CHAPTER V. On the Danube

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.