Trajan's Parthian campaign

• 1. Introduction

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  Trajan's Parthian campaign is described in one assessment as the climax of two centuries of political posturing and bitter rivalry between Rome and Parthia. Trajan became the first Roman emperor to carry out a successful invasion of Mesopotamia. None of his predecessors had managed that across the entire standoff. For decades before him, Rome and Parthia had circled each other over control of Armenia and the wider balance of power further east. Historians still dispute what finally pushed Trajan to act, torn between economic motives, prestige, and plain military caution. This documentary follows that campaign from its opening moves in Armenia to the revolt that undid it. What kind of resistance could unmake an emperor's own conquests so completely?

• 2. The Trigger In Armenia

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  In 114, Trajan set out on what would be his last campaign, provoked by Parthia's choice to place an unacceptable king on the Armenian throne. Rome and Parthia had shared hegemony over Armenia since the time of Nero, roughly 50 years earlier. A year before, in 113, Trajan judged the moment ripe to resolve the so-called eastern question for good. His plan called for the decisive defeat of Parthia and the annexation of Armenia. That decision marked a deliberate change in Roman policy toward Parthia. It also shifted the emphasis of the empire's broader grand strategy toward the east. That policy shift would later be traced by some historians back to a dispute far more mundane than empire. At the center of it: control of the trade route running through the Persian Gulf.

• 3. Follow The Trade

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  After annexing Arabia, Trajan had built a new road, the Via Traiana Nova, running from Bostra to Aila on the Red Sea. That left Charax, on the Persian Gulf, as the only remaining western terminus of the Indian trade route still outside direct Roman control. Many modern historians think that gap explains Trajan's decision to go to war. Controlling Charax could lower import prices and curb the drain of precious metals blamed on Rome's trade deficit with the Far East.

  A contemporary Palmyrene inscription documents actual links between Charax and merchants from Palmyra, honouring various Palmyrene citizens for holding office there. Charax's rulers may also have controlled the Bahrain islands. A Palmyrene citizen held office there as satrap shortly after Trajan's death, appointed by a Parthian king of Charax. That connection raised the possibility of extending Roman hegemony into the Persian Gulf itself. On this reading, Trajan's goal was to break Parthia's grip on Far Eastern trade passing through small Semitic, or Arab, cities. He wanted that trade placed under Roman control instead.

  Trajan had already leaned on Syrian auxiliary units during his Dacian conquests. Syrian traders later helped colonize Dacia alongside those veterans. He had also recruited Palmyrene units into his army, including a camel unit. That may have secured Palmyrene backing for his ultimate goal of annexing Charax. Some have even argued that once Trajan annexed Armenia, he was bound to take the whole of Mesopotamia too. That would protect the Gulf trade route. It would also stop Parthia from stirring trouble along Rome's Danube frontier.

• 4. Prestige, Tax And Doubts

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  Other historians call the whole trade theory into doubt. They point out that Parthia's grip on maritime trade was, at best, conjectural, resting on a selective reading of Chinese sources. Trade by land through Parthia seems to have gone unhampered by Parthian authorities, left to private enterprise. Commercial activity in second century Mesopotamia looks like a general phenomenon shared by many peoples, with no sign of a concerted imperial policy behind it.

  Scholars such as Moses Finley and Paul Veyne have called the whole idea of a Roman foreign trade policy anachronistic. They make the same argument about the alimenta. In their view, Rome's only real concern with Far Eastern luxuries was moral, frowning on softness, not economic policy beyond collecting toll taxes and customs. Trade between Rome and India may have been far more balanced in precious metals than assumed, given the lack of conclusive evidence. Pliny the Elder, uncle of Pliny the Younger, was one source for the gold drain idea. He had earlier described the Gangetic Plains as one of Rome's gold sources. In his book on the ancient economy, Finley called Trajan's assault on Parthia badly miscalculated and expensive. He called it an example of Roman commercial wars that exist only in the books of modern historians.

  Cassius Dio offers a different explanation, ascribing the campaign solely to the lure of territorial annexation and prestige. Territorial conquest also meant collecting the tetarte, a 25 percent tax on goods entering the Roman Empire, giving the war a genuine economic angle too. There was also propaganda value in eastern conquests that let Trajan emulate, in Roman fashion, Alexander the Great. Emissaries from the Kushan Empire may have attended commemorative ceremonies for the Dacian War. That presence may have stirred dreams of Macedonian-style conquest and its booty. Greco-Roman intellectuals like Plutarch, who wrote that only about 70,000 Roman soldiers were needed to conquer India, shared such dreams, as did Trajan's own associates.

  Trajan's expansionism may also have drawn support from a powerful circle of conservative senators from Hispania, especially the all-powerful Sura. The Roman Empire was, in principle, unlimited. Trajan simply took an opportunity to make idea and reality coincide. Finally, some modern historians think Trajan's original aims were purely military and modest. He wanted a more defensible eastern frontier, crossing Northern Mesopotamia along the Khabur River, to shield a Roman Armenia. That reading is backed by the fact that every later Roman war against Parthia aimed at establishing a presence inside Parthia itself.

• 5. The Northern Push

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  Ten legions were concentrated in the Eastern theatre well before the fighting began, a sign of how carefully the campaign was planned. Since 111, the correspondence of Pliny the Younger shows provincial authorities in Bithynia organizing supplies for passing troops. Local city councils and their members had to shoulder part of the expense themselves. The campaign was immensely costly from its very start.

  Trajan marched first on Armenia and deposed its Parthian-appointed king, Parthamasiris. Parthamasiris was murdered soon after, while in the custody of Roman troops, in an unclear incident. The writer Fronto later described it as a breach of Roman good faith. Trajan then received the acknowledgement of Roman hegemony from tribes in the Caucasus and along the eastern coast of the Black Sea. That process kept him occupied until the end of 114.

  At the same time, a Roman column under the legate Lusius Quietus pushed further east. Quietus was a cavalry general who had distinguished himself in the Dacian Wars commanding a unit from his native Mauretania. His column crossed the Araxes river from Armenia into Media Atropatene and the land of the Mardians, in what is now Ghilan. It is possible that Quietus's goal was to push the new, more defensible Roman border east to the Caspian Sea. It may also have aimed north, to the foothills of the Caucasus.

• 6. Down The Rivers

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  By the most common reconstruction, Trajan launched his Mesopotamian campaign in early 115. He marched toward the Taurus mountains to consolidate the land between the Tigris and Euphrates. He placed permanent garrisons along the way to hold the ground. While Trajan moved from west to east, Quietus moved his own army from the Caspian Sea westward. Together the two formed a pincer that planted a Roman presence inside Parthia itself.

  Trajan took the northern Mesopotamian cities of Nisibis and Batnae and organized a province of Mesopotamia around them. That province included the Kingdom of Osrhoene, whose king, Abgar VII, submitted publicly as a Roman protectorate. The process seems to have been finished by 116. Coins issued that year announced that Armenia and Mesopotamia now stood under the authority of the Roman people. The land between the Khabur River and the mountains around Singara became the new frontier, marked out by a road ringed with fortresses.

  Trajan wintered in Antioch across 115-116 and, according to literary sources, barely escaped a violent earthquake that killed the consul Marcus Pedo Vergilianus. In 116 he took the field again, aiming this time at the conquest of the whole of Mesopotamia. It was an overambitious goal that would backfire on his entire campaign. Some modern historians think the 116 push aimed only at a preemptive demonstration. Its goal, in this view, was tighter Roman control of the eastern trade route, not conquering Parthia outright. Either way, a chronic scarcity of manpower doomed the effort from the start. Notably, Trajan raised no new legions before the Parthian campaign, perhaps because the usual sources of citizen recruits were already worn thin.

  One Roman division crossed the Tigris into Adiabene and swept south to capture Adenystrae. A second followed the river south and took Babylon. Trajan himself sailed down the Euphrates from Dura-Europos, where a triumphal arch was later raised in his honour. He continued on through Ozogardana, where he erected a tribunal. That tribunal was still visible generations later, during Julian the Apostate's own campaigns in the area. At the narrow strip of land separating the Euphrates from the Tigris, Trajan dragged his fleet overland. He then captured Seleucia, and finally Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital.

  He pressed on south to the Persian Gulf. After his fleet survived a tidal bore on the Tigris, he received the submission of Athambelus, ruler of Charax. Trajan declared Babylon a new province of the empire and had his own statue raised on the shore of the Gulf. His push to the Gulf may have lined up with Palmyrene interests in the region, given Charax's documented ties to Palmyra. Another idea holds that Charax's rulers had their own expansionist designs on Parthian Babylon, giving them reason to ally with Rome. The Parthian city of Susa was apparently occupied as well. Late literary sources, unsupported by any coin or inscription, claim a province of Assyria was proclaimed too, covering the territory of Adiabene.

  Some fiscal measures were considered for the Indian trade, or simply for collecting customs, called portoria, on goods moving along the Euphrates and Tigris. It is possible that the ordinary machinery of Roman tax collection and requisition in these newly conquered lands played a part. That machinery may be what triggered the resistance still to come. Some historians think Trajan spent his time at the Gulf ordering raids on the Parthian coast. He may also have probed for suzerainty over the mountain tribes guarding the passes across the Zagros Mountains into the Iranian Plateau. He may even have reached for contact with the Kushan Empire. No attempt was made to push into the Iranian Plateau itself, where Rome's relative weakness in cavalry would have told against it.

  As Trajan turned back from the Gulf toward Babylon, he intended to sacrifice to Alexander the Great. He planned to do so in the very house where Alexander had died, in 323 BC. Yet his grand schemes were, in one appraisal, already being cut short. The cause, in that reading, was a misjudged sense of eastern conquest's strategic realities and an underestimation of what insurgency can do.

• 7. When The East Rose Up

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  A nephew of the Parthian king, Sanatruces, still commanded a cavalry force, apparently reinforced by Saka archers. His sudden resistance imperilled Roman positions across Mesopotamia and Armenia. Trajan answered by partly giving up direct Roman rule inside Parthia itself.

  He sent two armies north to deal with the crisis. One, under Lusius Quietus, recovered Nisibis and Edessa from the rebels, probably having King Abgar deposed and killed in the process. The other, under Appius Maximus Santra, likely a governor of Macedonia, was defeated, and Santra himself was killed. Later in 116, Trajan was helped by Quietus and two other legates, Marcus Erucius Clarus and Tiberius Julius Alexander Julianus. Together they defeated a Parthian army in a battle in which Sanatruces was killed.

  After retaking and burning Seleucia, Trajan formally deposed the Parthian king Osroes I and put his own puppet ruler, Parthamaspates, on the throne. A coin struck to mark the moment declared, in Latin, that a king had been given to the Parthians. Trajan then pulled back north to hold onto what remained of the new provinces. He had already accepted an armistice in Armenia, trading away part of its territory to Sanatruces's son, Vologeses, and he still held Mesopotamia.

  It was around then that Trajan's health began to fail. The fortress city of Hatra, on the Tigris in his rear, held out against repeated Roman assaults. Trajan was personally present at the siege, where he may have suffered heat stroke in the blazing conditions.

  Shortly afterward, Jews across the eastern empire, in Egypt, Cyprus and Cyrene, rose up. It was probably an outburst of religious rebellion against local pagans, later called the Diaspora Revolt. Cyrene was likely its original hotspot. A separate rebellion flared among Jewish communities in Northern Mesopotamia, probably a general reaction against Roman occupation. Trajan was forced to pull his army back to put down these revolts. He treated the withdrawal as a temporary setback, though he would never again command an army in the field. He handed his eastern armies over to Lusius Quietus, who had just been made governor of Judaea. Quietus may already have handled some Jewish unrest there.

• 8. The Purge That Followed

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  Lusius Quietus discharged his new command so well that the fighting in Judaea was afterward named for him. That war, the Kitos War, took its name since Kitos is a corruption of Quietus. He was promised a consulate for the following year, 118, as reward for his victories. He was killed before that could happen, in the bloody purge that opened Hadrian's reign.

  Quietus and three other former consuls were sentenced to death on a vague charge of conspiracy. They were tried by the secret court of the Praetorian Prefect Attianus. One theory holds that Hadrian ordered the executions directly, out of fear of the men's popularity with the army and their close ties to Trajan.

  By contrast, the equestrian Marcius Turbo was the next prominent figure in putting down the Jewish revolt. He had dealt with the rebel leader from Cyrene, Lukuas, and kept Hadrian's trust. He went on to become his Praetorian Prefect. All four executed consulars were senators of the highest standing, generally regarded as capable of taking imperial power themselves. Hadrian's calculation left Marcius Turbo, not any of Trajan's old generals, as the man he trusted to finish policing the empire's eastern edge.