After 250 years of stability, the third century AD saw the Roman empire descend into an era of chaos
On a spring morning in AD 235, a column of dust on the horizon signalled the approach of Maximinus Thrax’s mutinous troops. On the parade ground in what is now Mainz in Germany, the young emperor Alexander Severus begged his soldiers to fight for him against these rebels. In spite of their promises, renewed the day before, the troops refused to take up arms. They shouted various complaints: against the cowardice of the emperor’s commanders and household, against the rapacity and miserliness of his mother.
When the rebels came into sight, they called out, urging their comrades in arms to abandon the “timid little boy tied to his mother’s apron strings”. Terrified out of his wits, Alexander fled for his imperial tent. There, waiting for his executioners, the 26-year-old emperor clung to his mother, weeping and blaming her for his misfortunes.
Although the contemporary writer Cassius Dio thought the empire had already descended to an “age of iron and rust” (meaning decay) no one could have predicted the chaos that would be unleashed with the murder of Alexander – and the installation of Maximinus as his successor. Since the battle of Actium in 31 BC, when the first emperor, later to be called Augustus, had secured his rule, the Roman empire had known relative security. In over two and a half centuries from then there had been only two protracted outbreaks of civil war: the year of the four emperors in AD 68–69 (two were assassinated and two committed suicide); and the struggles against the emperors Didius Julianus, Niger and Albinus, which brought Septimius Severus to the throne in AD 193.
Although some battles had been lost against external enemies, notably the Germans in the Teutoburger Wald late in the reign of Augustus (AD 9) and the Dacians in the Balkans under Domitian (84–89), the empire had suffered no great defeats. No emperors had been killed or captured by barbarians.
Trajan had added Dacia, north of the Danube, as a province (101–06) and, apart from relinquishing some briefly held gains in the north of Britain under Domitian and in southern Mesopotamia under Hadrian, no territories had been lost. Internally it had been a time of political stability. Leaving aside ephemeral pretenders, there had been only 28 emperors in 266 years. Statistically the average reign had lasted nine and a half years.
After Alexander’s killing, the age of iron and rust became much worse. The first civil war erupted three years later in 238. There were further outbreaks in 249 and 253. In the 260s armed usurpation became near continuous. By the end of that decade much of both the west and east was held by rival emperors and thus lost to the central government.
Incursions by peoples from beyond the frontiers increased in number and severity. The first Roman emperor to be killed by barbarians in battle was Decius, who fell to the Goths in 251 (the Persians’ boast to have killed one of Decius’s predecessors, Gordian III, in 244 was contested by Roman sources). When the Persians captured Valerian in 260, he became the first emperor to be taken alive by an external foe. It was claimed his captor, Shapur, used Valerian as a footstool to mount his horse, and on Valerian’s death had his flayed skin stuffed, and hung in the chamber where Roman ambassadors were received.
In this period the Roman empire suffered its first significant territorial loss, when it abandoned Dacia in the 270s. Given the prevalence of revolt between 235 and 284, any list of emperors must be provisional. Yet at a conservative estimate, at least 30 men held the throne in the 49 years between 235 and 284 – an average reign of a little over 18 months.
What had gone so wrong? We can seek answers in three areas: two concern long-term relations with peoples outside the empire, and the third the role of the emperor within his own society. In all of them it can be argued Rome was the author of its own misfortunes.
A head for a stage prop
When Roman forces reached the Euphrates in the 60s BC, they met the Arsacid dynasty of the Parthians, which had been expanding westward for over two centuries. The understandable, if mistaken, Roman perception that their new eastern neighbour posed a serious threat was reinforced when the Parthians crushed the unprovoked invasion of the triumvir (part of a three-way Roman ruling alliance) Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BC. Having used Crassus’s head as a stage prop in a production of Euripides’s Bacchae, the Parthians subsequently raided Rome’s eastern provinces (40 BC), and, having been expelled, they defeated a campaign of retribution led by Mark Antony (36 BC).
Although diplomacy often was preferred to conflict when Rome was under the rule of the emperors, several major wars broke out between the two empires. Of these it is significant that only one (AD 162–66), in the joint reign of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, was instigated by the Parthians. The other four, under Trajan (114–16), Septimius Severus (194–95, 197–98), and Caracalla (217), were begun by the Romans. So it was not so much that Rome had a Parthian problem, more that Parthia had a Roman one.
The campaigns of the emperors Trajan, Lucius Verus and Septimius Severus broadly followed a pattern. The Roman army advanced down the Euphrates, took and plundered the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon, then withdrew. While resulting in no lasting gains, these invasions, above all the repeated sacking of Ctesiphon, did much to weaken the prestige of the Arsacid dynasty, and thus pave the way for its overthrow in the 220s by one of its own client kings, Ardashir of the house of Sasan.
The Persian Sassanid dynasty proved far more aggressive than its predecessor. Ardashir and his son Shapur launched repeated attacks upon Roman territory. Likewise their forces appeared more effective. The Sassanids defeated several Roman field armies in open battle, and, unlike the Parthians, had the capacity regularly to take fortified cities. Archaeology reveals the final siege of the fortress city of Dura-Europos on the Euphrates. By destabilising the dynasty of Parthia, quite unintentionally Rome had been complicit in replacing a reasonably pacific eastern neighbour with one far more lethal.
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