Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (27 page)

Turbo we have also already met: he had been a centurion at Aquincum, where he probably first got to know the youthful Hadrian and join his circle, and rose swiftly from the ranks; he was now admiral of the fleet at Misenum (modern Miseno, at the northwestern end of the Bay of Naples). He was Hadrian’s kind of soldier, hardworking and without airs and graces. Dio Cassius writes of him: “He displayed neither effeminacy nor haughtiness in anything he did, but lived like an ordinary person.” (The fact that his character was the complete opposite of the not-long-dead Licinius Sura’s illustrates the wide range of Hadrian’s affections.)

On the debit side, the
Historia Augusta
pointed to Aulus Cornelius Palma and Lucius Publilius Celsus, “always his enemies.” Palma was a younger friend of Trajan; trusted and trustworthy, he had twice been consul, and in 105 or 106 he had conquered the Nabataean Arabs, hardy nomads on the southern border of Syria who traded in frankincense and myrrh, and brought them within the empire. Celsus was consul for the second time in 113 and stood high in Trajan’s favor. According to Dio, he and a colleague were awarded the signal distinction of public statues. In the shadows, other critics of Hadrian are to be suspected, among them his elderly brother-in-law, Servianus.

Grounds for the distrust of Hadrian are hard to determine. He was obviously competent and intelligent, and no reports have come down to us of serious disloyalty to Trajan. History shows that factions tend to gather around close relatives of a monarch and criticize official policy.
So one might speculate that Hadrian opposed the Parthian war, but if he did he surely held his tongue. Otherwise, as he played a large part in preparing the expedition and was working closely with the emperor, he would have been open to charges of subversion or hypocrisy.

There may have been objections to Hadrian’s personality. A picture does emerge of a hardworking but cocksure man—a combination often irritating to colleagues. Not suffering fools gladly is insufferable to the fools.

Whatever the explanation, Trajan would have been rational to conclude that the eve of a major expedition was the wrong moment to alienate one side or the other by coming to a firm decision about his former ward. The question of the succession would have to wait.

In the spring Trajan marched with his army northward from Antioch to the town of Satala in Lesser Armenia, on the Roman bank of the river Euphrates. It was a long trudge—some 475 miles—across awkward terrain, and the Romans probably arrived toward the end of May. The advance precipitated a line of embassies from client kings and minor rulers, all wishing to make their peace with the emperor. One who stayed away was Abgarus, king of Osrhoene, a tiny kingdom on the far side of the Euphrates that he had purchased from the king of kings. “Afraid of Trajan and the Parthians alike,” he sent gifts and kind words, but not himself.

At Satala the seven eastern legions, gathered by Hadrian, joined others dispatched from the Danube provinces (a risky step, one might have thought, to denude an unsettled region of its troops). Some of them were not at full strength, but Trajan now commanded the equivalent of eight full legions with the same number of auxiliaries—in other words, about eighty thousand men.

He also deployed his towering prestige. He marched into Armenia and then, before an arrow had been released or a spear cast, paused at a place called Elegeia. Here he staged a splendid ceremony—like the
durbars
of the British Raj—at which local satraps and princes came to meet him and offer their fealty. One of them presented Hadrian with a horse that had been trained to prostrate itself as if it were a subject in the presence
of an eastern monarch. It knelt down on its forelegs and placed its head beneath the feet of anyone who stood by it.

The culminating event saw the arrival of the Parthian pretender, Parthamasiris. This should have been a significant propaganda coup, but it went badly, and mysteriously, wrong.

The emperor sat on a tribunal set up in the Roman camp and was forced to wait for his visitor. In a surprising breach of protocol, Parthamasiris turned up late, pleading as excuse the need to evade roaming supporters of his deposed rival, Exedares. He laid his diadem before Trajan, expecting to receive it back. The soldiers shouted in delight at this “victory.” But the emperor refused to crown Parthamasiris, who protested loudly. Trajan replied that he would surrender Armenia to no one, and declared that it was now a Roman province. He gave Parthamasiris permission to leave.

This is a very odd incident. Parthamasiris had been in communication with Trajan and presumably agreed terms for the encounter in advance. He was to be recognized as king of Armenia provided that he accepted Rome’s right of confirmation and coronation. Are we to suppose that events got out of hand by some mischance—or that Trajan had decided in advance to break the negotiated deal and trick Parthamasiris out of his throne? The accounts we have seem to imply confusion rather than conspiracy, except that it is unlikely that Trajan would announce out of the blue the annexation of Armenia. This was a strategic decision of some importance, and the humiliation of Parthamasiris was a striking means of dramatizing it. The Romans were well aware of the propaganda opportunity, as shown by several coin issues that depict the
rex Parthus
as a supplicant in front of Trajan.

But why let him leave the Roman camp? Surely the prince would be dangerous if set at large? Indeed. The Romans had thought of that. Parthamasiris and his entourage were given a cavalry escort to see them on their way, presumably to Parthia. Soon news arrived of the prince’s death; apparently he had been cut down while trying to escape his guard—an explanation deployed by ruthless captors throughout the ages.

Over the centuries Rome placed great weight on honest and straightforward dealing; treaties were sacred. The episode damaged the good
name of the
optimus princeps
. He must have known it would do so, and we can only assume that Parthamasiris could call on very powerful support in Armenia for it to be worth Rome’s while to tolerate the moral cost of removing him.

Armenia was soon reduced. Various commanders, among them Lusius Quietus, the Moorish chieftain with his fierce horsemen, were dispatched to various parts of the kingdom to subdue resistance. The fighting seems to have gone on into the winter, for there are reports of soldiers making themselves snowshoes. But victory was complete, and previously hesitant local kings decided it was time to join the winning side.

Among them was Abgarus, who had the luck to have an extremely good-looking son, a certain Arbandes, who wore gold earrings and caught the emperor’s roving eye. Thanks in part to the young man’s intercession, his father’s early reluctance to meet the emperor was pardoned. Dio Cassius remarks that the king “became Trajan’s friend and entertained him at a banquet. During the meal he brought in his boy to perform some barbaric dance or other.” History fails to record how the evening concluded.

It would have been difficult to retain control of Armenia without annexing a large slice of the Parthian empire to its south, Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), the fertile land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. That was to be the business of next year’s campaign.

Entry into Parthian territory in 115 was an event of historic proportions, and Trajan led his troops in the field. Despite his age he made a point, as he always had done, of marching on foot with the rank and file, fording rivers with them and so forth. According to Dio, he paid special attention to training. “Sometimes he even made his scouts circulate false reports, so that the soldiers might at one and the same time practice military maneuvers and become fearless and ready for any dangers.”

The campaign went well, and it appears that Mesopotamia was entrapped in a pincer movement with Lusius Quietus moving into eastern and Trajan into western Mesopotamia (taking care to march around the lovely Arbandes’ Osrhoene).

The emperor returned to Antioch for the winter, and before the end
of the year Trajan sent dispatches to Rome—a “laureled letter” betokening victory. He probably announced the creation of Armenia and Mesopotamia as two new Roman provinces. The Senate received the news on February 21 to loud acclaim. It awarded Trajan the title of
Parthicus
, despite the fact that much of the Parthian empire remained to conquer.

Meanwhile, the emperor had a narrow escape from death. Early one morning in January a severe earthquake occurred, with its epicenter near the city. The emperor’s presence had attracted large numbers of soldiers, officials, visiting embassies, and tourists, so the loss of life was all the greater. Many people were trapped beneath collapsed buildings, “able neither to live any longer nor to find an immediate death.” Two of the very few to be pulled out of the debris some days later were a mother and child; she had survived by feeding both herself and her baby with her own milk. One of the consuls for 115, Marcus Vergilianus Pedo, lost his life—and Trajan was lucky to have saved his by jumping out of a window.

The disaster did not materially impede the course of the war. With the beginning of spring the emperor “hurried” back into enemy territory. Settling the Armenian quarrel may have been the original war aim, but now he was determined, as one suspects he had been from the beginning, on the overthrow of the Parthian empire. He built a fleet of fifty river vessels on the Euphrates and marched alongside it down into the Parthian heartland. Meanwhile other forces followed the Tigris south; some of them passed through Gaugamela, where Alexander had scored the culminating victory over Darius III that had made him master of the Persian empire and its new, foreign king of kings. To Trajan’s mind, history was ready to repeat itself.

By the summer he arrived at Seleucia, a city opposite the Parthians’ winter capital, Ctesiphon, which stood on the far or eastern bank of the Tigris. At this point the two rivers flow within twenty miles of each other and the fleet was dragged overland from the Euphrates to the Tigris. The Romans entered Ctesiphon without encountering any resistance and found it empty.

It has been supposed that the Parthians had fled, but as the Romans arrived in the summer it was unsurprising that the place was deserted. Chosroes and his court were presumably to be found at their summer capital, Ecbatana, in the Zagros Mountains, where the air was cooler. However, the king had evidently decided against challenging the Romans in the field: according to Dio Cassius, civil strife had removed Parthia’s capacity to the resist the invader.

For Trajan the moment was sweet. He now deserved the
cognomen
Parthicus, and new coins showed a military trophy (enemy shields and weapons fixed on a pole) with two captives and the legend
Parthia capta
, “Parthia taken.” He busied himself with the details of administration—for example, raising the ferry charges across the Tigris and the Euphrates for camels and horses. He made arrangements to create a third new province, Assyria.

And then, a vacation, sailing down the Tigris with his river ships. According to Arrian,

Traveling downriver, the emperor continued the business of government, holding conferences on board the flagship. When navigating around an island in the Tigris delta, he was nearly sunk by a combination of storm and tide, but eventually reached the Persian Gulf at a place called Charax (today’s Basra). He saw a ship sailing to India and said wistfully: “I would certainly have crossed over to the Indians, too, if I were still young.” He counted Alexander, who reached the subcontinent, a lucky man.

The emperor built a statue of himself signaling the limit of his advance
(it was still standing in 659) and lost no opportunity to send another laureled letter to Rome. Public opinion was astounded by the demolition of the Parthian empire and the stunned Senate voted him many honors, among them the privilege of holding triumphs over as many peoples as he pleased. The senators explained, helplessly:

If ever a mission had been accomplished, this was the occasion.

The Jews had never forgotten the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of Titus. Scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean, large settlements flourished alongside their Greek-speaking neighbors. Unhappily, they seldom got on with them well and there was regular intercommunal strife, for which both sides bore a fair share of the blame.

Many Jews remained bitterly opposed to their Roman oppressors and despised the pagan environment in which they lived. They especially disliked the
fiscus judaicus
, which Titus had imposed after the bloody end of the siege of Jerusalem in 70. Nerva had restricted its application to religious Jews, but it still rankled.

In 115 the Jews in Cyrene revolted and by the next year the insurrection had spread to Alexandria, where about 150,000 Jews lived, and to the island of Cyprus. The match that lit the fire is uncertain; it is not inconceivable that the Parthians incited the Jews to disrupt the Romans’ supply chain to the legions in the east, but anti-Roman nationalism may be a sufficient explanation. Messianic fervor could also have played a part, for the Jewish leader in Libya, one Lukuas, was elected king by his coreligionists.

Dio Cassius paints a picture of unrelieved brutality. The Jews, he claimed,