Legions of Rome (37 page)

It is clear that at least two of the legions engaged in this war had performed so well that Augustus felt the
need to honor them. They had perhaps marched with the emperor himself during the campaign. These two, the 1st and the 2nd, received the emperor’s own new honorific, becoming the 1st Augusta and 2nd Augusta legions.

Two other legions were to receive the Augusta title under Augustus, the 3rd Augusta and the 8th Augusta. There is no record of either legion serving in Spain, during the Cantabrian War or at any other time. The 3rd Augusta was based in North Africa, and it is likely that it earned its Augusta title there in a 19
BC
campaign. The 8th Augusta’s location during this period is uncertain.

But the fighting in Spain was not yet over. Hardly had Augustus departed from Spain than Lucius Aemilius, the governor left in charge by him, received envoys from the Cantabrians and Asturians who said that the tribes wished to present his army with grain and other things, and asked him to send a large number of men to bring back the gifts. Aemilius, suspecting nothing, accordingly sent “a considerable number of soldiers” into the mountains. These Roman troops were ambushed and overpowered by the tribes and made prisoners. Led away to various places in the mountains, the captive legionaries were all eventually executed.

Aemilius reacted by ordering total war on the tribes. As a result, “their country was devastated,” said Dio. A number of forts were burned, and every Spanish fighting man taken alive had his hands cuts off. “They were quickly subdued.” [Dio,
LXIII
, 29] The war was now over. When Augustus returned to Rome, to signify that his empire was once again at peace he closed the gates of the ancient Arch of Janus, which stood in the Forum.

The Roman world had been pacified—but not for long.

22
BC
III. ROME INVADES ETHIOPIA
Penetrating Africa

Candace, ruler of the African Kingdom of Kush, in what the Romans called Ethiopia but what today is known as the Sudan, had apparently heard that the Roman emperor Augustus was engaged in a war in faraway Spain. Some 650 years before this, the kings of Kush had ruled Egypt, with their capital, Napata, becoming the religious center of the Egyptian world. The ambitious Candace, thinking that Egypt’s Roman
rulers would be distracted by their war in Spain, and also learning that two years earlier the Roman legions based in Egypt had lost many men to sunstroke during a disastrous expedition to Arabia, marched a Kushite army along the Nile and entered Egypt.

“Ravaging everything they encountered,” the Kushite army advanced to the southernmost Egyptian city, Elephantine, site of an ancient fortress on an island in the Nile. [Dio,
LIV
, 5] News of this incursion reached the Alexandria-based Prefect of Egypt, Publius Petronius. [Pliny the Elder,
NH
,
VI
, 181. Cassius Dio, writing two centuries later, called the prefect
Gaius
Petronius:
LIV
, 5.] At that time, there were three legions stationed in Egypt, the 3rd Cyrenaica, 12th Fulminata and 22nd Deiotariana. All of them were led by their senior tribunes, for a law of Augustus required that no member of the Senatorial Order enter Egypt, let alone hold a command there. Petronius quickly put together an army from the legions and auxiliary units in the province, then marched south to counter Candace.

“Hoping to make good their escape,” the Kushites hastily withdrew as the Roman army approached Elephantine. [Dio,
LIV
, 5] Petronius’ troops overtook the invaders on the road south, where they routed the Kushite force. Candace himself escaped with part of his army and fled for his capital. Petronius, seeing the opportunity for further glory, led his army after the fleeing enemy, and was drawn down the Nile. Storming one Kushite city after another, Petronius left a Roman garrison at one of them and pushed on to famed Napata.

Built on a hill called the Barkol, Napata was then 700 years old. The Barkol had been considered by the ancient Egyptians to be the home of their god Ammon. Around the bottom of the hill stood a number of Egyptian temples. The Roman army stormed the city’s wall and took Napata with ease. Petronius then ordered that the city be destroyed, and the buildings of Napata, including the handsome temples, were razed to the ground.

Leaving a garrison at the ruined city, Petronius marched on, heading south into the desert. Soon, lack of water and heatstroke affected his troops, who were clad in their helmets and armor. “Finding himself unable to advance farther on account of the sand and the heat,” the Roman commander eventually turned his army around. [Ibid.]

Candace had meanwhile reformed his army, and attacked Petronius’ garrisons; it took the return of Petronius’ army to rescue them. Petronius then “compelled Candace to make terms with him,” before he withdrew to Egypt with his troops and baggage train weighed down with booty. His legions returned to their bases. This was to be one of the few Roman armies to penetrate Africa south of Egypt in all of Roman history.

19
BC
IV. SECOND CANTABRIAN WAR
Treachery and dishonor in Spain

With Augustus on an extended tour of the East, his long-time close friend and deputy Marcus Agrippa was sent to govern Gaul and respond to recent raids from across the Rhine by German tribes. Agrippa was just a year older than Augustus. They had been at school together in Apollonia in Greece in March 44
BC
when word reached them that Augustus’ great-uncle Julius Caesar had been murdered in Rome. The pair had immediately set off for Italy, to forge a partnership that was unique in Roman history, for Agrippa was the most loyal of deputies and never once showed any interest in seeking supreme power for himself.

Agrippa had “put a stop to those troubles” affecting the Gauls when word arrived that the Cantabrians had risen in revolt in northern Spain. [Dio,
LIV
, 11] A number of men of the Cantabri tribe who had been sold into slavery in Spain had apparently
secretly concerted a plan for revolt. All at once they rose up, murdered their masters and escaped to their homeland. Back in the mountains, the fugitives convinced many of their countrymen to join them in a revolution against Rome. The rebels quickly seized several mountain towns, walled them in, and challenged the Roman army to attempt to dislodge them.

Hurrying over the Pyrenees from Gaul, Marcus Agrippa took charge of operations against the rebels. But he soon encountered problems with his own men. “Not a few of them were too old and were exhausted by the continual wars,” said Dio. Many of Agrippa’s troops refused to obey orders to go into the mountains, expecting certain ambush and “fearing the Cantabri as men hard to subdue.” [Dio,
LIV
, 11] Partly by disciplining them and partly by exhorting them, the general was able to motivate his legionaries and the operation went forward.

The year’s campaign was a grueling one, during which Agrippa “met with many reverses.” [Ibid.] While the Cantabri had been living among the Romans as slaves they had familiarized themselves with Roman ways, and having once been enslaved for opposing Rome they had no doubt that if captured they would not be spared a second time. This made the leading rebels fearless, even reckless.

By the end of the year, Agrippa had defeated the rebels but at significant cost, “losing many soldiers.” Other troops, he demoted, “because they kept being defeated.” [Ibid.] The legions even lost several standards in the fighting, a matter of great dishonor. [
Res Gest
.,
V
, 29] Agrippa was so dissatisfied with the performance of the entire 1st Augusta Legion that he deprived it of the Augusta title it had so recently been granted by the emperor. [Dio,
LIV
, 11]

In the end, Agrippa made captives of the entire Cantabri tribe. He executed almost all the males ages 17 to 46, disarmed those men who survived, and by forced migration brought every remaining member of the tribe down from the mountains and settled them on the plains. But so disgusted was he by the poor fighting qualities of some of his troops and the cost of success that Agrippa did not send a formal message to the Senate in Rome claiming a great victory. And when the Senate voted him a Triumph for the campaign, he declined it.

There would be brief unrest among the subjected peoples of northern Spain three years later, which was quickly put down, but by the time Augustus himself revisited Spain in 14
BC
, the peninsula was peaceful. The emperor was back in Rome the following year.

16
BC
V. THE 5TH ALAUDAE LOSES ITS EAGLE
Dishonour in Gaul

After spending ten years in northern Spain as one of the legions fighting the Cantabrian War in 19
BC
, with the war’s conclusion the 5th Alaudae Legion was transferred to the Lower Rhine, to face the tribes of Germany across the great river. There, three years later, the legion suffered one of the greatest humiliations that any legion could experience.

East of the Rhine, Germany’s Tencteri tribe and their neighbors, the Usipetes and Sugambri, had seized Romans traveling through their territory and crucified them. Realizing that Rome would send troops to exact reprisals, the tribes decided to take pre-emptive action by launching a raid across the Rhine into Rome’s German and Gallic provinces. As a result, the Gauls “suffered much at the hands of the Germans.” [Dio,
LIV
, 21]

Marcus Lollius, Rome’s governor of Lower Germany, immediately dispatched Roman cavalry to intercept the Germans, then set off from his headquarters at Cologne to meet the marauders with the 5th Alaudae Legion. Marcus, a consul in 21
BC
, was guardian of Augustus’ grandson Gaius Caesar, and was close to the emperor. He possessed an excellent military reputation after subjugating the Bessi tribe in Thrace and Moesia earlier in his career, and he confidently advanced toward the German invaders without waiting to gather a larger force.

Even in Tacitus’ day, a century later, the Tencteri, the leaders of the invasion, had a formidable reputation. “The Tencteri, besides sharing in the general military distinction [of the German tribes], excel in horsemanship,” Tacitus wrote. [
Germ
., 32] Children of the Tencteri grew up on horseback, and on a tribesman’s death his horses went to his son; not necessarily the eldest son, said Tacitus, but “the keenest and ablest soldier.” [Ibid.]

The Germans laid an ambush for the auxiliary cavalry sent against them by Lollius, and routed them. Surviving cavalrymen fled back toward Lollius’ approaching column, leading the pursuing Germans straight to the Roman infantry. Caught on the march, the 5th Alaudae struggled to fight off the Germans, who homed in on the legion’s golden eagle standard. The eagle was wrested away from its defenders, and the legion, its 1st cohort severely mauled, was forced to withdraw.

Lollius retreated, and began assembling a much larger force from the other legions of the army of the Lower Rhine. Augustus, meanwhile, was in Gaul, dealing with civil matters. On hearing of Lollius’ reverse he hurried to the Rhine with a substantial force which would have included cohorts of the Praetorian Guard. On hearing that two large Roman armies would soon be converging on them, the trio of German tribes withdrew back across the Rhine with the spoils from their campaign. Their envoys quickly entered into negotiations with Augustus as soon as he arrived at the Rhine, and sealed a peace treaty with him by providing hostages.

In the opinion of later Roman biographer Suetonius, “Lollius’ defeat was ignominious rather than of strategic importance.” [Suet.,
II
, 23] Even so, Lollius’ reputation was ruined by the “disgraceful” loss of a sacred legionary eagle. [Ibid.] Because of that disgrace, other Roman authors would savage him. “He was a man more eager for money that for honest action,” wrote Velleius Paterculus, an officer who served under Tiberius; “and of vicious habits.” [Velle.,
II, XCVII
] One of those habits, according to Suetonius, was the spreading of slanders about Tiberius. [Suet.,
III
, 12]

With his official career brought to an abrupt end by this battle, Lollius would spend his later years counseling his ward, Gaius Caesar. As for the 5th Alaudae Legion, it would never shake off the shame of the loss of its eagle, which was nothing short of a “disaster” according to historian Tacitus. [Tac.,
A
,
I
, 10]

This military reverse west of the Rhine was a warning which would not be lost on Augustus. The Rhine frontier was much too porous, and the Germans too numerous. If the Germans were allowed to think that they could get away with emulating the Tencteri and their fellow raiders, Rome’s northwestern frontier would soon teem with German invaders. Orders were issued for numerous legions to be transferred to the Rhine to create a strong bulwark against further incursions.