The Eastern Maximum and the Great Recoil

The Parthian War of Trajan

The last war of Trajan was the empire's high-water mark and the first demonstration of its tide-tables, and the Editor states at the outset the source-poverty that makes its interpretation the oldest open argument in Roman studies: Dio's epitomated book 68 and scattered fragments are nearly all the narrative there is, and Dio himself already framed the question — whether the war was strategy (the Armenian buffer subverted when the Parthian king crowned a nephew at Ctesiphon's pleasure without Roman investiture, the Neronian settlement of Book VI thereby torn up) or appetite, the desire for glory of a sixty-year-old soldier-emperor with Alexander's itinerary in his head. The operations, as far as the fragments carry them: 113–114, Armenia entered from the Cappadocian bases Vespasian had built, the crowned nephew Parthamasiris presenting himself at Elegeia to receive his diadem back in the Neronian choreography — and receiving instead annexation, the kingdom declared a province, the prince dead days later "attempting escape" in the phrase the compendium has learned across six volumes to grade; 115, the descent into Mesopotamia, Nisibis and Batnae taken, Edessa's client-king Abgar charmed into submission by his own son's diplomacy, northern Mesopotamia organized as a second new province while the Parthian realm, deep in one of its dynastic civil wars, could not concentrate; 116, the maximum year — the Tigris crossed on a prefabricated boat-bridge hauled overland in sections from Nisibis, Adiabene overrun as a third province (Assyria, the shortest-lived name in the imperial roster), the twin capitals Seleucia and CTESIPHON taken, the Arsacid golden throne captured with the king's daughter, the emperor sailing the lower rivers to the Persian Gulf — where, watching a merchantman clear for India, he spoke the sentence Dio preserved as the whole campaign's epitaph: that were he younger, he would have crossed to the Indus as Alexander had. He was the first and last Roman ruler to stand on that shore.

The recoil began before the fleet had left the Gulf. The conquest had been a raid wearing a province's paperwork — garrisons thin, communications enormous, the Parthian field armies traded space rather than dying — and in 116 the whole occupied East rose at once behind the emperor: the Parthian counteroffensive under the king's nephew Sanatruces and son Osroes's generals retaking the Tigris line, Seleucia and Edessa and Nisibis in revolt, a Roman column destroyed with its general Maximus, the sixty-three-year-old Trajan reduced to firefighting — Lusius Quietus, the Moorish prince whose horsemen the Column had celebrated, storming Nisibis and burning Edessa; Seleucia burned by two other columns; and at Ctesiphon, in the war's most naked scene, the emperor of Rome personally crowning a Parthian client-king, Parthamaspates, before the assembled armies — annexation converted in twelve months to the puppet-diplomacy the annexation had been launched to transcend. The siege of the desert city of Hatra closed the ledger: the walls that would defeat two more emperors defeated this one, the cavalry-country and the flies and the heat breaking the assault, the emperor himself nearly struck by a bolt at the walls; and Trajan, failing visibly — the stroke came at Selinus in Cilicia on the road home, August 117 — died leaving the East in flames, the succession to a rumor, and to his successor the decision the next chapter opens with. The Editor closes the campaign ledger with its modern balance: the war destroyed the Neronian architecture that had kept the East quiet for fifty years, consumed the last offensive surplus of the Trajanic army, and demonstrated — the volume's recurring theorem, proved here at maximum scale — that the Principate's instrument could conquer anything and hold only what it could garrison; the provinces of a single summer were abandoned within a year of their creation, the only such surrender of conquered provinces in Roman history to that hour.

The War Behind the War: The Diaspora Revolt115–117

Entangled with the Parthian recoil, and graver in the modern accounting than the tradition's thin notices admit, ran the second Jewish war — the revolt of the diaspora, the tumultus Iudaicus the rabbis remembered as the War of Kitos. In 115–116, as the emperor stood at the Gulf, the Jewish communities of Cyrenaica, Egypt, and Cyprus rose in a coordinated fury the sources render apocalyptic: in Cyrene under a king-messiah the Greek sources call Lukuas or Andreas, the temples of the Greek gods thrown down (the burn-and-rebuild epigraphy of Cyrene's sanctuaries, dated by Hadrianic restoration inscriptions "destroyed in the Jewish tumult," is the revolt's AGrade A stratum); in Alexandria, reciprocal massacre and the destruction of the great synagogue; in Cyprus, Salamis wrecked with a slaughter the tradition numbers in the six figures the Editor prints only as the tradition's; in Mesopotamia, the Jewish communities joining the general rising against the occupation. The suppression was proportionate to the fear: the marine legions and the generals Marcius Turbo (by sea against Egypt and Cyrene) and Lusius Quietus (in Mesopotamia, with a thoroughness that put his name on the war), the fighting running past Trajan's death; Egypt's papyri carry the aftermath for decades — the confiscated Jewish property accounts, the village lists with the Jewish names gone, an Oxyrhynchus festival still celebrating the victory eighty years on — and Alexandrian Jewry, the diaspora's metropolis since the Ptolemies, never recovered its weight. Cyprus barred Jews from landing on pain of death, by a law the geographers still noted centuries later. The Editor grades the episode as this compendium's starkest case of a great war surviving almost solely in its debris-field — no Josephus this time, no narrative at all beyond epitome-paragraphs, only the burned temple-lists, the papyri, and the silence of communities that had been the Mediterranean's largest — and marks its structural place: with Judaea itself held down by garrison, the diaspora's destruction closed the second act of the tragedy whose third, under the next reign, will close the volume's Jewish file forever.