Legions of Rome (50 page)

Linking up, Corbulo’s two forces advanced on the Armenian capital, Artaxata, fording the River Avaxes downstream then swinging around to assault the city from the east. Marching in battle order on the plain and flanked by foot archers and squadrons of cavalry extending to the hills, the 6th Ferrata occupied the column’s left wing, the 3rd Gallica the right. The 10th Fretensis marched in the middle with the baggage. Cavalry and auxiliaries comprised the rearguard.

King Tiridates brought thousands of horse archers pounding out on to the plain to intimidate the Roman troops, staying out of missile range on the flanks and keeping pace with the column. A young Roman cavalry prefect who had a rush of blood and galloped too close to the shadowing enemy, was filled with Armenian arrows. As night fell, Tiridates’ horse archers melted away.

The next day, Tiridates and his army were reported to be withdrawing to the east. When Corbulo arrived outside Artaxata, the inhabitants threw open the gates. Because he had no capacity to hold or defend the exposed city, Corbulo ordered the inhabitants to pack and leave, then burned their city to the ground. He then marched west, with his troops unhappy that they had run out of grain for their daily bread and had only meat to eat. Nonetheless, the legionaries stormed two fortresses before the army reached the second city of Armenia, Tigranocerta, on the River Nicephorius in the southwest.

On hearing from his friend Frontinus that the Tigranocertans were very likely to make an obstinate defense, Corbulo executed Vadandus, a captured Armenian noble, then had Vadandus’ head shot into the city by ballista. “When the leaders of the city saw this,” said Frontinus, it “so filled them with consternation that they made haste to surrender.” Tigranocerta swiftly opened its gates to Corbulo and his legions. [Front.,
Strat
.,
II
, 5]

Nero had chosen a Cappodocian noble, Tigranes, to be king of Armenia, and the prince now arrived at Tigranocerta. Leaving Tigranes a palace guard of two legionary cohorts, 1,500 auxiliary infantry and some cavalry, Corbulo withdrew to Syria, of which he became governor on the death in office of incumbent Ummidius Quadratus.

After a swift, unstoppable campaign by Corbulo’s three legions, Armenia was again in the Roman sphere.

AD
58–60
XIX. RIOTING IN JERUSALEM
Legionaries save the apostle Paul

On a late summer day in
AD
58, the guard cohort of the 3rd Gallica Legion stationed at Jerusalem’s Antonia Fortress was unexpectedly called to arms. That afternoon, toward the end of the “hour of prayer” at the Jewish temple up on the Temple Mount, a riot had erupted, and “all Jerusalem was in uproar.” [Acts, 21; 31]

A Jewish man from Cilicia had been assaulted in the Temple, then thrown out. As temple attendants pushed its massive bronze doors shut, the Cilician was being beaten by a crowd of angry Jews that grew larger by the minute. The 3rd Gallica’s camp-prefect at the Antonia, Claudius Lysias, led forth “soldiers and centurions, and ran down to them.” When the troops arrived on the scene, the crowd drew back. Camp-Prefect Lysias ordered the battered victim, a bald, bearded man in middle age,
to be bound hand and foot with two chains, then demanded to know from the crowd who this fellow was and what he had done. [Ibid., 32]

Lysias was answered by a cacophony of voices, all saying something different, so he ordered his men to carry the prisoner back to the Antonia. With the crowd following them, calling for the man’s death, he was carried to the Antonia’s gate. At the top of sixty steps that led to the gate, the prisoner, speaking Greek, asked Lysias if he might talk to him. Lysias, who, like many Romans throughout the East, was of Greek extraction, was surprised that the Jew spoke Greek. He then thought that he recognized the fellow as the Egyptian who, four years before, had led 4,000 followers against Jerusalem, only to have his band bloodily dispersed by the Roman garrison. But the man said that he was from the city of Tarsus in Cilicia, then asked for permission to speak to the crowd. Lysias agreed.

From the Antonia’s steps, the Jew addressed the mob, which fell silent, as, speaking in their native tongue, he said that he was Saul of Tarsus, a Cilician Jew who had studied at Jerusalem under Gamaliel, a leading rabbi of the day. Later, he said, under the instructions of the Jewish High Priest and the Sanhedrin, he had hunted and imprisoned members of the breakaway Nazarene sect—the Christians. But while on the road to Damascus to collect more Christian prisoners, he had received a vision of Jesus of Nazareth. When he said that Jesus had instructed him to take his teachings to non-Jews, however, the mob exploded with rage. “It is not fit that he should live!” they exclaimed, casting off their clothes and throwing dust in the air in the Jewish custom. [Ibid., 22]

Camp-Prefect Lysias had the prisoner hustled inside the fortress and ordered that he should be interrogated under the lash. As the prisoner was being tied to a column with leather thongs and a flagellator was preparing, the prisoner asked the 3rd Gallica centurion in charge if it was lawful to whip a man who was a Roman citizen without a sentence from a magistrate. It was indeed illegal to punish a citizen without trial, and the worried centurion hurried off to tell the camp-prefect what the man had said. Lysias immediately came to see the prisoner, and demanded to know if he did truly hold citizenship. The man replied that he did. [Ibid., 25]

Apart from having the records checked in Tarsus, there was no way of confirming the prisoner’s claim. Lysias was not convinced that the Jew would hold citizenship, saying that he himself had actually paid a large sum to acquire Roman citizenship when he was younger. The fact that Lysias’ first name was Claudius suggests that the
camp-prefect was a peregrine who had obtained his citizenship during the reign of Claudius, when the empress Valeria Messalina had notoriously taken bribes to arrange for her husband to grant citizenship to large numbers of people. The prisoner responded that he had been born a free man—intimating that he had possessed Roman citizenship since birth.

Lysias believed the man, who used both the Jewish name of Saul and the Roman name of Paulus. This was Paul, the Christian apostle. Lysias kept Paul in the fortress overnight. Next day, he took him before the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish religious counsel, to determine what charges they wished to lay against Paul, for the man had not broken any Roman law. When Paul revealed to the Sanhedrin that he had been raised a Pharisee, a Jewish sect which believed in resurrection, dissension broke out between the Sanhedrin’s Pharisee and Sadducee members—Sadducees did not believe in resurrection. As the Jewish argument raged, Lysias returned Paul to the Antonia Fortress.

Paul had a sister living in Jerusalem, and later that day her son learned that more than forty Sadducees had vowed not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul. The young man was admitted to the Antonia to visit his uncle, and when he told Paul about this murder plot, Paul informed the camp-prefect. Lysias decided that the best way to avert trouble was to spirit Paul out of Jerusalem and send him to the Procurator of Judea, Antonius Felix, at Caesarea, and let him decide the Jew’s fate. Accordingly, that evening Lysias had two of his centurions assemble an escort from the Roman troops stationed at Jerusalem. This comprised two centuries of legionaries, two centuries of auxiliary spearmen and seventy cavalrymen. [Ibid., 23–25]

As soon as darkness fell, in the third Roman hour of the night—roughly between 7.00 and 8.15 p.m.—Paul was led from the Antonia, placed on a mule, and with his escort around him, taken from the city. The centurion in charge took with him a letter from Lysias which urged Procurator Felix to decide what should be done. That night the party traveled as far as Antipatris in the Judean Hills. At dawn, the foot soldiers returned to Jerusalem while the cavalry continued on to Caesarea with Paul. [Ibid.]

Paul was kept at Caesarea for a year. In
AD
59, he asserted his right as a Roman citizen to appeal directly to the emperor, and was sent to Rome with other prisoners. They were escorted by a centurion Julius and soldiers who were presumably from the 3rd Gallica Legion. After surviving shipwreck on the Maltese coast, prisoners and escort would arrive in Rome in
AD
60. According to Christian tradition, Paul was released by Nero, only to be executed in Rome on other charges, several years later.

AD
60–61
XX. BOUDICCA’S BRITISH REVOLT
14th Gemina versus the warrior queen

“Close up the ranks, and having discharged your javelins, then with shields and swords continue the work of bloodshed and destruction.”

S
UETONIUS
P
AULINUS
, R
OMAN GENERAL, PRIOR TO THE BATTLE WITH
B
OUDICCA’S
B
RITONS
. T
ACITUS
,
Annals
,
XIV
, 36.

Intent on subjugating the Welsh island of Anglesey, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Britain for the past two years, marched out of Camulodunum in the spring of
AD
60, and, after assembling an army in the Welsh borderlands, pushed through the mountain valleys toward the northwest coast of Wales. His task force was made up of the 14th Gemina Legion and auxiliary cohorts including Batavian light infantry which had fought beside the 14th Gemina for decades, plus the famous Batavian Horse and other cavalry units.

Ambitious Paulinus had come to Britain with a big military reputation and something to prove. In
AD
42 he had cleared Mauretania of rebellious Moors, and, according to Tacitus, this “hard-working and sensible officer” was determined to use his latest posting to challenge Corbulo, who had recently recovered Armenia for Rome in the East, for the title of the empire’s leading soldier. [Tac.,
A
,
XIV
, 29;
Agr
., 5]

Paulinus recognized that a unifying strand of the disparate British tribes was the Druidic religion. The children of British nobles were educated by the Druid priests. Some of these children themselves later became priests. Others became leaders of their tribes. And all the tribes appealed to the same Celtic gods to give them the power to defeat their enemies. Because of its seditious potential, Augustus had made it illegal for Roman citizens to follow this Druidic religion, and Claudius banned it altogether, empire-wide. The Druids’ religious center was on Anglesey, which was called Mona Insula by the Romans. And Paulinus was determined to seize Mona and snuff out this illegal cult, and so snuff out the Druidic fire at the heart of British resistance.

During the winter, the men of the 14th Gemina Legion had prepared by building small, collapsible, flat-bottomed boats for river and inshore work. These were carried
in the task force’s baggage train and unloaded at each river encountered on their progress through north Wales. From their jumping-off point at Deva, today’s Chester, there were several major waterways to cross—the Dee, and later the Clwyd and Conway. The Roman force which reached the Menai Strait that summer launched its small boats once more, and began the crossing to Anglesey. They made the crossing in several places, the infantry rowing themselves across, part of the cavalry finding and using a shallow ford, and the Batavian squadrons swimming across with their horses.

Welsh warriors, probably from the Deceangli, Ordovice and Silure tribes, formed up on the southeastern shore of the island in “dense array” and waited for the Roman troops to land. [Tac.,
A
,
XIV
, 30] As the legionaries and their auxiliary colleagues clambered from their boats, frenzied women came dashing through the assembled Celtic ranks. Dressed in black, their hair disheveled, the women waved burning firebrands and shrieked like animals. All around, Druid priests raised their hands to heaven and called down the wrath of their gods on the heads of the invaders.

The sight of these witches’ crazy antics dazed the superstitious legionaries, and they froze in their ranks, not even raising their shields to protect themselves as they watched. It took Paulinus himself to take the lead, goading his men into action by asking if they were afraid of women. Without waiting for the cavalry to join them, the legionaries charged forward and cut down warriors and witches alike. Piles of Celtic bodies were soon being consumed in the flames of funeral pyres lit with the women’s own firebrands.

Roman troops spread over the island, locating the sacred groves where the Druids reputedly made human sacrifices, and rounding up prisoners. But as the Roman general was congratulating himself on his success, urgent dispatches arrived from the east—there had been an uprising of tribes in eastern Britain. Paulinus ordered his troops to prepare to march.

Prasutagus, king of the Iceni tribe of Norfolk in East Anglia, had died a year or so before. To preserve his kingdom, and his family’s control of it, he had willed his Iceni territory jointly to his two daughters and to the Roman emperor Nero. This was designed to keep his family in power, with the protection of Rome. But it had not worked out as Prasutagus had planned. Procurator Decianus Catus, the Roman financial administrator of the province of Britain, had taken the terms of the will literally and sent his staff into the Iceni kingdom to confiscate the homes and property of many nobles in the name of the emperor. The slaves in his employ had not only
ransacked the villa of the late king, they had raped his two virgin daughters. And when his widow had tried to intervene, they had stripped and whipped her. Queen Boudicca, young wife of King Prasutagus, had vowed vengeance on the Romans in the name of Andraste, Iceni goddess of war. [Dio,
LXII
, 6]

Cassius Dio wrote that there was another, financial cause of discontent among the British tribes at this time. The wealthy philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who was Nero’s chief secretary, had loaned the tribes 40 million sesterces, only to call in the money at short notice. Seneca, said Dio, had “resorted to severe measures in enacting” repayment of the loan. [Ibid., 2]