The Roman army in turmoil

As an independent researcher, I am spared the burden of academic administration that seems to plague the current generation of university staff members. But I am also denied the many benefits that they enjoy, chiefly (to my mind) ready access to a research library. However, this is somewhat mitigated by the existence of the Internet Archive’s indispensable virtual lending library (as I mentioned in the preface to my book Phantom Horsemen).

An overlooked book

I recently came across a book that was uploaded to this library last year but had so far escaped my attention: it is entitled L’armée romaine dans la tourmente, written in 2009 by Yann Le Bohec, Emeritus Professor at the Paris Sorbonne.

No reviews ever appeared in the English-language journals, but maybe they received no review copies. As far as I can see, it seems that the book was noticed only in the German journal Bonner Jahrbücher (in 2010) and in the French-language journal Latomus (in September 2013), on both occasions in broadly congratulatory terms — in the former, we read, “Despite some redundancy, the book is clearly organized, its thesis firmly and confidently presented, in any case worth discussion”, and in the latter, “(Le Bohec) approaches a hackneyed subject with a fresh eye and a readable style”.

Le Bohec begins by promising a detective story (“une véritable enquête policière”) in which the Roman empire is the victim. “How could a body as solidly built as the Roman army”, he asks, “have received such violent blows, been shaken in such terrible difficulties?” Disasters of such magnitude, including emperors killed in combat or taken prisoner, legions routed or wiped out, these and a thousand other misfortunes require an explanation. (Such dramatic hyperbole, incidentally, also requires justification.)

The remainder of the book describes, first of all, the Roman army of the later second century, in which Le Bohec offers an apology for having drawn extensively on his 1989 book L’armée romaine sous le Haut-Empire (apparently in a third edition of 2002, which I have not seen). “To make amends”, he writes, “we shall try to update it and, which is more difficult, to identify the features specific to the end of the second century”. None of which is strictly relevant to the third-century army, but let us proceed.

The rise and fall of the Roman army?

Le Bohec emphasizes (in chapters 1 and 2) that the success of the army of the Antonine emperors (AD 138–192) was founded on high-quality recruiting (“le choix des meilleurs”). He also emphasizes that this excellent second-century army was stationed in a privileged frontier zone, a “golden belt” (“une ceinture dorée”) that “undoubtedly exerted a strong attraction on the barbarians, but also allowed them to be watched and repulsed”.

So far, so good. These points may well be true, but they do not necessarily imply that any disasters that occurred thereafter must have been caused by (a) a deterioration in recruiting standards from the Antonine ideal, and (b) the increased allure of the wealthy frontier zone, that “golden belt”, to the external peoples. But let’s see where Le Bohec is going with this.

In chapter 3, he describes the army of the Severan emperors, from Septimius himself (AD 193–211) through to the last notional “relative” Severus Alexander (AD 222–235). This was the period, Le Bohec claims, when the Roman army “probably reached the peak of its efficiency”. They could easily repulse German and Parthian enemies. And yet it was also the period during which the soldiers, by their inflationary greed, “dug their own graves” (“les soldats creusaient leur propres tombes”).

Le Bohec devotes chapters 4–8 to the main enemies of Rome: Franks, Alamanni, and Goths; the Persians; the northern Britons, the trans-Danubian peoples, and the north African peoples; and finally, the “invisible enemy” of the inflationary economy. This is his main bugbear.

He seeks to blame the soldiers for demanding a pay rise from Caracalla. “The emperors and the soldiers jointly committed this crime against the Empire”, resulting in a financial crisis that he locates squarely in the reign of Gallienus, largely based on the presumption that the loss of the eastern provinces compromised the imperial revenues. He also blames the need to pay “tribute” to victorious enemies, claiming that “the third century provides some examples of this practice”.

Paying off Rome’s enemies?

It is certainly true that, from time to time, the Romans resorted to paying subsidies, but there certainly doesn’t seem to have been a sudden torrent of payments depleting the third-century imperial treasury. Severus Alexander is said to have considered paying off the Germans in AD 234, but probably never did. The Persians claimed that Philippus paid them tribute in AD 244, though no western source records it, while in AD 251 Trebonianus Gallus probably did pay off the ‘Scythians’ who had killed the emperor Decius. The Juthungi certainly requested a subsidy from Aurelian in AD 270, but didn’t get it.

I have a nagging doubt about whether the problem can be diagnosed so simplistically, in any case. Evidence of price inflation, though sparse, seems to begin in the AD 270s, and not earlier. Furthermore, there had already been a debasement of the coinage under Marcus Aurelius, who faced a similar problem to the one that vexed Gallienus — namely, major military operations mounted at a time of rampant plague — and we certainly don’t talk about an “Antonine crisis”.

And yet Le Bohec writes of “a serious military crisis”; of “attacks carried out, more and more often, on two fronts at the same time”; of defeats, “often terrible”, and coups (his preferred term for usurpations); of “a worsening of difficulties in the years 249–258”; and of “a continuation of worsening” up to AD 275. “The inhabitants of the Empire”, he writes, “experienced all possible evils”.

Some of this really needs to be fact-checked.

In support of warfare on two fronts, Le Bohec claims that the Alamanni were threatening northern Italy at precisely the same time that the Goths invaded the Balkans. Unfortunately, the chronology is vague, and the two events may have been consecutive rather than simultaneous. (And they don’t seem to have occurred “more and more often”.) Gallienus certainly managed to visit both theatres. For his terrible defeats, Le Bohec is probably thinking of Valerian’s eastern débâcle (which was not, strictly speaking, a battlefield defeat but a foolish blunder).

I have no idea why he thinks that legions were routed and wiped out (unless he is, again, alluding to the eastern fiasco and the unknown fate of Valerian’s army), but he would like his readers to believe that “this situation encouraged minor peoples who had never troubled Rome to do some looting”. His evidence for this is limited to the case of Gaius Macrinius Decianus (governor of Numidia, probably around AD 254, as he alludes to joint emperors on his dedication, ILS 1194), who on three occasions, defeated a people known as Bavares, once in concert with a people known as Quinquegentanei. But this kind of raiding must have been common in all periods. It cannot, in any case, be used as evidence of a serious military crisis. (Decianus was, after all, successful.) Finally, the allegation that “coups d’état became commonplace” rests heavily on the spurious testimony of the Augustan History and its “Thirty Tyrants”, most of whom are fictitious.

The Roman army in crisis?

Le Bohec’s general conclusion is that three factors conspired to create the grave turmoil of AD 235–284.
1) Stronger barbarians. Really? It is true that, for a few years in the early AD 260s, invaders were able to penetrate much further into the empire before being repulsed, but repulsed they were. Le Bohec thinks that this “proves their strength and, at the same time, the weakness of the Romans”, but only at that precise moment. It is difficult to demonstrate either “a new and violent aggressiveness” or the composition of “leagues that allowed them to help each other” (for which he cites the Quinquegentanei, mentioned above, and the Picts, who first appear in AD 297).
2) Weaker Romans. It is also difficult to demonstrate Le Bohec’s “clear decline” in the Roman army and a “crisis of adaptation”, as the Romans failed to modify their tactics in the face of “barbarians (who) used new weapons and fought better than before”. No wonder “the Romans experienced defeat with the consequence of a weakening of morale and a drop in the quality of recruits”. Unfortunately, Le Bohec doesn’t back any of this up with evidence.
3) The crisis against Rome. Under this heading, Le Bohec cites the (alleged) economic failure, which he considers inevitable, after two centuries of continuous prosperity. Since the Roman army was “less well paid and more poorly fed, they had less and less desire to be killed”. Again, no evidence is adduced.

These are all very interesting ideas. But Le Bohec never comes close to proving any of them, and in the end, we are left wondering if there really was a third-century crisis after all.