyana received full pardon--he

justly recognised that the subjects of the empire were hardly to be

blamed, when they had submitted to the Palmyrene prince appointed as

commander in chief by the Roman government itself. The Palmyrenes,

after having engaged in a conflict on their retreat at Daphne, the

suburb of Antioch, marched off, and struck into the great route which

leads from the capital of Syria to Hemesa and thence through the desert

to Palmyra.

 

[Sidenote: Battle at Hemesa.]

 

Aurelian summoned the queen to submit, pointing to the notable losses

endured in the conflicts on the Orontes. These were Romans only,

answered the queen; the Orientals did not yet admit that they were

conquered. At Hemesa[114] she took her stand for the decisive battle.

It was long and bloody; the Roman cavalry gave way and broke up in

flight; but the legions decided, and victory remained with the Romans.

The march was more difficult than the conflict. The distance from

Hemesa to Palmyra amounts in a direct line to seventy miles, and,

although at that epoch of highly developed Syrian civilisation the

region was not waste in the same degree as at present, the march of

Aurelian still remains a considerable feat, especially as the light

horsemen of the enemy swarmed round the Roman army on all sides.

Aurelian, however, reached his goal, and began the siege of the strong

and well-provisioned city; more difficult than the siege itself was

the bringing up of provisions for the besieging army. At length the

courage of the princess sank, and she escaped from the city to seek

aid from the Persians. Fortune still further helped the emperor. The

pursuing Roman cavalry took her captive with her son, just when she had

arrived at the Euphrates and was about to embark in the rescuing boat;

and the town, discouraged by her flight, capitulated (272). Aurelian

granted here too, as in all this campaign, full pardon to the subdued

burgesses. But a stern punishment was decreed over the queen and her

functionaries and officers. Zenobia, after she had for years borne

rule with masculine energy, did not now disdain to invoke a woman’s

privileges, and to throw the responsibility on her advisers, of whom

not a few, including the celebrated scholar, Cassius Longinus, perished

under the axe of the executioner. She herself might not be wanting

from the triumphal procession of the emperor, and she did not take

the course of Cleopatra, but marched in golden chains, as a spectacle

to the Roman multitude, before the chariot of the victor to the Roman

capitol. But before Aurelian could celebrate his victory he had to

repeat it.

 

[Sidenote: Destruction of Palmyra.]

 

A few months after the surrender the Palmyrenes once more rose,

killed the small Roman garrison serving there, and proclaimed one

Antiochus[115] as ruler, while they at the same time attempted to

induce the governor of Mesopotamia, Marcellinus, to revolt. The

news reached the emperor when he had just crossed the Hellespont.

He returned at once, and stood, earlier than friend or foe had

anticipated, once more before the walls of the insurgent city.

The rebels had not been prepared for this; there was this time no

resistance, but also no mercy. Palmyra was destroyed, the commonwealth

dissolved, the walls razed, the ornaments of the glorious temple of the

sun transferred to the temple which, in memory of this victory, the

emperor built to the sun-god of the East in Rome; only the forsaken

halls and walls remained, as they still stand in part at the present

day. This occurred in the year 273.[116] The flourishing of Palmyra

was artificial, produced by the routes assigned to traffic and the

great public buildings dependent on it. Now the government withdrew

its hand from the unhappy city. Traffic sought and found other paths;

as Mesopotamia was then viewed as a Roman province and soon came again

to the empire, and the territory of the Nabataeans as far as the

port of Aelana was in Roman hands, this intermediate station might be

dispensed with, and the traffic may have betaken itself instead to

Bostra or Beroea (Aleppo). The short meteor-like splendour of Palmyra

and its princes was immediately followed by the desolation and silence

which, from that time down to the present day, enwrap the miserable

desert-village and the ruins of its colonnades.

 

[Sidenote: Persian war of Carus.]

 

The ephemeral kingdom of Palmyra was in its origin as in its fall

closely bound up with the relations of the Romans to the non-Roman

East, but not less a part of the general history of the empire. For,

like the western empire of Postumus, the eastern empire of Zenobia

was one of those masses into which the mighty whole seemed then about

to resolve itself. If during its subsistence its leaders endeavoured

earnestly to set limits to the onset of the Persians, and indeed the

development of its power was dependent on that very fact, not merely

did it in its collapse seek deliverance from those same Persians,

but probably in consequence of the revolt of Zenobia Armenia and

Mesopotamia were lost to the Romans, and after the subjugation of

Palmyra the Euphrates again for a time formed the frontier. The queen,

when she arrived at it, hoped to find a reception among the Persians;

and Aurelian omitted to lead the legions over it, seeing that Gaul,

along with Spain and Britain, still at that time refused to recognise

the government. He and his successor Probus were not able to take

up this struggle. But when in the year 282, after the premature end

of the latter, the troops proclaimed the commander next in rank,

Marcus Aurelius Carus, as emperor, it was the first saying of the new

ruler that the Persians should remember this choice, and he kept it.

Immediately he advanced with the army into Armenia and re-established

the earlier order there. At the frontier of the land he was met by

Persian envoys, who declared themselves ready to grant all that was

reasonable;[117] but they were hardly listened to, and the march

went on incessantly. Mesopotamia too became once more Roman, and the

Parthian residential cities Seleucia and Ctesiphon were again occupied

by the Romans without encountering lengthened resistance--to which the

war between brothers then raging in the Persian empire contributed its

part.[118] The emperor had just crossed the Tigris, and was on the

point of penetrating into the heart of the enemy’s country, when he

met his death by violence, presumably by the hand of an assassin, and

thereby the campaign also met its end. But his successor obtained in

peace the cession of Armenia and Mesopotamia;[119] although Carus wore

the purple little more than a year, he re-established the imperial

frontier of Severus.

 

[Sidenote: Persian war under Diocletian.]

 

Some years afterwards (293) a new ruler, Narseh, son of king Shapur,

ascended the throne of Ctesiphon, and declared war on the Romans in

the year 296 for the possession of Mesopotamia and Armenia.[120]

Diocletian, who then had the supreme conduct of the empire generally,

and of the East in particular, entrusted the management of the war to

his imperial colleague Galerius Maximianus, a rough but brave general.

The beginning was unfavourable. The Persians invaded Mesopotamia and

reached as far as Carrhae; the Caesar led against them the Syrian

legions over the Euphrates at Nicephorium; between these two positions

the armies encountered each other, and the far weaker Roman force

gave way. It was a hard blow, and the young general had to submit

to severe reproaches, but he did not despair. For the next campaign

reinforcements were brought up from the whole empire, and both rulers

personally took the field; Diocletian took his position in Mesopotamia

with the chief force, while Galerius, reinforced by the flower of

the Illyrian troops that had in the meantime come up, met, with a

force of 25,000 men, the enemy in Armenia, and inflicted on him a

decisive defeat. The camp and the treasure, nay, even the harem, of the

great-king fell into the hands of the warriors, and with difficulty

Narseh himself escaped from capture. In order to recover the women and

the children the king declared himself ready to conclude peace on any

terms; his envoy Apharban conjured the Romans to spare the Persians,

saying that the two empires, the Roman and the Parthian, were, as it

were, the two eyes of the world, and neither could dispense with the

other. It would have lain in the power of the Romans to add one more

to their Oriental provinces; the prudent ruler contented himself with

regulating the state of possession in the north-east. Mesopotamia

remained, as a matter of course, in the Roman possession; the important

commercial intercourse with the neighbouring foreign land was placed

under strict state-control and essentially directed to the strong

city of Nisibis, the basis of the Roman frontier-guard in eastern

Mesopotamia. The Tigris was recognised as boundary of the direct Roman

rule, to such an extent, however, that the whole of southern Armenia as

far as the lake Thospitis (lake of Van) and the Euphrates, and so the

whole upper valley of the Tigris, should belong to the Roman empire.

This region lying in front of Mesopotamia did not become a province

proper, but was administered after the previous fashion as the Roman

satrapy of Sophene. Some decades later the strong fortress of Amida

(Diarbekir) was constructed here, thenceforth the chief stronghold

of the Romans in the region of the upper Tigris. At the same time

the frontier between Armenia and Media was regulated afresh, and

the supremacy of Rome over that land, as over Iberia, was once more

confirmed. The peace did not impose important cessions of territory on

the conquered, but it established a frontier favourable to the Romans,

which for a considerable time served in these much contested regions

as a demarcation of the two empires.[121] The policy of Trajan thereby

obtained its complete accomplishment; at all events the centre of

gravity of the Roman rule shifted itself just at this time from the West to the East.