Fire in the East (57 page)

For a long, long time neither spoke. The sword remained at Bagoas’s throat. The staring blue eyes gave nothing away. The sounds of the pursuit were getting louder.

The sword was gone. Maximus was carefully wiping it on a rag at his belt. He sheathed it. He smiled. ‘Until the next time, boy.’ Maximus spun his horse round and kicked on back the way that he had come, up the right-hand branch of the ravine after the others.

 

High on the hills, Ballista sat on Pale Horse and looked down at the burning city. The south wind was picking up. It pulled long streamers of fire into the night sky. Now and then dense clouds of sparks like an erupting volcano rose up as a building collapsed. The dying city was at least a mile and a half away. No sounds reached Ballista. He was glad of that.

All our efforts and it has come to this, he thought. Is it my fault? Did I concentrate so much on the Sassanid siege works that I did not pay enough attention to the possibility of treachery? If I had thought properly about the Christians, would clues have been there; would I have seen them?

Another large building fell and a whirl of sparks rose up. The undersides of the racing clouds were tinged pink. An ugly, unwanted thought rose like a big pike with a mouth full of sharp teeth to the surface of Ballista’s mind: this was meant to happen. This is why I was sent, not Bonitus or Celsus. This is why I was given no additional troops. This is why the kings of Emesa and Palmyra felt able to refuse my requests for troops. There never was any hope of relief. The emperors already knew that the two field armies would be needed elsewhere this campaigning season; that one would go to the Danube with Gallienus to face the Carpi, and one with Valerian to deal with the Goths in Asia Minor. Arete was always expected to fall. The town, its garrison, its commander were expendable. We were to be sacrificed to buy time.

Ballista found that he was laughing. In a sense he had succeeded. The city had fallen, but he had bought the Roman
imperium
some time. At the cost of so much suffering, of so many lives, so many thousands of lives, he had bought the Roman
imperium
some time. The emperors should welcome him like a returning hero. Of course, that would not happen. They had wanted a dead hero, not a living witness to their heartless betrayal of the city of Arete. They had wanted their expendable barbarian
Dux Ripae
dead sword in hand in the smoke-blackened ruins of the town, not staggering back into the imperial court reeking of failure and treachery. Ballista would be an embarrassment. He would be blamed, made the scapegoat, his reputation left in tatters.

One day, he vowed, this
imperium
will regret all the things it has done.

The city was still burning. Ballista had seen all he wanted to see.

Turning in the saddle, Ballista looked back down the line. All those he cared about were there: Calgacus, Maximus, Demetrius. And there was Bathshiba. Other thoughts came into his mind - the hooded figure of the big man, Mamurra entombed in the dark beneath the walls. He pushed them away. He looked back beyond the column. There was no sign of any pursuit. He gave the signal to move on.

At the rear of the line the last remaining
frumentarius
looked at the burning city of Arete. He wondered what report he would write to the emperors about all this. He took a last look at the fire in the east and kicked his horse to follow the others. He sneezed. And he wondered how this new journey would end.

Fire in the East
is a novel, but I have taken care over the historical background. The following notes aim both to show where history has been ‘played with’ to fit the fiction and to provide further reading for those who would like to try to create their own interpretation of the reality.

When I told my colleague Bert Smith, the Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, that I was writing a series of novels set in the second half of the third century AD, he congratulated me on picking a period about which so little is known for sure that no one could prove me wrong.

The period between the murder of the emperor Alexander Severus (AD235) and the accession of Diocletian (AD284) is traditionally known as ‘the third-century crisis’ of the Roman empire. It is a time for which we have very few and poor ancient literary sources. Undoubtedly it was a time of relative instability both in high-level politics (too many emperors in too few years) and in military operations (increases in the numbers of civil wars and in barbarian victories over Rome: for the first time, Roman emperors were killed and captured in battle by barbarian armies). Yet scholarly estimates vary widely on how far beyond this the crisis spread. At one extreme, G. Alföldy, ‘The Crisis of the Third Century as Seen by Contemporaries’
(Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
15 (1974), 89-III), holds that the empire suffered a ‘total crisis’ in all areas of life; social, economic and ideological, as well as political and military. At the other, H. Sidebottom, ‘Herodian’s Historical Methods and Understanding of History’
(Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt
II.34.4 (1998), 2775- 2 83 6), argues that, outside the political and military, the ‘crisis’ is largely an illusion created by various modem preconceptions playing upon the paucity of our ancient sources.

The standard modern attempt at a narrative of the years AD235-84 is that of J. Drinkwater in
The Cambridge Ancient History
(eds. P. Garnsey and A. Cameron, vol. XII, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2005, 28-66). More accessible (i.e., in paperback) is D. S. Potter,
The Roman Empire at Bay AD180-395
(London and New York, 2004, 167-72; 217-80).

For the history behind this novel, M. H. Dodgeon, and N. C. Lieu,
The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars AD226-363: A Documentary History
(London, 1991) is an extremely useful collection of sources translated into English with commentaries.

An indispensable tool for all research into the classical world is
The Oxford Classical Dictionary
(3rd edn, Oxford, 1996, eds. S. Homblower and A. Spawforth).

 

There was a Roman officer called Ballista (or Callistus) active in the east in this period. Ironically, the very brief ancient biography of him which survives is itself largely a work of fiction
(Scriptores Historiae Augustae
[now more commonly referred to as the
Historia Augusta
or
Augustan History], Tyranni Triginta 18).
What little we think we may know about him features in the third novel in this series,
Lion of the Sun.
For reasons that will emerge later I have given him the
praenomen
and
nomen
Marcus Clodius. It is extremely unlikely that the historical Ballista was an Anglo-Saxon nobleman. However, in the fourth century AD many German warriors rose to high command in the Roman army. The Ballista of these novels should be seen as a forerunner of this historical phenomenon.

An enjoyable way to learn about the island of Delos, and much else in classical culture, is the magnificently illustrated, but very hard to find, volume by P. J. Hadjidakis,
Delos
(Athens, 2003 ). A very short, offbeat introduction to the island can be found in J. Davidson,
One Mykonos
(London, 1999). In this novel I have made the island flourish rather more after the sack of 69BC than archaeology suggests was the case.

F. G. Maier and V. Karageorghis,
Paphos: History and Archaeology
(Nicosia, 1984 ), with a wealth of pictures, plans and an accessible text, is the standard work. The ‘House of Theseus’ is illustrated and discussed in W. A. Daszewski and D. Michaelides,
Guide to the Paphos Mosaics
(Nicosia, 1988, 52-63).

Discussion and reading for this city will be given in
King of Kings.

The modem city of Horns has obliterated virtually all archaeological traces of the classical city of Emesa. The first century AD funeral monument of Caius Julius Sampsigeramus, almost certainly a member of the ruling dynasty, was pulled down to make way for the railway station. Modern certainties about the site of the great temple seem misplaced. As so often, the best way into the archaeology and its literature is the now somewhat elderly
Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites
(eds. R. Stillwell et al., Princeton, 1976),
see under
Emesa [Horns].

The description of the temple of Elagabalus draws on images on coins. Some of these are nicely reproduced in R. Turcan,
Héliogabale et le Sacre du Soleil
(Paris, 1985,
see
esp. plates 1-7), although my interpretations are slightly different.

For the rituals, the main inspiration (somewhat altered) is book five of Herodian’s
History
(translated by C. R. Whittaker in two volumes in the Loeb series (Harvard, 1969/1970).

Fergus Millar,
The Roman Near East 31BC-AD337
(Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1993, 302-4 ), has doubted that the elite Emesene family which produced the Roman emperors Caracalla, Geta, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus in the third century AD was descended from the royal house of Emesa of the first century AD. However, it should be noted that some of the former carried close variants of the names of the latter (Sohaemias / Sohaemus; Alexianos/Alexio); above all, both families had the
nomen
Iulius. It suggests that at the very least the third-century family wished to be seen as the descendants of the old royal house. Similarly, the pretender Uranius Antoninus carried the name Iulius and, like Elagabalus, was a priest of the god of Emesa. So again,
pace
Millar (308-9), it is likely that either he was or wished to be thought of as a member of the same family. The priest-king Sampsigeramus of this novel is a fictional member of this family.

A popular (but not always totally accurate) introduction to this great caravan city is R. Stoneman,
Palmyra and Its Empire: Zenobia’s Revolt against Rome
(Ann Arbor, 1994 ). The best place to discover the unusual world of the caravan-protecting leading men of the city is J. F. Matthews, ‘The Tax Law of Palmyra: Evidence for Economic History in a City of the Roman East’
(Journal of Roman Studies
74 [1984], 157-80). Further reading will be given in
Lion of the Sun.

The town of Arete is of course modelled on the town of Dura-Europos on the Euphrates, which was besieged by the Sassanid Persians probably in AD256. (Actually, Dura was one ancient name for the town, used by locals, Europos another, used by its original settlers; the combination is modern). For the benefit of the plot I have played around with the topography of Dura and the siege works, mainly simplifying them, and have imported the political/social structure of neighbouring Palmyra. A good introduction to the place is an account of its excavation by one of the directors of the dig, C. Hopkins,
The Discovery of Dura-Europos
(New Haven and London, 1979 ). The essential study of all military aspects of the town is now S. James,
Excavations at Dura-Europos 1929-1937. Final
Report
VII: The Arms and
Armour
and Other Military Equipment
(London, 2004 ), which is both wider ranging and more interesting than its title suggests. For the atmosphere of the place, it is still well worth looking at the boxed set of pictures published by F. Cumont,
Fouilles de Doura-Europos (1922-1923), Atlas
(Paris, 1926). Possibly the most accessible introduction to Dura-Europos in the Roman period currently available in English is in N. Pollard,
Soldiers, Cities and Civilians in Roman Syria
(Ann Arbor, 2000).

The speeches made by Callinicus and Ballista on the arrival of the new
Dux
at Arete are drawn from the roughly contemporary treatise on rhetoric ascribed to Menander Rhetor, specifically the section on making a speech of arrival (translation by D. A. Russell and N. G. Wilson, Oxford, 1981, 95-115).

H. Sidebottom,
Ancient Warfare: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford, 2004 , 95-9; 147), provides an introduction to ancient Mediterranean naval war. R. Gardiner and J. Morrison (eds.),
The Age of the Galley: Mediterranean Oared Vessels since Pre-Classical Times
(London, 1995) is a superbly illustrated guide. Any idea of what it was like to sail a
trireme
must be based on the sea trials of the reconstructed Athenian
trireme
the
Olympias
: J. S. Morrison, J. E. Coates and N. B. Rankov,
The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship
(Cambridge, 2000, esp. 231-75). Yet, for very understandable reasons, the
Olympias
never goes out in a storm (it is no part of the project to see how quickly and nastily a crew of some two hundred can drown!). However, Tim Severin’s far less scientific reconstruction of a galley was caught in a gale: T. Severin,
The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece
(London, 1985, 175-82).

A brief overview of siege warfare in the classical period is given in H. Sidebottom,
Ancient Warfare: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford, 2004, 92-4; 146). Other scholarly introductions are P. B. Kern,
Ancient Siege Warfare
(Bloomington, Indiana, and London, 1999), which covers from earliest times to AD70; C. M. Gilliver,
The Roman Art of War
(Stroud, 1999, 63-88; 127-60), which looks at Roman siege warfare down to the fourth century AD; and P. Southern and K. R. Dixon,
The Late Roman Army
(London, 1996, 127-67), which considers the late empire to the sixth century AD. A nicely illustrated popular introduction is D. B. Campbell,
Besieged: Siege Warfare in the Ancient World
(Oxford, 2006).