Aurelian against the Palmyrenes.The vigorous and prudent emperor, to whom the dominion now had fallen, broke at once with the Palmyrene co-ordinate government, which then could not but have and had as its consequence, that Vaballathus himself was proclaimed by his people as emperor. Egypt was already, at the close of the year 270, brought back to the empire after hard struggles by the brave general Probus, afterwards the successor of Aurelian.[112] It is true that the second city of the empire, Alexandria, paid for this victory almost with its existence, as will be set forth in the following section. More difficult was the reduction of the remote Syrian oasis. All other Oriental wars of the imperial period had chiefly been waged by imperial troops having their home in the East; here, where the West had once more to subdue the revolted East, there fought once more, as in the time of the free republic, Occidentals against Orientals,[113] the soldiers of the Rhine and of the Danube with those of the Syrian desert. The mighty expedition began, apparently towards the close of the year 271; without encountering resistance the Roman army arrived at the frontier of Cappadocia; here the town of Tyana, which barred the Cilician passes, gave serious opposition. After it had fallen, and Aurelian, by gentle treatment of the inhabitants, had smoothed his way to further successes, he crossed the Taurus, and, passing through Cilicia, arrived in Syria. If Zenobia, as is not to be doubted, had reckoned on active support from the side of the Persian king, she found herself deceived. The aged king Shapur did not interfere in this war, and the mistress of the Roman East continued to be left to her own military resources, of which perhaps even a portion took the side of the legitimate Augustus. At Antioch the Palmyrene chief force under the general Zabdas stopped the emperor’s way; Zenobia herself was present. A successful combat against the superior Palmyrene cavalry on the Orontes delivered into the hands of Aurelian the town, which not less than Tyana received full pardon—he justly recognised that the subjects of the empire were hardly to be blamed, when they had submitted to the Palmyrene prince appointed as commander in chief by the Roman government itself. The Palmyrenes, after having engaged in a conflict on their retreat at Daphne, the suburb of Antioch, marched off, and struck into the great route which leads from the capital of Syria to Hemesa and thence through the desert to Palmyra.
Battle at Hemesa.Aurelian summoned the queen to submit, pointing to the notable losses endured in the conflicts on the Orontes. These were Romans only, answered the queen; the Orientals did not yet admit that they were conquered. At Hemesa[114] she took her stand for the decisive battle. It was long and bloody; the Roman cavalry gave way and broke up in flight; but the legions decided, and victory remained with the Romans. The march was more difficult than the conflict. The distance from Hemesa to Palmyra amounts in a direct line to seventy miles, and, although at that epoch of highly developed Syrian civilisation the region was not waste in the same degree as at present, the march of Aurelian still remains a considerable feat, especially as the light horsemen of the enemy swarmed round the Roman army on all sides. Aurelian, however, reached his goal, and began the siege of the strong and well-provisioned city; more difficult than the siege itself was the bringing up of provisions for the besieging army. At length the courage of the princess sank, and she escaped from the city to seek aid from the Persians. Fortune still further helped the emperor. The pursuing Roman cavalry took her captive with her son, just when she had arrived at the Euphrates and was about to embark in the rescuing boat; and the town, discouraged by her flight, capitulated (272). Aurelian granted here too, as in all this campaign, full pardon to the subdued burgesses. But a stern punishment was decreed over the queen and her functionaries and officers. Zenobia, after she had for years borne rule with masculine energy, did not now disdain to invoke a woman’s privileges, and to throw the responsibility on her advisers, of whom not a few, including the celebrated scholar, Cassius Longinus, perished under the axe of the executioner. She herself might not be wanting from the triumphal procession of the emperor, and she did not take the course of Cleopatra, but marched in golden chains, as a spectacle to the Roman multitude, before the chariot of the victor to the Roman capitol. But before Aurelian could celebrate his victory he had to repeat it.
Destruction of Palmyra.A few months after the surrender the Palmyrenes once more rose, killed the small Roman garrison serving there, and proclaimed one Antiochus[115] as ruler, while they at the same time attempted to induce the governor of Mesopotamia, Marcellinus, to revolt. The news reached the emperor when he had just crossed the Hellespont. He returned at once, and stood, earlier than friend or foe had anticipated, once more before the walls of the insurgent city. The rebels had not been prepared for this; there was this time no resistance, but also no mercy. Palmyra was destroyed, the commonwealth dissolved, the walls razed, the ornaments of the glorious temple of the sun transferred to the temple which, in memory of this victory, the emperor built to the sun-god of the East in Rome; only the forsaken halls and walls remained, as they still stand in part at the present day. This occurred in the year 273.[116] The flourishing of Palmyra was artificial, produced by the routes assigned to traffic and the great public buildings dependent on it. Now the government withdrew its hand from the unhappy city. Traffic sought and found other paths; as Mesopotamia was then viewed as a Roman province and soon came again to the empire, and the territory of the Nabataeans as far as the port of Aelana was in Roman hands, this intermediate station might be dispensed with, and the traffic may have betaken itself instead to Bostra or Beroea (Aleppo). The short meteor-like splendour of Palmyra and its princes was immediately followed by the desolation and silence which, from that time down to the present day, enwrap the miserable desert-village and the ruins of its colonnades.
Persian war of Carus.The ephemeral kingdom of Palmyra was in its origin as in its fall closely bound up with the relations of the Romans to the non-Roman East, but not less a part of the general history of the empire. For, like the western empire of Postumus, the eastern empire of Zenobia was one of those masses into which the mighty whole seemed then about to resolve itself. If during its subsistence its leaders endeavoured earnestly to set limits to the onset of the Persians, and indeed the development of its power was dependent on that very fact, not merely did it in its collapse seek deliverance from those same Persians, but probably in consequence of the revolt of Zenobia Armenia and Mesopotamia were lost to the Romans, and after the subjugation of Palmyra the Euphrates again for a time formed the frontier. The queen, when she arrived at it, hoped to find a reception among the Persians; and Aurelian omitted to lead the legions over it, seeing that Gaul, along with Spain and Britain, still at that time refused to recognise the government. He and his successor Probus were not able to take up this struggle. But when in the year 282, after the premature end of the latter, the troops proclaimed the commander next in rank, Marcus Aurelius Carus, as emperor, it was the first saying of the new ruler that the Persians should remember this choice, and he kept it. Immediately he advanced with the army into Armenia and re-established the earlier order there. At the frontier of the land he was met by Persian envoys, who declared themselves ready to grant all that was reasonable;[117] but they were hardly listened to, and the march went on incessantly. Mesopotamia too became once more Roman, and the Parthian residential cities Seleucia and Ctesiphon were again occupied by the Romans without encountering lengthened resistance—to which the war between brothers then raging in the Persian empire contributed its part.[118] The emperor had just crossed the Tigris, and was on the point of penetrating into the heart of the enemy’s country, when he met his death by violence, presumably by the hand of an assassin, and thereby the campaign also met its end. But his successor obtained in peace the cession of Armenia and Mesopotamia;[119] although Carus wore the purple little more than a year, he re-established the imperial frontier of Severus.
Persian war under Diocletian.Some years afterwards (293) a new ruler, Narseh, son of king Shapur, ascended the throne of Ctesiphon, and declared war on the Romans in the year 296 for the possession of Mesopotamia and Armenia.[120] Diocletian, who then had the supreme conduct of the empire generally, and of the East in particular, entrusted the management of the war to his imperial colleague Galerius Maximianus, a rough but brave general. The beginning was unfavourable. The Persians invaded Mesopotamia and reached as far as Carrhae; the Caesar led against them the Syrian legions over the Euphrates at Nicephorium; between these two positions the armies encountered each other, and the far weaker Roman force gave way. It was a hard blow, and the young general had to submit to severe reproaches, but he did not despair. For the next campaign reinforcements were brought up from the whole empire, and both rulers personally took the field; Diocletian took his position in Mesopotamia with the chief force, while Galerius, reinforced by the flower of the Illyrian troops that had in the meantime come up, met, with a force of 25,000 men, the enemy in Armenia, and inflicted on him a decisive defeat. The camp and the treasure, nay, even the harem, of the great-king fell into the hands of the warriors, and with difficulty Narseh himself escaped from capture. In order to recover the women and the children the king declared himself ready to conclude peace on any terms; his envoy Apharban conjured the Romans to spare the Persians, saying that the two empires, the Roman and the Parthian, were, as it were, the two eyes of the world, and neither could dispense with the other. It would have lain in the power of the Romans to add one more to their Oriental provinces; the prudent ruler contented himself with regulating the state of possession in the north-east. Mesopotamia remained, as a matter of course, in the Roman possession; the important commercial intercourse with the neighbouring foreign land was placed under strict state-control and essentially directed to the strong city of Nisibis, the basis of the Roman frontier-guard in eastern Mesopotamia. The Tigris was recognised as boundary of the direct Roman rule, to such an extent, however, that the whole of southern Armenia as far as the lake Thospitis (lake of Van) and the Euphrates, and so the whole upper valley of the Tigris, should belong to the Roman empire. This region lying in front of Mesopotamia did not become a province proper, but was administered after the previous fashion as the Roman satrapy of Sophene. Some decades later the strong fortress of Amida (Diarbekir) was constructed here, thenceforth the chief stronghold of the Romans in the region of the upper Tigris. At the same time the frontier between Armenia and Media was regulated afresh, and the supremacy of Rome over that land, as over Iberia, was once more confirmed. The peace did not impose important cessions of territory on the conquered, but it established a frontier favourable to the Romans, which for a considerable time served in these much contested regions as a demarcation of the two empires.[121] The policy of Trajan thereby obtained its complete accomplishment; at all events the centre of gravity of the Roman rule shifted itself just at this time from the West to the East.
CHAPTER X.
SYRIA AND THE LAND OF THE NABATAEANS.
Conquest of Syria.It was very gradually that the Romans, after acquiring the western half of the coasts of the Mediterranean, resolved on possessing themselves also of the eastern half. Not the resistance, which they here encountered in comparatively slight measure, but a well-founded fear of the denationalising consequences of such acquisitions, led to as prolonged an effort as possible on their part merely to preserve decisive political influence in those regions, and to the incorporation proper at least of Syria and Egypt taking place only when the state was already almost a monarchy. Doubtless the Roman empire became thereby geographically compact; the Mediterranean Sea, the proper basis of Rome after it was a great power, became on all sides a Roman inland lake; the navigation and commerce on its waters and shores formed politically an unity to the advantage of all that dwelt around. But by the side of geographical compactness went national bipartition. Through Greece and Macedonia the Roman state would never have become binational, any more than the Greek cities of Neapolis and Massalia had Hellenised Campania and Provence. But, while in Europe and Africa the Greek domain vanishes in presence of the compact mass of the Latin, so much of the third continent as was drawn, with the Nile-valley rightfully pertaining to it, into this cycle of culture belonged exclusively to the Greeks, and Antioch and Alexandria in particular were the true pillars of the Hellenic development that attained its culmination in Alexander—centres of Hellenic life and Hellenic culture, and great cities, as was Rome. After having set forth in the preceding chapter the conflict between the East and West in and around Armenia and Mesopotamia, that filled the whole period of the empire, we turn to describe the relations of the Syrian regions, as they took shape at the same time. What we mean is the territory which is separated by the mountain-chain of Pisidia, Isauria, and Western Cilicia from Asia Minor; by the eastern continuation of these mountains and the Euphrates from Armenia and Mesopotamia, by the Arabian desert from the Parthian empire and from Egypt; only it seemed fitting to deal with the peculiar fortunes of Judaea in a special section. In accordance with the diversity of political development under the imperial government, we shall speak in the first instance of Syria proper, the northern portion of this territory, and of the Phoenician coast that stretches along under the Libanus, and then of the country lying behind Palestine—the territory of the Nabataeans. What was to be said about Palmyra has already found its place in the preceding chapter.
Provincial government.After the partition of the provinces between the emperor and the senate, Syria was under imperial administration, and was in the East, like Gaul in the West, the central seat of civil and military control. This governorship was from the beginning the most esteemed of all, and only became in course of time all the more thought of. Its holder, like the governor of the two Germanies, wielded the command over four legions, and while the administration of the inland Gallic districts was taken away from the commanders of the Rhine-army and a certain restriction was involved in the very fact of their co-ordination, the governor of Syria retained the civil administration of the whole large province undiminished, and held for long alone in all Asia a command of the first rank. Under Vespasian, indeed, he obtained in the governors of Palestine and Cappadocia two colleagues likewise commanding legions; but, on the other hand, through the annexation of the kingdom of Commagene, and soon afterwards of the principalities in the Libanus, the field of his administration was increased. It was only in the course of the second century that a diminution of his prerogatives occurred, when Hadrian took one of the four legions from the governor of Syria and handed it over to the governor of Palestine. It was Severus who at length withdrew the first place in the Roman military hierarchy from the Syrian governor. After having subdued the province—which had wished at that time to make Niger emperor, as it had formerly done with its governor Vespasian—amidst resistance from the capital Antioch in particular, he ordained its partition into a northern and a southern half, and gave to the governor of the former, which was called Coele-Syria, two legions, to the governor of the latter, the province of Syro-Phoenicia, one.