Thunder of the Gods (54 page)

Scaurus frowned.

‘You think there’ll be a war with Parthia? It sounded to me as if Arsaces was pretty much bent on avoiding such a thing. And Commodus’s concerns only extend to the next place he’s going to bury his manhood.’

The younger man shrugged, turning back to look at the Parthian lines.

‘Nobody lives for ever, Legatus. Not kings, and most definitely not emperors, especially those with a gift for creating enemies. One way or another, everyone dies. One way, or another …’

There are several historical aspects of
Thunder of the Gods
that will bear some further and slightly more scholarly explanation than would be appropriate in a work of fiction.

To start with, Parthian history is a subject that the casual student of Rome may think they know well enough, but there’s one big problem for the uninitiated – those who aren’t studying Parthia with an ancient history degree in mind – the sheer lack of sources. Parthian historical tradition seems to have been oral for the most part (we seem to get most of our record of the Parthian kings from numismatics, the study of the empire’s coinage), which means that the only place where we can find written evidence as to the empire’s history is in the writings of those powers that opposed Parthian expansion – and most specifically Rome.

Parthia was indeed a great empire spanning the boundaries of ancient Persia, more or less, with a King of Kings in the Achaemenid tradition, and (at least initially) militarily the match of Rome due to a combination of highly mobile and deadly accurate horse archers and terrifying heavy cavalry, the cataphracti. In the standout battle of the two empires’ early engagement, at Carrhae in 53 BC, Rome’s heavy legionary infantry more than met their match, albeit on unfavourable ground and under questionable command. So began a period of apparent uneasy equality between the two empires that lasted until the fall of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty in the early third century and, for Rome, the horrifying events of the Sassanid dynasty’s rather more effective response to Roman attempts at controlling Mesopotamia (for which read my colleague Harry Sidebottom’s excellent
Warrior of Rome
series).

But this initial balance of power wasn’t to last. The Parthians did indeed completely dominate Rome’s might with a much smaller force at the battle of Carrhae, and then successfully defied Mark Antony’s attempts to impose Roman hegemony over Mesopotamia in the thirties with considerable success. And for much of the first century AD an uneasy peace was the norm, with some Parthian success against Nero’s armies in the sixties. But with the invasion ordered by the emperor Trajan in AD 115, to safeguard his recent occupation of Armenia, a pattern was established that would recur throughout the second century. Not only did Rome advance as far as the Arabian Gulf, sacking the Parthian capital Ctesiphon for the first time, but the scale of Parthia’s defeat in the face of massed Roman legions was to be repeated twice more, with the capital falling once again in AD 165, to the Roman general Avidius Cassius, and for a third time to the emperor Septimius Severus in AD 197.

The Parthian empire had by the late second century gone from being a military superpower that had the measure of Rome’s armies, to little more than a combination of convenient punchbag and piggy bank – indeed it is theorised that Severus’s sacking and mass enslavement of Ctesiphon’s population enabled him to prop up a tottering Roman empire whose crisis of the third century might otherwise well have come three or four decades earlier. And the reasons? Loss of absolute power over the empire’s vassal kings? Internal divisions within the Arsacid dynasty? Incessant pressure from the steppe tribes to the empire’s north and east? Whatever it was, the problem seems to have been one of Parthian weakness in the face of the same level of Roman threat that had been offered two hundred years previously by the republic rather than any increase in Roman military capability.

The reader who wishes to delve deeper is encouraged to read the following excellent works on the subject. Gareth Sampson’s
Defeat of Rome in the East
tells the story of Carrhae, and attempts to do so in a manner that is fair to the Roman commander Crassus. Fergus Millar’s
The Roman Near East
considers the period 31 BC–AD 337 as a whole, while Dr Kaveh Farrokh’s
Shadows in the Desert
provides a more Parthian perspective. And the usual excellent Osprey volume
Rome’s Enemies 3
: Parthians and Sassanid Persians
brings the Parthian army to life, and points out, as more than one well-informed student of Persia told me during my research (see the acknowledgements), that there was more to Parthia’s military than archers and armoured cavalry.

A few other points of historical interest are worth offering to the casual historian without the time to delve deeply enough into the subject.

As described in the story, the Parthian kings did indeed make a point of emphasising their facial abnormalities on the empire’s coinage, as a direct link to Ataxerxes I, who was known as ‘Longhand’, as his right hand was indeed a good deal longer than the left. While this might seem far-fetched, it seems that there may have been some basis for the claim. Modern scientists call the condition neurofibromatosis – a genetic problem that renders the victim prone to limb gigantism and wart-like tumours – and it seems from the numismatic record that it was suffered by both the Achaemenid and Parthian kings. Take a look at the coin representation of King Vologases IV (the birth name of Arsaces the Forty-Fifth, Arsaces being the dynastic name used by all of the Parthian kings) and you can see quite distinctly that there is the representation of a large wart-like growth on his head. I find it fascinating that a monarch would seek to emphasise a disfigurement in order to strengthen his claim to kinship with an ancient line of kings, but that seems likely to have been the case.

Speaking of Vologases IV, while I have exercised a degree of artistic interpretation of the state of Arsacid family politics in the late second century, we do know – from the numismatic record once again – that there was a King Osroes II of Media with a coin mint in his capital city of Ectebana in the late second century. It seems that many of the vassal kings were allowed to mint their own currency, an indicator of the way that imperial authority was quite significantly delegated by this point in the Parthian empire’s trajectory to failure. Osroes II is believed to have revolted against the Parthian throne – and against his father – around the year AD 190, and to have been swiftly dealt with by his brother Vologases V shortly thereafter with his ascension to the throne. Vologases then ruled until the year AD 208, which means that he was on the throne in AD 197 when Severus invaded Parthia and sacked Ctesiphon for the third and final time.

And lastly, Nisibis. Whilst I was desperately keen to go and look at the historical site, cooler opinions prevailed (it being 2014 and modern-day Nusaybin being right on the Syrian border). In truth, it’s clear that little of the ancient fortress has survived, which is a pity as it was clearly one of Mesopotamia’s most impressive features. Changing hands several times over the course of the second and third centuries – including it being taken from Rome by its Jewish population during the little known but vicious Kitos War (a widespread Jewish revolt in North Africa, Egypt Cyprus and Mesopotamia) in the AD 140s, and then recaptured shortly thereafter – it was by the late third century back in Roman hands. Described as the ‘bulwark of empire’ by the fourth-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, the city was ceded back to the Persians in AD 363 as the result of the catastrophic defeat of the Emperor Julian, and indeed seems to have been surrendered for strategic reasons far more frequently than it was taken by force.

And that use of flood waters to breach the walls? Reader, I wish I could say it was my idea, but sadly I’d be lying if I made any such claim. The real genius involved was not King Narsai of Adiabene either – for all that he was a genuine contemporary vassal monarch – but some nameless engineer in the service of King Shapur II, who clearly took one look at the Fruit River and saw not a source of water but a battering ram. Just as I have portrayed in
Thunder of the Gods
, the city walls were felled by the flood water, but when Shapur’s elephant cavalry followed up they became bogged down in the mud, and (ascribed by the Christian population of the city to a miraculous intervention but more likely as the result of good old-fashioned do or die), the walls were promptly restored to an effective height by the city’s population.

And scorpion bombs … The first recorded use of highly irritated scorpions to put an attacking army off its stride was in AD 198, in defence of the ancient city of Mosul against a besieging Roman army. Although the concept might have been invented on some earlier occasion – and not necessarily by the Persians.

The Roman empire of the late second century was composed of a population of about fifty million people whose fates were decided by an aristocracy numbering little more than five thousand men. Originally ruled by kings, Rome became a republic with the overthrow of Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud) in 509 BC.

The establishment of the republic was not without irony. The previous king (Tarquinius’s father-in-law Servius Tullius) had in the course of his beneficent forty-four-year reign done so much to promote the interests of the plebians that the aristocracy found themselves under pressure from the expanded franchise, and so used the excuse of his successor’s tyranny to take control of the state. Controlling the assemblies through their disproportionate strength when it came to public decision-making (with more than fifty per cent of the voting centuriae), their firm grip on the city’s political levers ensured that they would hold more or less absolute power over the republic for almost five hundred years.

Even after Rome had tottered through a century of civil wars that were made inevitable by the creation of a powerful standing army of legions that just begged to be wielded by men of wealth and ambition, and had been supplanted by the supreme rule of the emperor, the aristocracy remained not simply influential but essential to imperial power. Why? The answer lies in Rome’s breakneck expansion from city state to a pan-European empire to rival that conquered by Hitler’s armies two thousand years later. Despite his unequalled power, the emperor needed a host of bureaucrats and military men to safeguard Rome’s frontiers and to control (and for that matter to tax) its vast population, a task beyond the control of even the most formidably intelligent of men. The first emperor, Augustus, recognised this absolute requirement for the aristocracy’s continued role in public life, and was careful to keep the senate onside throughout his reign. Terming himself as ‘princeps’ – ‘first citizen’ – specifically to avoid a term like ‘rex’ – ‘king’ – that might reawaken the resentment that had proven so deadly to his maternal great-uncle Julius Caesar, he ruled with a deft (if somewhat firm) hand.

By the time period in which the
Empire
series is set, the late second century, the two major groups of men who composed Rome’s aristocracy, the senatorial and equestrian classes, remained essential to the effective function of almost every part of the sprawling and increasingly threadbare imperial machine. Sometimes battered by the storms and vicissitudes of public life, often brutally exploited as a convenient source of funds by the throne, and with their positions at times the subject of gross venality in their distribution, they were nevertheless the lynchpin on which the imperial world was entirely dependent.

The six hundred senators, their positions dependent upon a property qualification of 250,000 denarii under Augustus (equivalent to about 70 kilos of gold), and needing the leading family member to have a seat in the senate to maintain their status, were Roman society’s elite. Most of the really important positions in the empire’s administration went to men from the senatorial class, including the role of governing the larger provinces (with the exception of Egypt which, as the critical source of grain, was the exclusive preserve of the emperor). Senators traditionally held the position of Prefect of the City of Rome, commanding the urban cohorts charged with keeping order in the capital, and as legionary legates controlled the empire’s legions with the exception, once more, of the forces based in Egypt. With responsibility for most of Rome’s highest ranked civil and military positions, it would at first glance appear that the senatorial class were effectively in control of enacting (and indeed influencing) the emperor’s policies with regard to internal and foreign affairs, but this fails to take account of the pervasive influence of the more numerous equestrian class, the title meaning ‘the Knights’, in recognition of their original role as Rome’s cavalry force.

While most of the positions open to knights were of a status lower than those reserved for senators, there were exceptions. The governor of Egypt was an equestrian, appointed by the emperor to keep that most vital of provinces well ordered, the position the pinnacle of such a man’s potential achievement and without doubt only granted to those with the most distinguished careers in the public service. In the same way, other smaller provinces and sub-provinces were similarly available to knights at the emperor’s behest.

Lower down the scale of public appointments, knights were
procuratores Augusti
(in charge of the province’s finances), in the provinces controlled by the emperor and took many of the senior management roles that kept the empire’s revenues flowing and its people fed in other procurator and prefect positions.

In the army, equestrians commanded the praetorian guard as Praetorian Prefects (usually two at a time to ensure their loyalty), the emperor’s protectors and the chiefs of his military staff. Knights commanded the two main praetorian fleets at Misenum and Ravenna, and an equestrian commanded the
urban vigiles
– the City Watch – Rome’s combination fire brigade and police force. Some equestrians followed a less conventional career path than the norm, such as those who specialised in law and became judges, and were given a dispensation from military service, but the knights were the backbone of the army’s officer class. Many equestrians served well beyond the expected ten-year period that was initially spent achieving the
tres militae,
a three rank progression from command of an infantry cohort as a prefect, followed by a spell as a military tribune with a legion, with the command as a cavalry wing as the last and most prestigious office.