Ancient Asia Minor
In our three journeys across south-west Turkey, we searched out monuments from the high noon of the Roman Empire - the time of the five good Emperors: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninius Pius and Marcus Aurelius. From what we saw, it is difficult not to agree with Edward Gibbon that if you had to choose a period when humankind was happiest, then this, the so-called Antonine Age, was one of our golden periods.
The Roman Empire in this period stretched from Scotland to Iraq, from the Rhine to the Sahara, from Morocco to Rumania. No other Empire has ever succeeded in uniting all these nations together, neither before nor since. There were many great powers before the Romans, and many after them, but no other state has been able to forge a unity between Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. As British travellers in Turkey, we could feel remarkably at home amongst these Roman ruins, ruled by the same men, carved with the same script, decorated with the same statues, as our homeland.
In all other ways, the contrast between Roman Turkey and Roman Britain, is comically imbalanced. In terms of surviving architecture, let alone marble sculpture, just one city in Asia Minor, possesses more elegance than all of Roman Britain piled up together. If you have wandered around the excavations that have unearthed the modest foundations from one of the small temple courtyard-shrines built in Roman Britain (at Caerwent, Maiden Castle or Vindolanda) you will know what I am speaking of. And it is not just the built environment, every ancient city whose stone pavements we trod upon in Asia Minor has a barely credible intellectual heritage. During our three journeys, we accidentally walked roads trod by such philosophers as Aristotle (at Assos), Heraclitus of Ephesus, Thales of Miletus and Bias of Priene. We also crossed paths with half a dozen homegrown historians, be it Herodotus (born in Hallicarnassus), Pausanias (who came from Magnesia), Strabo (a native of Amasya), Dio Chrysostom, (who came from Bursa) and Dio Cassius, who was from Nicaea.
By comparison, there is not a single Romano-British voice from the classical period. Nor has a single Briton been positively identified amongst the ever-changing jostle of a thousand ambitious men packed into the Senate, which sat in Rome for a thousand years. It is a sobering thought, especially when compared to other provinces, such as North Africa, which during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian was home to a third of Roman Senators. At least two dozen of that long list of Roman Emperors were born in either Spain, Syria, Libya or Serbia. In terms of intellectual and material culture, Roman Britain was right at the bottom of the heap, while what we now know as Turkey stood right at the summit of the ancient world, in terms of wealth, culture, trade and population.
We now know that Anatolia is one of the motherlands of humankind. In the hills of southern Turkey, sometime around 10,000 BC, humans first learned to harvest barley and wheat, and to herd sheep and goats. A continuous succession of civilisations followed, creating the earliest temples, the earliest cities, the earliest pottery and the earliest art.
The Troy of Priam, Hector, Paris and Helen is the very earliest city in Turkey that most of us can imagine, but it is typical of the history of Turkey that this ancient citadel of the Bronze Age (1200 BC) was already perched over the foundations of half a dozen previous civilisations. Troy is as much the creation of Homer’s poetry as of history, but his story of the sack of this city does match a global phenomenon. For all around the world, the great Bronze Age palace civilisations were being toppled in this period. This may have been started by climate change but culminated in a pitiless age of anarchic violence, dominated by armed bands of men using iron weapons, coming by sea or driving chariots from the steppe-land shores north of the Black Sea. Achilles is an appropriate individual identity to associate with this age of random Indo-Aryan violence, which destroyed the fortresses of Hittite Anatolia, Mycenean Greece as well as the Harappa civilisation on the Indus. The new lords of the earth, loved horses and chariots, revered the sun and knew how to work iron. We do not know that much about their political culture, but get sudden flashes of intense connection to this time, from the earliest surviving scriptures from this period, tucked into the lines of Homer, Zoroastrian hymns, Hindu scriptures or the stories of the Heraclid hero-kings of Greece. We have all become used to subdividing our history into national slices: be it India, Persia, Greece or Turkey but when you look at the material evidence from this early iron age, the elaborate horse and chariot fittings, the swords, the fluted oblation bowls, the cauldrons with their associated metalware for the hearth, the evidence of horse sacrifices and the wooden royal tombs buried beneath great earth mounds, you feel how much was shared. But they were not imaginative potters or stone carvers, so Iron Age galleries do not fill much museum space.
In the interior of Turkey, we can label this Iron Age culture as Phrygian or Lydian or Carian, while on the Aegean shore it is identified as Ionian, Dorian or Aeolian. In certain small sections of the coast, fragments of the old Bronze Age civilisations get blended into that of the conquerors. By 800 BC, half a dozen Phoenician trading cities had emerged on the Syrian coast, and a dozen cities along the Ionian coast of western Turkey and among the islands of the Mediterranean. There is so much for us still to learn, but this dark age was clearly full of interconnections that wove these tiny trading outposts together, as has been revealed in excavations at Ischia (off the Italian coast), on the Greek island of Euboea and at Al-Mina (on the Syrian coast). It was also the period when the Phoenicians invented the alphabet, which was very rapidly borrowed and adapted as Greek and Latin. On the Phoenician coast, Tyre emerges as the most eminent city, just as Ionia, it was Miletus. Both Tyre and Miletus, whether by actual human migration, or through reopening ancient trading networks, are credited with the foundation of dozens and dozens of daughter cities on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Miletus maintained certain religious traditions that connect it with the ancient culture of Minoan Crete.
There are other clues about shared culture from this period, for both the Ionians (western Turkey), the Etruscans and the Lycian cities (in south-west Turkey) formed self-governing defensive leagues of twelve allied cities. The number twelve has a strong relationship to the sacred, for not only are the hours of the day assessed into units of twelve but so is the solar year. This allowed for an easy division of responsibilities, for each unit within a twelve-strong federation could take responsibility for a central shrine and exercise the priestly powers for a lunar month before passing both the power and the expense onto a neighbour. The Lycian league maintained a central religious sanctuary (at Tlos) where they worshipped the mother goddess and her consorts. Tlos can still be found tucked away in a high mountain valley through which the sacred Xanthus river flows. Local officials were elected by each individual city who continued to govern their own affairs but agreed to abide with the decision of the federal assembly on all matters to do with peace, war and foreign affairs. The Lycian federation met to elect a leader (the Lysiarch), a treasurer and a board of judges. Not all cities were equal so they were ranked with either one, two or three votes depending on their wealth and population. They also maintained an intriguing dual system of identity. Ancestry, names and cousin-age were identified through the maternal heritage of mothers and grandmothers whilst a separate paternal identity was mapped out for political life and formal civic inscriptions. The Lycians had their own language and their own alphabet which seems to have been a halfway house between Greek and the original Phoenician alphabet. They tolerated, and even welcomed, the presence of foreigners in their land. Though the bustling trading ports were treated as allies of Lycia rather than as intimate members of the league. Similar federations existed in other highland regions of ancient south-west Turkey and collectively maintained sanctuaries. We visited some of the Carian holy places at Aphrodisias, Labryinda and Lagina.
The federations also had a pragmatic purpose, helping create a united front against new waves of horse-born invaders coming from out of the steppes. In the eighth century BC, the Cimmerians, emerged from the Caucasus mountains and sacked many cities. They were ultimately expelled from Asia Minor by the emergence of two strong martial kingdoms: Lydia (with its capital at Sardis) and Phrygia (with its capital at Gordium). The names of the first warrior monarchs of these Anatolian kingdoms (Midas of Phrygia and Gyges of Lydia) remain part of our common culture. These two kingdoms also struck buttons of gold and silver and electrum to make the world’s first uniform coinage, and their influence will gradually expand over the cities of the Ionian coast. Only Miletus maintained its independence, just as in the Near East, only Tyre remains independent of Assyria.
Further to the East, another kingdom will be formed from this relentless pressure of cavalry armies coming out of the steppes. The Persians, in alliance with the Medes, will eventually create an enormous land-based Empire, conquering Assyria (initially in self-defence) and also Lydia, once again acting in self-defence. Sardis the old Lydian capital was ruled by a Persian satrap (governor) who was directly connected to the Persian royal capitals, the cities of Susa and Persepolis, by the royal Persian road. The Ionian cities, having previously been dominated by the King of Lydia, fitted into this new order. The thirty old kingdoms within the Persian Empire were effectively left to govern themselves providing they were prompt in the delivery of the annual tribute and provided soldiers when the Great King went to war.
In 499, the ruler of the city of Miletus organised the Ionian Revolt, which expelled the Persians. Five years later, a Persian army returned. They squashed the revolt and made a terrifying example by flattening the city of Miletus and the holy sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma. Concerned at the support that Miletus had received from Greek cities, such as Athens, a Persian army was sent four years later to torch Attica. Much to everyone’s surprise, this invasion was defeated by Athenian infantry at the battle of Marathon, 490 BC. Ten years later a much larger Persian force will advance upon the independent cities of Greece. This army will flatten the city of Athens (including the sacred olive tree and the Parthenon temple perched on the Acropolis) but this victory is completely undermined when the Athenian navy defeats the Persian fleet at the battle of Salamis, 480 BC. On the back of this second astonishing military achievement, the city of Athens revives the Ionian revolt. A new federation is established from all the independent-minded islands and cities around the Aegean Sea, which becomes transformed into an Athenian Empire. So, just like the Persians, the Athenians collect tribute which supports a permanent navy with which they police (and rule) Ionia for the next fifty years. Athenian ambitions will eventually be checked by the rival Greek city of Sparta (in the gruelling 27-year-long Peloponnesian war so exactly chronicled by Thucydides). Sparta will later seek to establish a permanent peace by returning the Ionian cities to the rule of the Persian Empire, as agreed in the King’s Peace, 386 BC. This fifty-year-long period of Persian rule is often overlooked by Western history books, though on the ground there is plenty of evidence of prosperity, especially in Caria (the region beside Lycia in south-western Turkey), where a local dynasty of Persian satraps (the Hecatomnids) constructed the monumental highland shrine of Labryanda to Zeus, and created in their port-city of Hallicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the world, the tomb of Mausolus. Nothing now remains of the Mausoleum (apart from some foundation stones) but a prototype for the stepped Mausoleum has recently been discovered at nearby Milas, whilst outside Ephesus, another of the seven wonders of the world, the temple of Artemis, will also be constructed during this period. Not a bad showing, two of the seven wonders of the world.
Fifty years later, Alexander the Great, the young king of Macedonia, will place himself on the Persian throne. Much has always been made of the fascinating speed of the conquests of Alexander the Great, who in three battles: Granicus (334), Issus (333) and Gaugamela (331 BC) toppled Darius III, the King of Kings, from the throne of the Persian Empire. Macedonia is one of nature’s borderlands, which connects the cities of Greece with the Thracian plain and the mountains of Epirus and Illyria. The military superiority of the well-drilled, heavily armoured Greek infantry had already been revealed to the world, some seventy years before Alexander the Great’s invasion, when a force of 10,000 Greek mercenaries (employed in a Persian succession war) cut their way through the provinces of the Persian Empire in order to reach the sea. But what was so exceptional about Alexander the Great’s succession of military victories is that they were achieved by Greek cavalry, personally led by their young king. What also made his 35,000-strong Macedonian army invincible is that it could subdivide at his will and operate as a number of independent but obedient units. For side-by-side with the enormous set-piece battles against Darius III’s army, Alexander the Great waged a simultaneous war of conquest against the thirty self-governing provinces and individual city-states within the vast Persian Empire. In Asia Minor, this included some of the most important cities on the coast, such as Miletus and Hallicarnassus as well as such mountain citadels as Termessos and Sagalassos. Not all of these campaigns were equally arduous for Alexander and his army were often welcomed as liberators. For Alexander the Great waged a curious but successful propaganda war, where he pretended to be revenging Greece against the Persian invasions of seventy years previous, although at this time, Macedonia had been a tributary ally of the Great Kings. But some of his actions, such as honouring the tomb of Achilles at Troy or ordering the reconstruction of the oracle of Apollo at Didyma, still cast their spell over our imagination.
Alexander's Empire lasted less than ten years. Much has been made of the universal language, Greek, and a universal coinage (based on the drachma of Attica) that he imposed over this vast region, but these stood on the shoulders of existing Persian achievements, for they had already created a universal coinage (the daric) and used a common language, Aramaic. Alexander the Great, died of a fever in central Iraq in 323 BC, aged 33, preferring, to rule his Empire from Babylon which was not so far from the old Persian capital city of Susa.
Antigonus ‘Monomathus’, a trusted old general who had fought beside Alexander’s father ( Philip II of Macedon) emerged as the man most likely to hold the Empire together. Antigonus had been placed in command of Anatolia during Alexander the Great’s far eastern campaigns, and he had kept control of the vital lines of communication back to Macedonia as well as suppressing three Persian revolts. Antignonus’s position was further bolstered by the proven ability of his son, Demetrius ‘Poliocretes’ who became famous as both a naval commander and besieger of cities. But the strength of royal purpose expressed by this father and son team, alarmed their contemporaries. So a clutch of rival Macedonian generals: Seleucus, Ptolemy and Lysimachus agreed to unite their rival forces and march upon Antigonus. Their armies found the general in the high plains of Phrygia outside Afyonkarahisar, where Antigonus made his last stand – scanning the far horizon with his one eye, hoping to spot the dust being raised by an army led by his son, marching to his rescue. This aid did not come in time, and Antigonus perished at the battle of Ipsos, 301 BC, aged 81.
Lysmichachus established his rule over Asia Minor and Thrace. Lysimachus was the son of a Thessalian ally of King Phillip II, who had fought beside Alexander in many battles, on more than one occasion acting as his personal bodyguard, whilst also now and then falling from favour. On one occasion, for some act of merciful insubordination, Alexander had Lysimachus placed in the same cage as a lion. The city walls of Ephesus and that still encircle Heracleia-under Latmos and that once defended the lost city of Lysimachia (which commanded the Gallipoli peninsula) testify to his extraordinary energy. He also died on his feet, during the battle of Corupedium (in Lydia) fought in 281. One of his surviving sons searched the battlefield in order to give this 71-year-old warrior an honourable burial. His body was eventually found, undisturbed by the crows and vultures, protected by a faithful hound.
The funeral pyre of Lysimachus marked the end of the most brutal period of the wars of the Diadochi “the successors.” The cities in southern and eastern Turkey fell under the rule of the Seleucid Empire while the family of another Greek general, Ptolemy, established themselves as the new ruling dynasty of Egypt. Viewed from the perspective of an Anatolian prince and the coastal city-states, this was a period of liberation. On the mountainous northern coast of Turkey, Bithynia and Pontus re-emerged as independent kingdoms, while central Anatolia was now ruled by the native monarchs of Cappadocia. In south-western Turkey, the coastal cities and highland federations of Lycia, Caria and Ionia also reclaimed their freedoms.
Prince Antiochus Cyzicenus IX
The central bulk of Asia Minor was to become dominated by an unlikely new dynasty, the Attalids of Pergamon. The Attalid kingdom was created by one of Lysimachus’s minor officials, Philetairos who was a eunuch from the Black Sea region, who had governed Pergamon on behalf of his master. The death of Lysimachus was quickly followed by that of the Seleucid monarch who had defeated him, which left the royal treasury (of 9,000 talents) in the possession of Philetairos. He used this fortune to establish Pergamon as an independent city-state ornamented with a famous library within the sanctuary of a splendid new temple to Athena. Philetairos adopted his nephew, Eumenes I (263-241) who in his turn passed the rulership onto a cousin, Attalos I, who reigned from 241-197. Attalos refused to pay tribute to the three Celtic (Gaulish) tribes which had migrated down the Danube and marched across Thrace into Asia Minor. Having sacked many a rich city, the Celts were in no mood to tolerate such disobedience, but they were fought off by Attalos who was saluted as Soter, ‘the saviour’ of Pergamon. The famous statue of the Dying Gaul was first carved during this period, to ornament a victory monument where it provides dignified testimony to the spirit of these invaders. The Gauls were defeated but not destroyed. They were left in occupation of the central, herd-grazing plateaux of Anatolia which would become known as Galatia. It was to these communities that three hundred years later St. Paul wrote his letters to the Galatians. Attalos I’s military victories confirmed Pergamon as the leading state within Asia Minor, much bolstered ( as we shall soon find out) by an expedient military alliance with Rome against his neighbours.
Much, much further to the east, another migration of horsemen coming out of the steppes (known as the Parni of Scythia) had created the kingdom of Parthia (by 240 BC) over the river valleys of central Asia. This turned out to be no more than their advance base, from which they slowly reconquered the old Iranian heartlands of the Persian Empire, seeing themselves as the rightful heirs of the Achaemenids. Riding back, after a mere absence of a hundred years, to re-establish the line of the King of Kings.
This was the lively shape of the geopolitics of Asia Minor, when Rome first began to emerge on the horizon. The city of Rome had long been respected as the dominant military regime within central Italy, but the conclusion of the First Punic War, 264-241 BC, revealed her as an assertive and aggressive new power. For by the end of her long struggle against Carthage, Rome was the mistress of an overseas Empire, which included the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, with a victorious navy patrolling the seas. Once Rome began to expand into Spain and along the Adriatic, her neighbours recognised that they had but one last chance to oppose this new power. During the Second Punic War (218-201), Carthage (as led by Hannibal) was part of a grand anti-Roman alliance which included the Kingdom of Macedonia (under King Phillip V), the Hellenistic Empire of the Seleucids and the Celts of northern Italy. This is not how history is customarily explained. Rome tends to be portrayed as the heir of the ancient Greeks, if not the natural successor of Alexander the Great. But here we see the Carthaginians of North Africa (speaking a Semitic language) were alliance with the two principal Greek kingdoms and the Celts against the common threat of Rome.
The Romans never forgot the danger of this quadruple alliance. After they defeated Hannibal, they concentrated their very considerable energies on neutralising then weakening, then destroying Macedonia. Their first step was to build up a rival alliance, from all the neighbours who felt jealous of Macedonia. The Romans selected the island of Rhodes (the central lynchpin of a trading confederacy), various Greek leagues and squabbling city-states and the Kingdom of Pergamon as their regional allies. This allowed Rome to entirely encircle the Kingdom of Macedonia which was attacked in the Second Macedonian War (200-197) and concluded with the victory of Cynoscephale in 197. Using the same nest of allies in the East, the Romans then advanced on the only other power that might equal them, the Hellenistic Empire of the Seleucids. They launched the Seleucid War (192-188) and for the first time dispatched a Roman army into Asia Minor, to ‘support’ their allies. At the battle of Magnesia (190 BC) the Romans and their allies defeated the Seleucids but were too wise in the ways of the world to yet show the full extent of their ambitions. Instead the Seleucids were forced by treaty to abandon Asia Minor, and the Romans generously awarded their two local allies (Pergamon and Rhodes) with these new territories. No one could be in any doubt though, that power now rested with the Roman army in the field. Macedonia, now completely isolated, was finally ripe for the last act of revenge. The Third Macedonian War of 171-168 ended with the battle of Pydna (22 June 168BC) after which the kingdom of Phillip II and Alexander the Great is sliced up into four subject provinces and the royal tombs are plundered.
Rome now turned her attention on her old allies, who were no longer useful. First she set up Delos as a maritime rival to weaken her old ally Rhodes and then her armies advanced to conquer what is left of independent Greece. In 146 BC Rome revealed the full extent of her powers, and in that year orders the complete destruction of two of the greatest cities of the known world: Carthage (the cultural capital of North Africa) and Corinth (the commercial centre of Greece). It is a merciless action, which can be compared to ordering the simultaneous destruction of both London and Paris, but there is no longer any confederation of powers that can oppose her will. By this period the Roman army had been the power behind the throne of Pergamon for a whole generation. In 133 BC, Attalos III of Pergamon, freely surrenders his kingdom to the Roman Empire in his will. You can believe that if you wish, but his people had no such illusions. They rose in spontaneous rebellion against this Roman palace coup and it took the Roman army three years to tame this revolt. By 129 BC, all the old territories once ruled by the Attalid Kings of Pergamon become the Roman province of Asia Minor, to be governed from the port city of Ephesus.
Emperor Hadrian, found at Sagalassos
The Romans might have the best field army, and be the most brilliant diplomats, and the most skilled manipulators of grand strategy and highly accomplished in the craft of besieging engineers, but in terms of material or intellectual or spiritual benefits, they could offer absolutely nothing to the people of Asia Minor. The Roman Empire in Asia Minor, for the first hundred years, was an entirely predatory state, worked entirely to the benefit of carpet-bagging officials, working hand in glove with exploitative bankers and privatised tax-collectors.
The Kingdoms of Bithynia and Pontus (northern Turkey) remained independent of the Roman Empire in this period. They were remnants of the old Persian Empire that had never been conquered by Alexander the Great and were ruled by native dynasties. But the Romans, ever resourceful about any opportunity to divide and rule, sought to foment rivalry between these two neighbouring kingdoms.
But it turned out to be a dangerous period for the Romans to be plotting a forward strategy. For the Roman Republic was imploding into civil strife back home in Italy, both a class war (led by populist reformers in the cities) but also a provincial war waged against Rome’s oldest Italian allies, infuriated that they had remained third-class citizens. This strife cut into the operating strength of the Roman army, so when the border incidents between Bithynia and Pontus erupted into war, there were only two Roman legions on hand. These legions had been placed to watch over the conquered provinces of Macedonia but were now both ordered east. They were ill-prepared for the difficulty of campaigning in northern Turkey, a land of forested mountains defended by gorges, mists and fast-flowing rivers. In 89 BC the Roman army was defeated by the King of Pontus, Mithridates VI, who would become known as Mithridates Great.
The next year (88 BC) a popular uprising against Roman rule exploded across all her conquered territories in Asia Minor and Greece. The arrogant, Latin-speaking merchants, tax collectors, bankers and corrupt officials were now hunted down. This massacre, known as the Ephesian or Asiatic Vespers, slaughtered tens of thousands of Latin-speaking settlers. Mithridates was able to create a Pontic Empire which included all of Anatolia and much of Greece. Mithridates was another of those extraordinary charismatic rulers, who (alongside Hannibal of Carthage and Jugurtha of Numidia) attempted to oppose Roman imperialism. He was able to bridge the differences between Greek and Persian culture, speaking twenty-two dialects and proudly claiming descent from both Cyrus (the heroic founder of the Persian Empire) and such Macedonian dynastic heroes as Antigonus and Seleucus. His name, ‘gift of Mithras’ placed him within the ancient Zoroastrian religious traditions of Iran, and to the great moral and spiritual deity linked with light and justice, sun and the truth.
The news of the massacres (and the degree to which she had become so hated) shocked the Romans. They determined on revenge, but the First Mithridatic War (88-84) was not decisive. Sulla had been given the military command, but despite winning battles (Chaeronea in 86 and Orchomenus in 85), he did no more than stabilise the situation over the Greek-speaking cities on the coast. Sulla agreed to the truce of Dardanus (84 BC) with Mithridates so that he could return to Rome and pitch into the civil war, being waged with pitiless ferocity between the Populist general Marius and the die-hard Roman nobles, of whom Sulla was now their only champion. The Second Mithridatic War (83-81) saw the Romans back in occupation of all of Asia Minor, but the initial run of victories were undermined by a second defeat of the legions (once again deep within the mountains of Pontus) at a battle fought at the crossing of the Halys river. Sulla was now triumphantly in power as Dictator of Rome (82-79) but too old to contemplate a return to the East, especially whilst the last round of the civil war was being fought out in the west. Pompey, a young hero-commander of the Senatorial party had been commissioned to hunt down the last of the populists (77-71 BC) holding out in Spain.
The Third Mithridatic War (73-63) began almost accidentally with an attempt by the Romans to annexe Bithynia, but Mithridates the Great once more struck back with great force and at one point had the Roman governor besieged behind the walls of Chalcedon (now a suburb of Istanbul on the Asian shore). But the new Roman general, Lucullus proved himself to be an efficient commander, fully aware that his enemy had the superiority in cavalry as well as the dangers of campaigning through an Anatolian winter. Lucullus also developed an alliance with the Anatolian kingdoms of Galatia and Cappadocia which were fearful of Mithridates’s ambition. Lucullus’s first victory, the battle of Cabira in 72 BC, was defensive in nature, but his subsequent methodical campaigns, secured a string of base camps in Northern Mesopotamia and in Armenia. Mithridates was expelled from Pontus but succeeded in recruited new armies in the East, and showed his brilliance as a commander of cavalry by defeating four Roman legions at the battle of Zela (67 BC). Lucullus, advancing in good order, was able to rescue these legions, but then found himself replaced as commander by Pompey, an old personal rival. Lucullus and Pompey were the two political heirs of Sulla, both men of talent descended from old Senatorial families who were determined to uphold the traditions of the Roman Republic. Lucullus was furious at being superseded in his hour of victory, and called Pompey a vulture, forever feeding off the achievements of others.
Pompey was certainly already crowned with many achievements. Having returned to Rome after his victory over the populists in Spain, he had then been placed in overall command of the last campaign which suppressed the slave rebellion led by Spartacus (73-71). Vast new powers were then voted upon his shoulders, in order to cleanse the Mediterranean of pirates. Using clemency (to those who surrendered) and efficient staff-work (fifteen admiral-like legates backed up by a fleet of five hundred ships) the ‘scourge of piracy' was tidied up in a briskly efficient three-month naval campaign, which culminated in just one military action, the siege of the port-city of Alanya on the southern coast of Turkey. This victory was well sited geographically, for it allowed for Pompey to be immediately in the right place for his next campaign. For his allies in the Roman Senate now voted him full powers to settle the East. Pompey left nothing to chance. All of Mithridates potential allies (such as Trigranes of Armenia and the King of Parthia) were won over to the side of Rome, while all his local enemies were reinforced with a stiffening of Roman legions. The battle of Lycus, 66 BC, was the final siege-like conclusion of the relentless occupation of Pontus by Pompey’s vastly superior army, advancing from every direction. But Pompey had at last achieved the decisive defeat of Mithridates which no other Roman general had achieved. He was forced to flee from his homeland – and took refuge in Crimea before taking his life. Mithridates the Great remains an inspiring national hero.
Pompey then made a peace. The new conquests: Pontus, Bithynia and the south-eastern Mediterranean coast of Turkey (Cilicia) became new Roman provinces, whilst the independence of Rome’s valuable allies within Anatolia: the Kingdoms of Armenia, Galatia and Cappadocia was confirmed, indeed enlarged with sliver-gifts of new territory, but yet circumscribed in their status as client allies of Rome.
Pompey also extended a practice by which the Roman Empire slowly became less predatory and better ordered. Discharged soldiers from his vast army of Roman legions were paid in land not just in cash, which created pockets of loyalism in the provinces, rewarding veterans but in a manner which got them out of the politicised big cities, and in the long term allowed for the miscegenation of Latin culture and the Roman population with that of the provinces. During Pompey’s power-sharing agreement with Caesar and Crassus (effectively keeping the peace in Rome between 60-52 BC), there was also an attempt to establish a fixed, and fairer system of provincial tribute.
Pompey worked out the details of this peace when he wintered (64-63 BC) in the city of Antioch, the old capital of the Seleucid monarchy. The Seleucids stood in a direct line of connection with Alexander the Great, but as we have already noted it is a common mistake to see Rome as the lineal heir of the Macedonian Empire, even if they borrowed their art and were inspired by their architecture. Rome proved itself merciless in its dealings with the old Hellenistic monarchies. Pompey arranged for Antiochus XIII Asiaticus to be killed (Sampsiceramus, priest-king of Emessa was given this task). Antiochus XIII was the eleventh Seleucid generation to have ruled in the East, and after his death, his various surviving cousins (having taken refuge beyond the frontiers of Rome) were also disappeared. Pompey turned the remnants of the old Seleucid Empire into two brand new Roman provinces: Cilicia and Syria. At the same time a string of client kingdoms (Emesa, Nabatean Petra, the oasis of Palmyra and Hasmonean Judea) were recognised as Roman allies which effectively guarded the desert frontier.
Pompey also arranged for a federation of ancient cities to be given self-governing independence under the protection of Rome. This, the so-called Decapolis, was home to a complex fusion of cultures, which has the added fascination of being the intellectual background to the youth of Christ. Under Roman rule these cities minted coins proudly attesting to their ‘Autonomy’, their ‘Freedom’ and their ‘Sovereignity’. There is of course, some self-love in this policy, for the Roman Empire delighted in cities that mirrored their own balanced constitution - which blended traditions of democracy and aristocracy with royal lineages of high-priests. But this formula, of beheading rulers but giving liberty to the individual cities, single-handedly helps explain the golden age of the Roman Empire. It bridges the great dichotomy, between the merciless deeds of centuries of aggressive Roman imperialism, and what we found on the ground: the fountains that cascade with fresh spring water brought down from the mountains on a long march of arched aqueducts, the fortress like cisterns for conserving water over the long summers, the storm drains, the splendid kiosks in the centre of a market square allowing elective magistrates to police fair practice amongst the traders, the opulent senate and such vastly ambitious theatres and circus tracks, that you realise that each city was the festival centre for a much larger rural hinterland.
But before this benign era of the Roman Empire fully emerged, there were three further storms to navigate during the last predatory decades of the Roman Republic. Crassus, the influential middleman in the Roman power-sharing triumvirate between Pompey and Julius Caesar, accepted the position of Roman governor of Syria. He accepted this position purely in order to invade Parthia. Crassus’s invasion was a typical instance of Roman unprovoked aggression, breaking a formal truce but in all other ways extremely well planned, taking advantage of a Parthian succession war, and working in tandem with a joint attack launched to the north, by the allied King of Armenia. Crassus had assembled a mobile field army of 35,000 men (seven legions). Although vastly rich he was no fool. As a young man Crassus had seen more than his fair share of fighting, as the commander of the right wing in the merciless battle of the Colline gate, which gave Sulla the final victory in the civil wars and he also had a key role in the war against Spartacus. When Crassus plotted the invasion of Parthia he was already aged 61. It seems highly likely that his purpose was not so much to win more glory for himself, but to establish his son Publius Crassus as one of the leading young men of the Republic. Publius had already served Julius Caesar for two years with distinction, as a junior commander during the conquest of Gaul, and was admired by Cicero. Publius was given the position of honour, in command of the Vanguard of Roman cavalry.
Crassus’s invasion of central Anatolia (in 53 BC) was shadowed by a much smaller Parthian force of cavalry, under the command of General Surena. The two armies finally confronted each other at Carrhae which is often described by Roman historians as if it was some waterless desert into which the legions had been led by the treachery of native guides. Carrhae (Harran) is the fertile bread-basket just south of the strategic city of Edessa, and Crassus had usefully established the Roman military position beside a stream. Skilled archery (the famous Parthian shot, delivered as your horse checked and turned) wore down the vast Roman infantry square that Crassus had formed, then assaulted it with frontal charges by heavily armoured knights. The Roman army, though badly worsted in this first round of fighting, had yet held together as a fighting unit. It only began to break apart during the subsequent peace negotiations. For Crassus’s decisive spirit had deserted him after he saw the head of his son Publius impaled on the end of a Parthian pike. Publius had been killed in a cavalry skirmish early on in the battle of Carrhae. A column of 10,000 Roman soldiers did succeed in marching back and secure the defences of Syria, but the rest of the army, including Crassus was slaughtered or taken prisoner.
The defeat of an entire Roman field army, at Carrhae, was never forgotten. But the most immediate consequence of Crassus’s death, was a return to the Roman civil wars. This round (49-46 BC) fought out between the armies of Julius Caesar and Pompey all over the provinces of the Empire. In Asia Minor, this allowed Prince Pharnaces, one of the surviving sons of Mithridates to raise the banner of national revolt, and to briefly sweep all before him after he defeated the Romans at the Battle of Nicopolis (near the modern city of Sivas) in 48 BC. But the next year, Julius Caesar (just then campaigning in Egypt) marched rapidly north. He found Pharnaces camped at Zela (the site of one of his father’s major victories) but defeated him in the lightning campaign of 47 BC summed up by that legendary dispatch, “Veni, Vidi, Vici”. Caesar did indeed triumph everywhere, but he ruled in Rome as Dictator for just two short years before he was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BC.
Caesar’s death unleashed the next round of Roman Civil War (44-40 BC) pitching the new upholders of the Roman Republic (Cassius and Brutus) against his two political heirs (Mark Antony and Octavian). In Asia Minor, as in all the subject provinces of the Roman Empire, these years were a diplomatic nightmare, with both Roman factions desperate to acquire funds to wage their wars. Any city accidentally caught up in the inter-Roman fighting, was sure to be sacked, and no one escaped the punitive fines. The Republican generals, when they were briefly in charge of Roman Asia Minor demanded ten years' worth of tribute from all the cities, as well as brokering an alliance with the Parthian Empire. So, in a very bizarre footnote, squadrons of Parthian cavalry fought beside the Roman army that was defeated (at Phillipi in northern Greece in 42 BC). Two separate Parthian armies invaded Roman Asia Minor in 40 BC. One was under the command of a Roman Republican ( Quintus Labienus) which cut its way through to Caria, and sacked a number of cities, before occupying Cilicia. The second Parthian army under the command of the Prince Pacorus seized control of Roman Syria. Publius Ventidius Bassus, an old companion of arms of Julius Caesar, eventually succeeded in repelling both of these Parthian invasions.
Mark Antony was in command of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire from 42 BC. Once again, the poor provincial cities were plundered by his demand for a donative to celebrate their liberation. Mark Antony initially governed from Athens, then travelled east to rule from the city of Ephesus for a year, where he was greeted as an incarnation of the God Dionysios. In 41 BC he travelled to the city of Tarsus in Cilicia (southern Turkey) to meet Cleopatra, the Ptolemaic Queen of Egypt. They had known of each other for years, for Cleopatra had lived in Rome as the wife of Julius Caesar and had borne him a child, Caeserion who was the acknowledged heir to the Kingdom of Egypt. Mark Antony and Cleopatra now fell in love, and jointly ruled the entire East from the Egyptian port-city of Alexandria. Cleopatra would give birth to a pair of twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II in 40 BC and a third child, Ptolemy Philadelphus in 36 BC. It is a period where myth and history mingle, as if you have entered the improbable plot of an opera. The very names of their children, take a very un-Roman pride in the Hellenistic kingdoms. As a wedding present, Mark Antony gave his wife the island of Cyprus and the life of her half-sister Arsinoe who had for years taken safe sanctuary in the Great Temple of the Goddess Artemis at Ephesus. Although distracted by recurring tensions with Octavian (his old ally but often his chief rival) Mark Antony began to amass a vast army in Antioch for his planned invasion of Parthia. In 36 BC he led this force deep into the Parthian homeland, but instead of being saluted as a second Alexander the Great, his invasion got bogged down in logistics, as the enormous size of the invading Roman army required long and complex supply lines. The Parthian monarch never gave battle, retreating into what is now Iran and the unexpected ferocity of winter on the Anatolian plateaux became the real enemy of the Romans. Two-fifths of Mark Antony’s army perished during the prolonged march back to Syria, harassed ever more effectively by Parthian cavalry.
The failure of this grand campaign of conquest, undermined Mark Antony in his final struggle against Octavian (32-30 BC). The battle of Actium was won as much by the secret diplomacy (encouraging various admirals to defect) as naval combat, which was repeated when Mark Antony’s vast army of the East (19 legions) surrendered without a fight. The proud and very ancient kingdom of Egypt became just another subject province of the Roman Empire. Mark Antony and Cleopatra succeed in none of their grand projects – other than the taking of their own lives. Octavian was quick to order the killing of Caeserion (a rather more convincing heir of Julius Caesar than himself) but the daughters of Mark Antony and Cleopatra were spared, and their bloodlines flourished in a tendril of descendants that included later monarchs and Emperors.
Octavian could not compete with Mark Antony as a passionate lover of women or a charismatic cavalry general, but he proved to be a most effective and patient politician. Octavian effectively neutralised the reckless old ruling class of the city of Rome, but left them their position and their dignity intact, while creating a new meritocratic administrative class from talented provincials. One of Octavian’s most important early decisions was to reduce his vast standing army by 120,000 men (without creating a mutiny) and to settle these soldiers in colonial foundations established throughout the Empire, often in valleys of strategic importance. His second great decision, certainly in terms of the security of Asia Minor was to make a firm peace with the Parthian King. Phraates IV formally returned the legionary eagle-standards, captured at Carrhae, to the safe keeping of Octavian. Galatia will be quietly annexed by Rome in 25 BC, followed by the kingdom of Cappadocia and Commagene by Tiberius in 17 AD, and Lycia under Claudius in 43 AD.
That golden period of history, the reign of the five adoptive Emperors begins with Nerva being chosen by the Senate, 96-98, who adopts Trajan (98-117) who adopts Hadrian (117-38) who adopts Antonius Pius (138-61) who adopts Marcus Aurelius (161-180). By this period Roman Empire has evolved into a confederation of two thousand five hundred cities, spread over some twenty-five provinces, whose frontiers are defended by a standing army of twenty legions.
Each of the cities within the Roman Empire are self-governing. In Asia Minor the Greek-speaking cities maintained a register of free male citizens, usually with some property qualification, known as the ecclesia. Summoned in their tribes or clans to the Agora (the open place of debate in the centre of the city) they elected their own magistrates usually from out of their own ruling class of local landlords. These officials watched over the urban markets, the water supply, the storm drains, bridge and roads and came together as a governing council in the prytaneion (town hall) which often stood beside the bouleterion (senate house). The collective body of officials, and ex-magistrates, formed the core of the local senate, was known as the curia. Many of the bouleterion look like a small theatre with their semi-circular rows of seats and in their heyday were littered with statues and inscriptions honouring local patrons and the emperors. Some of them were very substantial buildings, that could house six hundred members, but which might only be packed to this capacity once a year to offer a formal sacrifice to the spirit of the Emperor and the safety of Rome. The members of a local senate were legally defined as honestior, an honourable person who could not be flogged by an official, or tortured at the instruction of a judge. They represented about one per cent of the population of the Empire and had many local privileges, sitting in the front rows of the towns theatre, in the amphitheatre and at the circus race-track. It was also expected that the richer members of this class would serve as priests in the temples and now and then step forward to sponsor a festival, celebrated at the theatre or pay for the bulls slaughtered at a communal sacrifice. They also had obligations. They were collectively responsible for collecting, inspecting and delivering the cities tax assessment (in harvested, dried corn) to the imperial granaries, usually sited at a coastal port. So membership of the curia, the senate of each city, came with a real sense of responsibility, for they had to step up and fill any shortfall.
It was also the first base for any man of ambition, to be part of this elite of 65,000 men who sat in the city councils all around the Roman Empire. Typically one or two of the most important individuals from each city might have a connection, or maybe even a seat in the Senate of Rome. Talented young men would struggle to get themselves an introduction to these well-placed men, maybe finishing their education in Rome and its law courts (getting the right accent and making the right friendships) then serve an apprenticeship in the legions as a legate and as a very junior administrative official, a quaestor. This youthful experience was often enough after which a rich provincial might return home filled with stories of the capital city, its buildings and social circles. Those with more ambition, allied to luck, talent, energy, persistence and the right connections might climb the ladder of ranks of the chief offices of state, ricocheting between an administrative or a legal post and further service as an officer in one of the legions, or in an auxiliary regiment, leading up to service as a judge (praetor), then maybe (but only for the most ambitious) a command of one of the twenty-five legions followed by the governorship of a province and a honorary consulship. The private dreams of a fulfilling career did not need to stop there.
The Emperor Trajan was just such a career officer, born in Spain but descended from Italian colonial settlers who originated in Tuscany. His family were wealthy but very provincial. He had risen through the ladder of rank enhanced by one crucial incident, when he had proven himself loyal to his Emperor during a military mutiny. He was also well thought of by other legionary commanders, which encouraged the elderly Emperor Nerva to officially adopt him as his heir. Trajan was not part of the charmed aristocracy of Rome and preferred action and sound engineering projects to urbane life. His conquest of Dacia (modern Rumania) extended the Roman frontier north of the Rhine, and in 107 AD his annexation of an old client kingdom pushed Roman rule deep into Arabia. As an old man, he determined on one last great achievement which was to be the invasion of Parthia. Like Crassus and Mark Antony before him, this was a matter of personal ambition not grand strategy. By 113 AD the Emperor had amassed an army of ten legions in Syria which he led East the following spring, annexing the Kingdom of Armenia and then ordering the murder of the captive king. The following year, in 115 he occupied the Kingdom of Osrhoene which commanded the upper waters of the Euphrates, and which is where Crassus had been defeated. He returned to the city of Antioch that winter, which was well used to serving as an occasional eastern capital, before embarking on the conquest of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) over the spring of 116, marching right down to the shores of the Persian Gulf supported by a fleet of river boats. Thus far, everything had worked exactly to plan, but later that year, Parthian Mesopotamia crackled with local rebellions. A battle had to be fought outside the walls of Seleucia, which was sacked, and Trajan’s famously efficient North African cavalry commander, Lusius Quietus was forced to ride north to rescue the Roman positions established there. Despite the Emperor’s own presence, the legions failed to storm the walls of the city of Hatra on the Tigris river. By the spring of 117, it was clear that not only was the old Emperor weakening, but the Roman army were faced with an uphill struggle holding onto all the recently occupied new provinces: Babylon-Mesopotamia, Assyria and Armenia, which still look so grand on a map of the Roman Empire. There was some sort of cabinet crisis, between the hawks (career generals) and the Emperor’s trusted old associates from Spain, as Trajan grew weaker that summer. Emotionally his life was not too complicated, for he trusted his oldest friends but liked the company of young men. He died at Selinus on the southern coast of Turkey on 11 August 117, but not before his trusted old wife had encouraged him to formally name his young cousin Hadrian as his heir, who was already serving as governor of Syria.
Hadrian had played no part in the war and once he became Emperor immediately ordered the return of both Armenia and Osrhoene to the Parthians. It was a wise decision, but could not have been popular at the time. He also decided to execute the dashing cavalry general from North Africa, Lusius Quietus and two other generals, who had been closest to Trajan throughout the invasion. Throughout his long career as Emperor, Hadrian completed a detailed inspection tour of all the military frontiers of the Empire, including two tours of the Roman defences along the Euphrates river valley, almost if he knew that the territorial apogee had been achieved and the counter-shocks must soon begin. Thirty years after his death, during the reign of the philosopher Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Empire would indeed be faced with a war on five of its frontiers: Britain, the Rhine, the Danube, Mauretania and most pressingly against the Parthians.
Statues of Marcus Aurelius’s emperor's handsome bearded brother, his co-emperor, Lucius Verus, survive from all over the Empire. He was a charming, woman-loving and indolent man. He was not cruel or proud, and loved street life more than long meetings with his secretaries in the council chambers. He made a good pair with his earnest, slightly joyless elder brother, more interested in philosophy than sex. The Parthian King Volgasss IV had started a border war by resisting Roman interference in Armenia, but after he destroyed two legions on the frontier, he grew confident enough to advance on Syria. Lucius Verus was sent East to watch over the eastern frontier but largely confined himself to the joys of urban life in Antioch, Ephesus and Athens. It was not until 163 that legions could be withdrawn from other frontiers and the Roman army could counter-attack, taking back their frontier posts, then sweeping down to win battles at Dura-Europos, the great fortress city overlooking the upper Euphrates, after which they stormed Seleucia (on the west bank) and then Parthian capital of Ctesiphon (on the east bank) in 165. It was as if the conquests of Trajan had been repeated, but this time for real. But plague brought both the Roman and the Parthian army to its knees, so once more the old frontier was restored. In Ephesus, Don photographed the sculptured reliefs that once decorated a monument raised to this victorious Parthian Wars.
A generation later, the Emperor Septimius Severus would follow in the footsteps of Trajan and lead a Roman army into Mesopotamia. He would also try and annexe the old kingdoms of the Upper Euphrates, and also try and besiege Hatra. Later, his son (the Emperor Caracalla) would return to the eastern frontier of Roman Turkey. Caracalla was a nickname, a badge of honour that he had won from the soldiers as a child, on campaign with his father, who named him after the rough hooded cloak worn. Caracalla could dig a trench as quickly as any of the soldiers under his command. Before dawn on the morning of 8 April 217 AD he was scouting out the rough limestone hills to the south of the Harran (near Edessa) possibly where the ancient temple of the moon (known to the Babylonians) was located. He was stabbed in the back by a member of his own bodyguard. Over the next fifty years, fifty soldier-emperors will attempt to occupy the throne, most of them for less than one year. So it is impossible not to look back over the reign of Septimius and his son Caracalla, and salute it as the last golden period of the Roman Empire.
As we have discovered in our travels, there are many other reasons to salute the Severan dynasty. They embellished city after city with bath complexes, spectacular three-storey fountains and new piazza squares framed by triumphal gates, as well as restoring frontier forts and building new temples. They also patronised the leading Platonic philosophers of their day, who were constructing a moral and ethical fabric that would unite all the classical deities with as the ancient belief systems of Egypt, Syria and Anatolia. Even in the details of their biographies, they are inspirational for Septimius Severus had been born in Leptis Magna (in Libya) while his intellectual wife, Julia Domna was a Syrian princess from the ancient royal dynasty of Emessa. His son Caracalla extended Roman citizenship throughout the Empire and continued the task of codifying Roman Law to become a common resource for lawcourts across the entire Empire. They had a coherent vision that could have kept this ancient world alive, but it would be ultimately swept away by Christian soldier-emperors. We stopped chronicling Roman Asia Minor at this period, before the Goths break through the frontiers and before the Christian mobs started smashing the faces of the old gods in their temples.
