ON THE DANUBE
A prince of peace, Marcus Aurelius was destined by the irony of fate
to live most of his days as a leader of battles. The low rumbling of
war from the provinces mingled discordantly with the acclamations
which proclaimed him Princeps, Rome’s chief citizen and lord. The
disturbances in Britain and on the Rhine were easily quelled; but not
so in Parthia or on the Danube.
Parthia was Rome’s great rival in the old world. More than once had
the captains of that mysterious Eastern kingdom plucked the laurels
from Roman brows; the Roman eagle had brooded in captivity in Parthian
dungeons; and had been released not by steel but by gold. On the
succession of Marcus, King Vologeses, a man with all the spirit and
ambition of his race, determined to secure for himself the neighbouring
kingdom of Armenia. The Romans resisted and their first army was
annihilated. This defeat was quickly followed by another; the Eastern
legions were demoralised, and things looked grave for Rome.
It was at this crisis that Marcus entrusted to his consort, Lucius
Veras, the command in the East: a foolish choice, scarcely less foolish
than the first folly of making him his consort. For Lucius had neither
ability nor morality; he spent his days amidst the pleasant groves,
the flowers and the perfumes and the sensuous society of Antioch. He
committed the campaign to the care of his generals, the chief of them,
Avidius Cassius, a soldier tried and true; whilst he himself frittered
away his hours in soft dalliance amidst the ill-famed groves of Daphne,
which made Antioch the lodestone of voluptuaries from all parts of the
world. Avidius Cassius with Priscus and Martius Veras ended the war
within a few years; and Lucius Verus with a heavy heart turned his face
towards the West, to celebrate a triumph and receive high titles in
Rome for his great achievements. But Rome paid dearly for the conquest;
for with the army came the plague which devastated the capital and
Italy.
In the desolation which surrounded him, the Stoic Emperor recognised
the need for something more inspiring than the maxims of his masters,
Zeno and Chrysippus. The futility of such chamber philosophy and
religion was borne home to him with fearful intensity by the human
misery he saw on every side, the stench of the unburied dead, the
haggard looks and demoniacal cries of the living. He recognised, then,
that a syllogism never soothed an aching heart; that for life’s tragic
moments we need a living, breathing, throbbing, thrilling, religion,
a religion of the whole man. Hence he called on all the gods, old and
new, Roman, Grecian, Eastern and Egyptian, to aid the suffering State.
Every altar reeked with the incense of sacrifice; great nobles marched
in procession bearing the statues of the gods; noble ladies might be
seen, half-naked, standing beneath the platform from which the hot
blood of the slain bull poured down upon them, enduring this baptism of
the Great Mother, by which they were to be “reborn for eternity”; at
eventide a wanderer in the Campus Martius might hear the vesper song
of Isis, and entering her shrine might see dark Egyptians holding up
the water of the Nile for adoration; or, descending into a subterranean
chapel, he might see the slave, the soldier, and the senator, side
by side, attending at the strange mystic initiations of Mithra, the
Unconquered One, the god of light, the strong young god in Phrygian cap
and loose flowing mantle caught by the sculptor in the symbolic slaying
of the bull. No extravagance of superstition, however fantastic, was
omitted, not even the greatest extravagance of all, the cry of “the
Christians to the lions.” If Aurelius had but known; if Rome in its
desolation could have seen; if modern Europe and its rulers could but
realise the secret healing of Christ’s religion of sorrow, how much
the world, laboured and heavy-burdened, would be refreshed! But Marcus
did not know this healing. He prayed and he sacrificed: but the plague
did not pass, nor were his people comforted. The ancient world never
recovered from the blow, Niebuhr says. While it yet raged, another call
to arms came, this time from the Danube.
It was the severest onset of the barbarians which the Roman Empire had
yet endured. All the tribes from the Rhine to the Don, Teutonic and
Slavonic, seemed in league against it. These wild Northmen, chaste and
strong of limb, had hurled themselves on the Danube frontier and broken
into the sacred precincts of the _Pax Romana_. The Danube passed,
Pannonia, Dacia, Greece were overrun. The prints of Northern hoofs were
on the plains of Rhætia and Noricum; and the wild Marcomanni were seen
in the streets of Venice and Padua. Well might the Romans fear that
it would be with them now as it was in the days of Hannibal. Aye, and
even worse; for the Romans of the second century of the Empire were
not the Romans of the second or third century before the fall of the
Republic; and to replace a Scipio and a Marcellus, they had for leader
not a Vespasian or a Trajan, but a sickly “Greekling,” “a philosophical
old woman,” as Avidius Cassius used to call him. This was their Emperor
Aurelius, and in these wars on the Danube he was amply to refute these
taunts of the men of rougher mould. His was the great task of stemming
the first inflow of those nomadic tribes which, two centuries later,
swept in full flood-tide over the Empire; and he performed it well if
not greatly.
The heralds of the revolt found him at his work of peace and
legislation, of charity and self-culture in the capital. Now came
the test of his principles of devotion to duty. Would he face the
loneliness, spiritual and intellectual, the barbarity, the long-drawn
desolation of a campaign in the dull plains of Hungary? Would he be a
leader to his people? or would he, like certain selfish souls, wrap
himself in himself and seek his own advancement towards the sapiency of
the perfect Stoic at the cost of his people? It was the test of a man;
and he answered well to it. He elected to lead the troops in person.
This was in the year A.D. 167. The Romans were just then busy burying
their plague-stricken, but the call to arms would brook no delay; and
to arms they went. War, the plague, and the Emperor’s charities had
exhausted the treasury; hence the difficulty in raising supplies and
a force. It was then that he sold by auction the treasures of the
palace and his villas and thus secured the required funds. To swell
the numbers of his troops he compelled the gladiators to serve. This
was the most unpopular act of his reign as it was one of the most
creditable. “He wants to steal our amusements from us,” cried one;
“Aye, to compel us to be philosophers,” cried another of the mob, who
cared for nothing but the _panem et circenses_, the public dole of food
and the public games. The sporting set, the loungers, the fast young
men about town, the brutalised rabble, almost created a revolt against
the act. They cared little for the Empire, if they could but get their
meed of blood; the gladiators were better spent in glutting their evil
eyes than in checking the onrush of those Wandering Nations, who were
one day to sit in those amphitheatres and exult over fallen Rome,
having changed the history of Europe and the world.
The two Emperors led the troops in all the glory of warlike array
through the streets of Rome to the Northern gates. Aurelius, as he
rode in all the Imperial adornment, yet with sad, wistful look and
countenance sickled o’er with the pale cast of thought, contrasted
ominously with the splendour of the pageant of which he was the centre.
He seemed to be far away from it all--far away, yes, in the depths of
his own soul. On one side of him rode Lucius Verus, resplendent and
gay, the hero of levees and banquets; on the other, Faustina, now as
ever outshining all in the great functions of state, her beauty making
her the darling of the mob. Throughout the war she abode with Marcus
faithfully and was called by the army the _Mater castrorum_, the mother
of the camp; and the Emperor thanked the gods for the solace her
fidelity brought to him.
The army reached Venice in A.D. 168. Such had been the energy of their
preparations that a panic seized the barbarian invaders. They begged
for peace; but Marcus had determined that there should be no peace
or a lasting one; the barbarians must be taught a lesson; and he set
about subjugating the tribes one by one. In this he was for a time
successful, thanks mainly to his able generals Pompeianus and Pertinax.
The Quadi were compelled to restore the 60,000 Roman prisoners they
had taken; and in A.D. 169 the Emperors felt justified in returning to
Rome, leaving the completion of the war to their generals. On the way
Verus died and this left Marcus sole ruler. At Rome he paid the highest
honours, civil and religious, to his colleague’s questionable memory.
His stay there was, however, abruptly cut short as, owing to the
acuteness of the war with the Marcomanni and Jazyges, he had to return
again to the fighting line. The Romans once more met with severe
defeats. Two commanders fell; and it was not till A.D. 172 that the
tide of victory turned. In that year the Marcomanni suffered an
overwhelming defeat and the Emperor assumed the title _Germanicus_. But
in the meantime the Quadi had rebelled and driven out their king, who
was a friend of the Romans, and elected one opposed to Rome. Marcus
then turned his attention to these: he set a price of 1,000 pieces of
gold on the head of the rebel king; and on his being betrayed sent him
to Alexandria.
During one of these campaigns against the Quadi occurred the incident
of the “thundering legion”--a story famous in the early Church and much
controverted. It is interesting as bringing Marcus and the Christians
face to face for the first time.
It was during the hot summer months that a legion containing many
Christians was surrounded by the Quadi in a wooded and hilly country.
They were cut off from all means of getting water, and suffered
terribly from the heat and thirst. In these straits, the story goes on
to say, the Christians in the legion knelt and prayed for release; and
lo! suddenly the whole heavens became overcast; a storm gathered and
broke over the opposing forces; rain fell abundantly and the Romans
gathered it in their helmets and in the hollows of their shields,
and drank eagerly and gave to drink to their horses. The barbarians
saw that they must now attack before the Romans recovered strength.
But the rain which had refreshed the Romans turned to blinding hail
against their foes; and the rain and the lightning “burnt them like
oil insomuch as they wounded one another to extinguish the fire with
blood.” Many, seeing such evident favour from heaven for the Roman
cause, went over to their side; and Marcus Aurelius received them
mercifully.
There are many controverted points in connexion with the details of
this story, and the use made of it by the Christian apologists, into
which this is not the place to enter. Certain it is that this Danube
legion got the title of _Fulminata_, at least for some time; even
though the twelfth legion, to whom it properly belonged since the time
of Augustus, were at this time at the Euphrates. It is certain, too,
that everyone, pagan and Christian, regarded the incident as a miracle.
Some attributed it to the prayers of the Emperor himself, and this
view was commemorated in bas-reliefs of the Antonine column, erected
after death to his memory and to be seen to this day. There one sees
represented in the air the winged figure of an old man with streaming
hair and beard, the god of rain, Jupiter Pluvius; while the Romans with
helmets and shields receive the torrents of rain, and their enemies lie
transfixed to the ground by the hail and lightning. Marcus Aurelius
himself was represented in pictures with hands uplifted and praying,
with strange forgetfulness of his barbarities against the Christians,
“Jove to thee do I lift this hand, which hath never shed blood.”
Others attributed this miracle to the Egyptian magician Arnouphis, who
accompanied the army.
That there were Christians “in Cæsar’s household” and round Marcus
Aurelius is certain. That there were many Christians in this legion
cannot reasonably be denied. But the great import of the event for
Tertullian and other Christian apologists, before and after him, was
based on a letter undoubtedly apocryphal, which Marcus Aurelius was
supposed to have written to the Senate, acknowledging that he had been
saved by Christian prayers and forbidding their further persecution.
The truth is that Marcus’ attitude to the Christians was in no way
changed for the better by this incident, but rather for the worse.
As Renan says: “In three or four years the persecution reached the
highest pitch of fury it knew before Decius.” In Africa persecution was
widespread and furious; Sardinia was crowded with Christian exiles; in
Byzantium nearly the whole population was put to death with torture;
while in Asia, where the Christians were especially numerous, officials
vented all their fury on them, interpreting the laws in a way in which
they had never been intended to be applied. “Truly,” to quote Renan
again, “these repeated persecutions were a bloody contradiction to a
century of humanity.” Marcus was not directly responsible for all this
cruelty; he was probably for the most part passive and indifferent.
Some of the Christian apologists certainly looked on him as friendly,
as, for instance, Melito, who wrote to him: “As for yourself, who
cherish the same kind of feeling for us [as the other good Emperors],
with a heightened degree of philanthropy and philosophy, we rest
assured that you will do what we ask you.” But the confidence of the
Christians in Marcus’ humanity and friendship for them and in his
ability to restrain the pagan mob or his own more brutal officials was
ill-founded. This passing incident in the Danube campaign was of little
importance in the history of the Empire, but its interest will never
die as a picturesque detail in the great world-battle of the spirit
then in its acutest stage.
In A.D. 175 Marcus followed up his reduction of the Quadi by that of
the Jazyges. This practically ended the war. Marcus intended securing
the fruit of his conquest by establishing two more Roman provinces; but
a new danger had appeared in the East, and he had to conclude a hasty
peace with the barbarians and to hurry with all speed to Syria.
These victories in the North stirred in him no pride. Here is his sadly
disillusioned comment on the whole campaign: “A spider is proud when
it has caught a fly, and a hunter when he has caught a poor hare, and
another when he has taken a little fish in a net, and another when he
has taken wild boars, _and another when he has taken_ _Sarmatians_.
_Are not these robbers, if thou examinest their principles?_”
He can scarcely have been an inspiring general who took this view of
war; and such sentiments have caused many active spirits to find him
a very dull person indeed. After this we can scarcely wonder at the
remark of one of his generals: “The soldiers don’t understand you;
they don’t know Greek.” In the frieze on the Antonine column which
represents him on horseback, surrounded by banners and triumphant
soldiers, receiving the submission of the kneeling Germans, there is
the same disenchantment in his eyes, the same firm lines of duty on the
lips; there is no flash of enthusiasm, no gloating over the fallen. He
seems absorbed in the thought that all is vanity, and the vanquished
look at him with a puzzled, interested look which has something of
affection in it.