Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (3 page)

Because of this complicated problem of names in the sources, we cannot say with any certainty when the Goths began to impinge upon the life of the Roman empire, let alone precisely why they did so. The first securely attested Gothic raid into the empire took place in 238, when Goths attacked
Histria on the Black Sea coast and sacked it; an offer of imperial subsidy encouraged their withdrawal.
[3]
In 249, two kings called
Argaith and
Guntheric (or possibly a single king called Argunt) sacked
Marcianople, a strategically important city and road junction very near the Black Sea.
[4]
In 250, a Gothic king called
Cniva crossed the Danube at the city of
Oescus and sacked several Balkan cities,
Philippopolis – modern Plovdiv in Bulgaria – the most significant. Philippopolis lies to the south of the Haemus range, the chain of mountains which runs roughly east-west and separates the Aegean coast and the open plains of Thrace from the Danube valley (all cities are shown on map 4 in chapter four). The fact that Cniva and his army could spend the winter ensconced in the Roman province south of the mountains gives us some sense of his strength, which is confirmed by the events of 251. In that year, Cniva routed the army of the emperor
Decius at
Abrittus.
[5]
Decius had persecuted Christians, and
Lactantius, a Christian apologist of the early fourth century, recounts with great relish how Decius ‘was at once surrounded by barbarians and destroyed with a large part of his army. He could not even be honoured with burial, but – despoiled and abandoned as befitted an enemy of God – he lay there, food for beasts and carrion-birds’.
[6]

Gothic raids in Thrace continued in the 250s, and seaborne raids, launched from the northern Black Sea against coastal Asia Minor, began for the first time. What role Goths played in these latter attacks is unclear, as is their precise chronology. The first seaborne incursions, which took place at an uncertain date between 253 and 256, are attributed to
Boranoi.
[7]
This previously unknown Greek word may not refer to
an ethnic or political group at all, but may instead mean simply ‘people from the north’. Goths did certainly take part in a third year’s seaborne raids, the most destructive yet. Whereas the Boranoi had damaged sites like
Pityus and
Trapezus that were easily accessible from the sea, the attacks of the third year reached deep into the provinces of
Pontus and
Bithynia, affecting famous centres of Greek culture like
Prusa and
Apamea, and major administrative sites like
Nicomedia.
[8]
A letter by Gregory
Thaumaturgus – the ‘Wonderworker’ – casts unexpected light on these attacks. Gregory was bishop of
Neocaesarea, a large city in the province of Pontus, and his letter sets out to answer the questions church leaders must confront in the face of war’s calamities: can the good Christian still pray with a woman who has been kidnapped and raped by barbarians? Should those who use the invasions as cover to loot their neighbours’ property be excommunicated? What about those who simply appropriate the belongings of those who have disappeared? Those who seize prisoners who have escaped their barbarian captors and put them to work? Or, worse still, those who ‘have been enrolled amongst the barbarians, forgetting that they were men of Pontus and Christians’, those, in other words, who have ‘become Goths and
Boradoi to others’ because ‘the Boradoi and Goths have committed acts of war upon them’.
[9]

Ten years later, these assaults were repeated. Cities around the coast of the Black Sea were assaulted, not just those on the coast of Asia Minor, but Balkan sites like
Tomi and
Marcianople. With skillful seamanship, a barbarian fleet was able to pass from the Black Sea into the Aegean, carrying out lightning raids on islands as far south as
Cyprus and
Rhodes. Landings on the Aegean coasts of mainland Greece led to fighting around
Thessalonica and in
Attica, where
Athens was besieged but defended successfully by the historian
Dexippus, who would later write an account of these Gothic wars called the
Scythica
.
[10]
Though only fragments of this work survive, Dexippus was a major source for the fifth- or early sixth-century
New History
of
Zosimus, which survives in full and is now our best evidence for the third-century Gothic wars
. As Zosimus shows us, several imperial generals and
emperors –
Gallienus, his general
Aureolus, the emperors
Claudius and
Aurelian – launched counterattacks which eventually brought this phase of Gothic violence to an end. Gothic defeat in 268 ended the northern Greek raids, while Claudius won a smashing and much celebrated victory at
Naissus, modern Niš, in 270.
[11]

In 271, after another Gothic raid across the Danube had ended in the sack of several Balkan cities, the emperor Aurelian (r. 270–275) launched an assault across the river that probably had considerable success. Aurelian was an extremely capable soldier, and one who spent his five-year reign in continuous motion from one end of the empire to the other, rarely out of the saddle, and rarely pausing between campaigns. A Gothic war is entirely in keeping with the evidence for Aurelian’s movements, and a
late fourth-century collection of imperial biographies which we call the
Historia Augusta
records that Aurelian defeated and captured a Gothic king named
Cannobaudes.
[12]
Here, however, we run into the sort of problem with the sources that we will encounter more than once in the pages that follow. The
Historia Augusta
is the only Latin source we have for large chunks of third-century history, and even where it refers to events known from Greek historians, it often preserves details that they do not. If it could be trusted, its circumstantial and anecdotal content would be invaluable. Unfortunately, the whole work is heavily fictionalized, its anonymous author sometimes using older – and now lost – texts as a jumping off point for invention, sometimes making things up out of thin air. The biographies of late third-century emperors are the least reliable part of the work, and some of them contain no factual data at all. For that reason, even though he appears in many modern histories of the Goths, we cannot be entirely sure that this Gothic Cannobaudes was a real historical figure.

In this case, however, we are able to confirm at least part of the
Historia Augusta
’s testimony from another type of evidence altogether, because
inscriptions make clear that Aurelian did definitely campaign against Goths. From a very early stage in Roman history, whenever a Roman general won a victory over a neighbouring people, he would
add the name of that people to his own name, as a victory title. When the Roman Republic gave way to the one-man rule of the empire, the honour of such victory titles was reserved for the emperor, and whether he won a victory personally, or whether a general won it in his name, it was the emperor alone who took the victory title. In this way, a Persian campaign would allow the emperor to add the title
Persicus
, a campaign against the Carpi would make the emperor
Carpicus
, and so on. Since these victory titles became part of the emperor’s name, they were included in the many different types of inscriptions, official and unofficial, that referred to the emperor. This provides a wealth of information for the modern historian, because victory titles often attest campaigns that are not mentioned by any other source. Thus in the chapters that follow we will sometimes be able to refer to a particular emperor’s Gothic campaign only because an inscription happens to preserve the victory title
Gothicus
– as in the present case, Aurelian’s use of the name shows that he did in fact fight against the Goths and felt able to portray that campaign as a success.
We can also infer that success from the fact that his Gothic victory was still remembered a hundred years later, and from the rather limited evidence for Gothic raids in the decades immediately following his reign: although we hear of more seaborne raids in the mid-270s that penetrated beyond Pontus deep into
Cappadocia and
Cilicia, after that Goths disappear from the record until the 290s, by which time major changes had taken place in the empire itself.
[13]

As the past few pages have demonstrated, the earliest evidence for Gothic invasions of the empire is not well enough attested to allow for much analysis, but that does not mean we should underestimate its impact. The letter
of Gregory Thaumaturgus gives us a rare glimpse into just how traumatic the repeated Gothic raids into Asia Minor and other Greek provinces could be. But it does not answer basic questions of causation: what drove these Gothic raids, what made them a repeated phenomenon?
The Graeco-Roman sources are content to explain barbarian attacks on the empire with an appeal to the fundamentals
of nature itself: to attack civilization is just what barbarians do. That sort of essentialist explanation can hardly be enough for us.
Rather, we need to seek explanations in the historical context. Now it happens that the third century was a period of massive change in the Roman empire, which saw the culmination of social and political developments that had been set in motion by the expansion of the Roman empire in the course of the first and second centuries A.D. Against this background, the first appearance of the Goths and the Gothic raids of the third century become comprehensible. Roman expansion had transformed the shape of Europe and the Mediterranean basin. It affected not just the many people who became Romans for the first time, but also the political constitution of the empire and even the many different peoples who lived along the imperial frontiers. One by-product of these changes was a cycle of internal political violence in the third-century empire that produced and then exacerbated the instability of the imperial frontiers.

The Roman empire had been a monarchy since the end of the first century B.C., when
Augustus (r. 27 B.C.–A.D. 14), the grand-nephew and adoptive heir of
Julius Caesar, put an end to a full generation of civil war that had ripped the Roman Republic apart. Augustus brought peace to the empire, but it came at the expense of the free competition amongst the Roman elite that had created a Roman empire to begin with. In its place, Augustus founded an imperial dynasty that lasted until A.D. 68.
By that year, when the regime of the detested emperor
Nero collapsed and he himself committed suicide, three generations had passed since the end of the Republic. The imperial constitution was fully entrenched – what mattered most was the relationship of the emperor to the powerful clans of the Roman elite, particularly the senatorial families of Rome itself, who now competed amongst themselves for the emperor’s favour and the offices and honours it bestowed. Until 68, emperors had been made at Rome, and loyalty to the dynasty of Augustus had been an essential element in their creation. The civil wars of A.D. 68/69 changed that forever: their eventual victor was
Vespasian, a middle-aged commander born of a prosperous but
undistinguished Italian family and raised to the imperial title in the eastern provinces of the empire, just as some of his immediate rivals had seized the purple in Spain or Germany. This revealed what
Tacitus called the
arcanum imperii
, the ‘secret of empire’ – that an emperor could be made outside Rome.
[14]
Italy remained the centre of the empire, but it was no longer the sun around which provincial planets revolved. These provinces increasingly had a life of their own and political influence that could, in time, impose itself on the Italian centre.

To be sure, the provinces might be very different from one another, and they might stand in different relationships to the imperial capital in Rome. Some provinces, like Spain, southern Gaul, or the part of North Africa that is now Tunisia, had been part of Rome’s empire for a century or more. Others, like Britain, much of the Balkans, or what is now Morocco were only a generation away from their conquest by Roman armies. Well into the late third century, these different provinces continued to be governed according to many differing
ad hoc
arrangements that had been imposed on them when they were first incorporated into the empire. But all the imperial provinces were more and more integrated into a pattern of Roman life and ways of living, much less conquered territories administered for the benefit of Roman citizens in Italy. Indeed, the extension of Roman citizenship to provincial elites was an essential element in binding the provinces to Rome. As provincial elites became Roman citizens, they could aspire to equestrian or senatorial rank, and with it participation in the governance of the larger empire. Already by A.D. 97, a descendant of Italian immigrants to Spain named
Trajan had become emperor. Trajan’s successor
Hadrian was likewise of Spanish descent, while his
own successor and adopted son came from
Gallia Narbonensis, the oldest Roman possession in Gaul.

These provincial emperors are the most impressive evidence for the spread of Roman identity to the provinces, but the continuous assimilation of the provincial elites into the Roman citizenship was ultimately
more important in creating the sense of a single empire out of a territorial expanse that stretched from the edge of the Arabian desert to Wales, from Scotland to the Sahara. These imperial elites could communicate with one another, linguistically and conceptually, through a relatively homogeneous artistic and rhetorical culture. This culture was founded on an educational system devoted almost exclusively to the art of public speaking, the rhetorical skills that were necessary for public, political life. Mainly Greek in the old Greek East, frequently Graeco-Roman in the Latin-speaking provinces of the West, this elite culture nurtured an aesthetic taste devoted, in Greek, to the fashions of the Classical and early Hellenistic period and, in Latin, to those of the very late Republic and early empire. It thereby provided a set of cultural referents and social expectations shared by Roman citizens and Graeco-Roman elites from one end of the empire to the other, and allowed them to participate in the common public life of the empire at large, even if they came from wildly divergent regions.