The Flavian Consolidation and the Wars of Domitian

Vespasian: The Army Rebuilt70–79

The reconstruction was designed by men who had just read the year 69 as a engineer reads a collapse, and its first principle was that the failure had been structural. Vespasian and Mucianus disbanded outright the four legions whose record the civil war and the Batavian oath had made unsalvageable — I Germanica, IV Macedonica, XV Primigenia, XVI Gallica struck from the list, their numbers, like the Varian three, never reissued — and reconstituted the salvageable under new titles and new stations; the Rhine garrison was rebuilt with legions owing nothing to the Rhine's recent history, and the army's whole geography was reshuffled on the principle, stated by no source and legible in every posting, that no army group should again ripen into a faction: legions rotated away from provinces where they had grown roots, no more than two wintering together where four had brewed Vitellius. The deeper reform reached the auxilia, whose national blocs under native princes had given Civilis his instrument: the Batavian cohorts were re-formed, renumbered, and posted to Britain and the Danube — soldiering on, tribute-free, but far from home — and the pattern became system: auxiliary regiments henceforth recruited increasingly wherever they were stationed rather than where they were raised, officered by Roman equestrians rather than tribal notables, their ethnic names fading into administrative labels; the empire had learned to dilute what it could not do without. The fiscal reconstruction was of a piece — the census of 73–74, the reclaimed public lands, the provincial revenues rebased, the notorious ingenuities down to the urine-tax that produced, when Titus wrinkled his nose at it, the coin held to his face and the reign's motto: pecunia non olet, money does not smell — because the army reform's real substrate was solvency: the donative-auction of 69 was to be foreclosed by a treasury that could always outbid a usurper. On the frontiers the reign's signature was the quiet closure of strategic reentrants: in the East, Cappadocia converted from unarmed procuratorial province to a two-legion command facing Armenia, the client-kingdoms of Commagene and Lesser Armenia absorbed, the Euphrates road fortified — the eastern limes founded in a decade without a battle the sources thought worth narrating; and in the southwest angle of Germany, the reoccupation beyond Rhine and upper Danube of the Black Forest salient — the Agri Decumates — shortening the frontier's dog-leg and opening the lateral road between the army groups, the first installment of the policy Domitian's wars would complete. Titus's brief reign the compendium notes for its non-war: the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, which buried the Campanian towns whose excavation would one day teach the modern world most of what it knows of Roman daily life, and killed — leading the fleet's rescue-evacuation, the ancient world's largest — the elder Pliny, admiral, encyclopedist, and lost historian of the German wars this volume has mourned chapter by chapter; the amphitheater the war-spoils of Jerusalem had financed was dedicated in 80 with a hundred days of games; and in September 81 the succession passed, without a sword drawn, to the younger son.

Domitian: The Chattan War and the Dacian Emergency81–89

Domitian has descended to posterity through the senatorial tradition that survived him — Tacitus's and Pliny's generation, writing their acquittals after his murder — and the compendium's method requires the warning before the wars: the reign's military record must be read through sources committed to its contempt, against a documentary and archaeological record that persistently contradicts them. The Chattan war of 83, the emperor's first, is the test case: the literary tradition preserved it as theater — a manufactured campaign, slaves dressed as prisoners, a triumph Tacitus's Germania mocks in a clause — while the ground records the largest engineering advance of the century: the Taunus and Wetterau salients driven through the Chatti's approach-country, the watchtower chains and palisade traces of the earliest limes proper, the forts at the passes, and behind them the conversion, by the middle 80s, of the old military commands of the Rhine into the formal provinces of Upper and Lower Germany — the German project of Drusus ending, seventy years after the Teutoburg, not at the Elbe but as two tax-districts and a fortified line, which was the version that lasted. The Editor grades the triumph as the tradition's and the frontier as the emperor's, and passes to the war that was nobody's theater. In 85 the Dacians came over the frozen Danube — the kingdom Burebista had built and Caesar had scheduled for destruction, reconsolidated now in the Carpathian ring around Sarmizegetusa under a war-king the sources call Decebalus, "clever in war and clever in the doing of it," Dio's estimate, a match the empire had not met since Maroboduus — and destroyed the province of Moesia's field force, killing its governor Oppius Sabinus; Domitian came to the Danube in person, cleared the province, and in 86 authorized the punitive crossing under the Praetorian prefect Cornelius Fuscus, the dashing Flavian partisan of 69, who took the Guard and a battle-group over the river on a bridge of boats, marched into the Carpathian passes, and was annihilated — the prefect killed, a Roman field army destroyed entire in enemy country for the first time since Carrhae's scale, standards and siege-train lost into Sarmizegetusa's trophy-halls, and among the casualties, on the strong modern inference the Editor flags as inference, the Fifth Alaudae, Caesar's own Gallic larks, last heard of before this war and never after. Moesia was split into two consular provinces and the Danube's garrison began the climb — five legions toward nine — that would make it, within a generation, the heaviest frontier on earth; and in 88 the methodical counterstroke under Tettius Julianus came through the Iron Gates pass to Tapae, on the approaches to the Dacian capital, and broke Decebalus's army in the field. The kill was forfeited to the year 89: on the first of January the legate of Upper Germany, Antonius Saturninus, proclaimed himself at Mainz with two legions and the savings-deposits of their strongbox, in compact with the Chatti across the river — and the revolt collapsed in eleven days by the empire's oldest weather: the Rhine broke up early, the Chatti could not cross the moving ice, and the loyalist army of Lower Germany under Lappius Maximus destroyed the usurper at the Rhine — after which Lappius burned Saturninus's correspondence unread, the Pompeian gesture of Book V repeated under the monarchy, this time to save not the guilty but the emperor from what he would do with the names; Domitian, arriving with the Guard and his own suspicions, supplied the executions regardless, and the army reforms that followed wrote 69's lesson into regulation at last: no two legions to share a camp again — the great double fortresses broken up empire-wide — and the soldiers' deposit-funds capped below usurpation-financing size. The Danube war was then closed by the settlement of 89 that the senatorial tradition never forgave: Decebalus, beaten at Tapae but unbroken in his mountains, accepted client-kingship — the diadem conferred on his brother as proxy, the forms observed — and received in exchange subsidies in coin and, the scandal's core, Roman engineers and artillery-artificers for his fortresses; Dio's sneer and Pliny's echoes fixed it as tribute paid to a barbarian, and the Editor enters the stipulated defense: with Pannonia's own front collapsing that same season, the settlement bought the empire fifteen years of a two-front problem deferred — at the price, accounted in the next volume, of a Dacia armed and drilled by Rome for the rematch Trajan would require two wars and a hecatomb to win.

The Pannonian Wars and the End89–96

The Danube's other nations filled the reign's last decade. The Marcomanni and Quadi of the middle river — Maroboduus's heirs, client-managed for a century — had failed the Dacian war's call for auxiliaries; Domitian's punitive war against them and their Sarmatian neighbors the Iazyges of the Hungarian plain opened with a Roman defeat in 89 that helped price the Dacian peace, and flared again in 92 into the disaster the sources let slip in a clause: a legion — the Twenty-First Rapax, on the standard reconstruction — caught by Sarmatian heavy cavalry and destroyed with its legate, the second eagle-formation lost in six years; the emperor's eight-month personal campaign that followed restored the line and was marked at Rome, in January 93, not with a triumph but with a laurel laid silently on Capitoline Jupiter's knees — the gesture, for once, exactly calibrated to the facts, and the reign's Danubian ledger closing in balance: no conquest, two legions gone, the river held, and the strategic architecture — Pannonia's camps multiplying, the fleet patrolling, the roads doubling behind the bank — assembled for the wars of the next volume, which would be fought from Domitian's baseline by commanders Domitian had trained. Two army-measures of the reign outlasted every verdict on it: the pay-raise of 84 — the first since Julius Caesar, a third added to the legionary's three hundred sesterces a year, the professional army's wage finally repriced after a hundred and thirty years of inflation and mutiny-arithmetic — and the frontier itself as the reign left it: the palisade going up, the towers intervisible, the auxiliary forts strung at day's-march intervals from the North Sea to the Black Sea, the empire's edge become the empire's largest built object. The reign's end belongs to the political history this compendium enters only at the join: the terror of the 90s consumed senators, philosophers, and finally the emperor's own household's sense of safety, and on the eighteenth of September 96 Domitian was stabbed to death in his bedroom by a conspiracy of freedmen and chamberlains — the steward Stephanus, bandaged arm hiding the dagger, dying on the floor with him — with the empress cognizant and the Guard's prefects bought in advance. The Senate rejoiced, damned his memory, and had the arches pulled down; the armies, which had had their wage raised and their wars led in person, mourned him and said so — the Danube legions near mutiny, the Guard within a year extorting the delivery of the assassins and forcing the new regime to watch them die; and in the space between those two reactions, the aged senator Nerva, childless, adopted as son and heir the legate of Upper Germany, Trajan — the army's own — and the succession problem that had produced the year 69 was solved, for the span of the next volume's golden age, by the expedient of giving the army the choosing of the man the Senate would then be thanked for. On that hinge — the eighteenth of September 96, the last day of the last dynasty this volume treats — the compendium closes its narrative and turns to the audit.