Constantius and Julian -Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 19 Part 2

Blackadder: Where is the prisoner.
Baldrick: He’s dead.
Blackadder: Dead? Are you sure?
Baldrick:  Well I cut his head off. That usually does the trick.

In that episode of Blackadder 2, Edmund Blackadder had been put in charge of the Tower of London and had brought all the scheduled executions forward so he could enjoy a long weekend.  Unfortunately Queen Elizabeth had changed her mind about killing one of her favourites.  When the change of instructions got through,  it was too late. With, needless to say, hilarious consequences.

I was reminded of that scene when I read that in some accounts of the death of Gallus, Constantius had second thoughts and sent a message to the prison sparing his cousin from execution.  The message arrived in plenty of time to save his life, but the artful eunuch Eusebius who saw Gallus as a threat to his influential position in the court delayed its delivery until it was too late.  As even the easily confused Baldrick could work out, beheading is a pretty final process.

Whether or not this version is true, it is easy to understand why Constantius would be in two minds about whether or not killing Gallus was a wise move.  Was it really such a good idea to get rid of one of the last people with a legitimate claim on the inheritance of Constantine?  We’ll a look in more detail at reasons why not a bit later.  First lets look at the immediate repercussions.

With Gallus out of the way all eyes turned to Gallus’ younger and much more charming brother Julian. He was now the last male relative of Constantine.  Potentially Julian was just as threatening to the positions of some courtiers.  In some ways even more so.  Plotting started instantly.  The story was put about that Julian had been in league with Gallus to overthrow Constantius.  That would be a very good excuse to get rid of him.

Julian had charmed the court of Constantinople with his good looks, intelligence and wit.  And he still has the power to charm even today.  We can get to know him from his own writings and also from accounts by close acquaintances.   And it is easy to like him.  He won friends early on, and was socially successful enough to provoke some jealousy from the emperor himself, enough for him to be advised to distance himself from the court so as not to overshadow his illustrious cousin.  That at any rate is one story.  I can’t help thinking that the jealousy might well have been in the minds of the men around Constantius seeking his attention rather than Constantius himself.

His passion in life was philosophy and he went about sporting a philosopher’s beard.  He must have cut a slightly odd figure in the court where most of the inhabitants were the ambitious or the servile.  Julian by contrast had no particular need to impress or flatter anyone and not really much power to make him worth courting.

But once his brother was killed he became the focus of the attention of the most worldly and calculating elements in the court.  I am talking about the eunuchs.  This is when we see the grit and determination in the otherwise aimable character of Julian emerging for the first time.  He was watched closely and everything he said was monitored.  There were two risks.  If he spoke out against his brother’s killing that was a treasonous act.  Eusebius and the other eunuchs no doubt would have been only to happy for this to be his downfall.

But to condemn his brother would have shown a weakness.  An understandable weakness – he was at risk of losing his head after all. But to buy his survival by slandering his kinsman would have been a highly dishonourable thing to do, and Julian valued his honour. That Julian could show loyalty to both his sovereign and his brother under the circumstances is a great testament to both his intelligence and his integrity.

Constantius must have been under subtle pressure from Eusebius to get rid of the potential threat that Julian posed to Constantius, and of course to the position of Eusebius himself.  But Julian had made friends.  And one of those friends was the wife of the Constantius, Eusebia.  And she could plot to get her own way as well. Somehow the contrasting plots of Eusebius and Eusebia cancelled each other out, and Julian ended up neither dead nor pardoned, but being internally exiled.  But the exile was to Athens.

Athens was the place Julian would have chosen to be exiled to had he been given the choice.  He could indulge his bent for philosophy in the very epicentre of what he loved.  The schools of philosophy were still in operation and he could learn from the top scholars.  He loved Athens, and would always have done so.  It was his sort of place. But it must have seemed all the sweeter to him out of the febrile atmosphere where one word wrong could have been deadly.  Instead of the wiles of the eunuchs he could enjoy the groves of academia.

Julian’s first language was Greek and he had a passion for Greek culture and with it for Greek religion.  And it was the religion that caught his imagination.  He had been brought up a Christian.  He knew his Bible well, and had even been a functionary in Church services.  He was a member of the family that had done more than any other to establish Christianity as the faith of the Roman Empire.  But this also gave him the inside view.  He knew where the bodies were buried.  Possibly literally.  Given his situation – a murdered father and an executed brother – it was not surprising that he was no lover of Constantine.  But the form his rejection would take would shock the world.  For now, his inner beliefs were kept to himself.  But he already attributed his deliverance not to God but to the Gods.

The actual agent of his deliverance, as he also acknowledged, was the empress Eusebia.  Like many others she had taken a shine to Julian and promoted his cause directly to Constantius.  She knew her Julian and was no doubt well aware of the appeal of Athens to him.  Having avoided him getting the chop, she worked on a more ambitious project still.  While Julian was enjoying the culture of Athens, Eusebia had more ambitious plans for him.  The elevation of Gallus hadn’t worked, but the problem was the character of Gallus not the basic idea.  Julian was a very different character to Gallus. And Gallus had been given the plum provinces while Constantius had kept the troublesome western ones.  Why not try the idea again, but this time the other way around.  Let Julian have the slog of fighting off the barbarians in inglorious border fighting, while Constantius got the glory of sorting out the long standing grudge match against the Persians.

So after only six months in exile in Athens, Julian was rehabilitated.  He was summoned to the palace in Milan to be given his new role.  Constantius probably congratulated himself on his open mindedness.  Despite his previous problems with Gallus, he was prepared to give Julian a chance.  He would need to take precautions of course, but basically this was a generous act to share his power with his kinsman.  It would also strengthen the empire and solve some problems.

That wasn’t how Julian saw it.  He was happy in Athens and had made many friends – he seemed to be good at making friends.  He did not regard Constantius as in any way a potential benefactor.  He was the remaining representative of the clan that had murdered his family – including recently his brother – and who had usurped his country’s gods.  And they were not to be trusted.  The memory of the deceit used to trick his brother into handing himself over to humiliation and death was fresh in his mind.  The treatment he was getting now must have looked like he was about to go the same way.

He considered flight or suicide, and referred to Minerva the goddess who he had a particular affinity with.  But the augers were that the gods would protect him.  Minerva had borrowed angels from the Sun and Moon to guide his steps and keep him out of danger.  He would gather his courage and travel to the court of his enemy and the personification of evil.

His supernatural protection was not needed.  He was welcomed with open arms and embraced by the royal couple.  He was to be elevated to the rank of Caesar.  Julian has left an account of how he found himself suddenly in a strange world where even previously familiar objects seemed odd, as if being encountered for the first time.  He shaved his philosopher’s beard off and took on the military garb of a Roman Emperor.  His bemusement was a source of amusement for the rest of the court.

But in reality it was a serious, even a deadly business.  The idea was for Julian to be a figurehead for military operations in Gaul.  The border had been overrun.  Former mercenaries, having been discharged but who had not gone home, were a menace.  In particular the Alamanni were intent on carving out a kingdom for themselves in the south east of Gaul.  The presence of a bona fide emperor and relative of the great Constantine would be a huge fillet for morale.

The first stage was to show Julian to the troops.  He joined Constantius on a platform elevated above a huge assembly of the army in Milan.  Constantius recommended to them the nephew of Constantine.  Although his only experience of soldiers was being guarded by them, and his only experience of politics was reading Plato’s Republic Julian was acclaimed by the troops.  To mark their approval they banged their shields on their knees.  Julian was now an emperor.  Constantius in his speech had talked of how they were now colleagues

But he still hadn’t escaped the suspicion and danger of his position.  He was watched continually and closely. His mail was intercepted and read.  His household was staffed with informers. He was only allowed to keep four of his domestics:  his physician, a couple of footmen and his librarian.  That last one was a concession to his bookish nature.  Eusebia had recognised his intellectual inclinations and presented him with a library of books.  This was thoughtful and a kind and generous gesture.  It also probably reflected the notion that Julian was going to have time on his hands in his new role.  His new household was tightly regulated, even down to what meals were to be served to him.  In fact Julian being the austere lover of plain living was revolted by the extravagant dishes suitable to his new rank.  And his dinner wasn’t the only thing he didn’t get a say in and probably wouldn’t have chosen.   He was married to the remaining daughter of Constantine, Helena.  When I said in the last podcast that Constantina was the last daughter of Constantine I was wrong.  Sorry about that.

Helena mathematically speaking cannot have been less than 30, and in all probability was in her forties.   It was no whimsical matter to put these two together.  Gibbon hints at the motive and in an age of hereditary monarchs did not have to spell it out for his readers.  In our more democratic age it may not be so obvious, so let me spare you the trouble of working out the dynastic implications.  Constantius and Eusebia at this stage did not have any children.  This made Julian the lawful successor to Constantius.  On one level this made him a threat because he could mount a challenge to Constantius.  But as Julian did not have an army at his disposal he was not in a strong position to push this.  In any case, his claim would not be a strong one since Constantius was clearly more closely related to Constantine.

But Julian’s claim did have another effect.  If someone wanted to overthrow Constantius, they would have to overcome the problem that Julian would be the legitimate successor.  Kill Constantius and you get Julian.  So a live Julian was in fact a protective shield for Constantius.  This worked still better if the shield was a Caesar.  The last minute attempt to save Gallus may not have happened, but it makes a lot of sense if it did.

Any son of Constantius and Eusebia had prior claim.  This meant Julian shouldn’t be a long term threat, but even so there was still a risk.  Any son of Helena would have had a claim on the throne.   In the event of Julian having a son, he would also be a contender.  Putting them together kept the succession under some measure of control and at least reduced the supply of alternative emperors to a single stream.  Hopefully the young Julian and the mature Helena would be at a reproductive disadvantage to Constantina and Eusebia.

Whatever the precise calculations, Julian was soon on his way to his new posting in Gaul, and took his new wife with him. She was to produce at least one and possibly more children with him but none survived.  Their deaths have been attributed to a cunning plot by Eusebia who artfully poisoned them.  This would have been a perfectly logical thing for her to have done, but the practicalities make it unlikely.

Constantius was still preparing a major campaign against the Persians but ended up staying in Italy for the eighteen months after the departure of Julian.  He had some border issues to deal with, a bit of persecution and also decided to visit Rome for the first time.  This was the first visit of an emperor since his father some 32 years before, so it was quite a big event.  He was greeted rapturously by the crowds.

Constantius behaved the total emperor throughout.  On arriving in the city he acted the part by never looking to either left or right while walking slowly through the streets.  He presided over games, met the senators and behaved like a supreme being.  The days when the Romans felt able to chum up to their emperor as if he was simply one of them were long gone.

Constantius had behaved as the consumate and polite guest in his visit to Rome and obviously enjoyed the reception he got.  To say thank you he decided to give the city a present.  And he hit on a great gift idea.  Who could fail to be bowled over by an obelisk from Egypt?  There happened to be a particularly large one that Constantine had already started moving with the intention of shipping it to Constantinople.  This project had been abandoned on his death, so the obelisk was going spare.  It was put in a particularly large boat and shipped to Rome where it was erected in the Circus Maximus.  It is still in Rome, though now it has been moved to the Lateran Palace.  The Romans liked obelisks and had pinched loads of them over the years.  Today there are more obelisks in Rome than anywhere else, even Egypt.  The one that Constantius gave to the city is the tallest.  So that was a nice token of appreciation.

Having had some fun in Rome, Constantius now had some serious business to conduct with the Persians and the Quadi.  The effects of the bloodthirsty battle of Mursa were still being felt in the form of poorly defended borders.  This allowed the lightly armed but very mobile Quadi to raid deep into the empire and carry off goods and citizens.  The Quadi were however no match for the legions.  Constantius crossed the Danube in strength and cut them and the other troublesome tribes to pieces.  He then made peace with some and set up some inter-tribe conflicts to facilitate the centuries old highly effective tactic of dividing and ruling.  The tribe of the Limigantes were particularly troublesome and in several episodes showed themselves to be untrustworthy and unwilling to respect diplomatic practices.  When they tried to seize Constantius himself during peace talks they had gone too far.  The order was given for their extinction, and the order was carried out.  Genocide would not have particularly shocked the Romans, and several genocidal projects were contemplated during the empire’s history.  But I think this is the only one that was ever actually carried out.

But it showed how strong the empire was even at this late stage in its history. This was Rome in its characteristic position of dictating the terms to the barbarians and holding the initiative.

The Persians were never such easy meat and chose to take advantage of the distraction to make trouble.  A haughty message arrived from Sapor.  The King of Kings and brother of the Sun and Moon condescended to offer terms to the supplicant emperor.  He would limit his demands to the provinces of Mesopotamia and Armenia as a show of his moderation and leniency, even though as the rightful successor of Darius he was entitled to ask for much more.

Sapor may have received some encouragement in his arrogance from within the empire.  In another example of byzantine behaviour the local officials had opened negotiations with the Persians without any authority from Constantius himself.  This was to prove to be a bit of a pattern of his reign.  He was competent enough when he was in direct control, but projecting his power via the imperial bureaucracy defeated him.  He doesn’t seem to have even been able to keep control of it.  So while he was triumphing over the Quadi he was being let down against the Persians.

But now the channels were open he made an attempt to establish a lasting peace.  He sent a delegation of three.  They were a count, a notary and sophist in Gibbon’s phrase.  I suppose we’d call them a politcian. a lawyer and a PR man.   This sounds like just the team for the job but they were unsuccessful and came back with the news that Sapor intended war.

He was encouraged in this by a Roman deserter called Antoninus who offered inside information on the defences.  With this advantage Sapor marched into Roman territory.  But it turned out that the Romans were better prepared than expected and the land in the anticipated attack route had been cleared of anything useful.  Time was lost as a different longer path had to be taken.  Once they had got back into Roman territory they bypassed the strong position of Nisibis and fell on less well defended Amida.

But even Amida was no pushover.  Its walls had been rebuilt and tall towers added.  It had recently been renamed after the emperor and was equipped with the latest dart throwing technology.  It was defended by 7 regular legions and a corp of barbarians.  Sapor attempted to overawe them with his presence alone but a missile fired hit him.  He was only protected from injury by his diadem.  I wonder if someone was trying out their new toy.  The defenders must have been well armed with missiles, because in another incident the son of one of the allies of Sapor was killed during an attempt to parlay.

This enraged the attackers and they set about an aggressive siege.  It was a hard fought battle.  The barbarian contingent attacked the Persians in a strong sortie.  The Persians counterattacked and captured a tower enabling them to shower the defenders with arrows.  In the end the attackers got some advice from Roman deserters and constructed mobile attacking towers.  Trenches were dug that allowed the attackers to get near enough to undermine the walls.  Battering rams were brought into service to reduce the defences.

The defenders fought on with desperate courage, but in the end they could hold out no longer.  Everyone the Persians caught in the city was massacred.  Incredibly, some of them escaped.

It was a victory for Sapor, but one that he had paid far too high a price for.  The spirited defence had reduced his army of 100,000 by 30,000.  And the fighting season had been used up.  He returned to Persia and made the most of the PR opportunity, but basically he had expended a huge portion of his resources for very little in the way of advantage.

The high morale and dogged determination of the defenders of Amida commands respect and admiration, but also begs a question.  They must have fought under the impression that they were going to be relieved.  So why didn’t a relief column appear?

The answer is that secure behind the lines the eunuchs had other priorities.  An invasion on the scale of Sapor’s was not an insignificant threat and required a response from a good general,  And luckily one was to hand in the form of Ursinicus.  It was him that had prepared the defences that had so effectively delayed Sapor in the early stages of his campaign.  But just as the crisis broke he was replaced by Sabinian, an effete courtier rather than a soldier.  Then Ursinicus was recalled, but was obliged to report ot Sabinian who vetoed any aggressive course of action and remained in his camp at Edessa.

Incredibly, Sabinian had the escapees from Amida executed. Presumably the story of the defence was embarrassing to those who had not moved to rescue them.   An enquiry was undertaken into what had gone wrong which concluded by blaming Ursinicus.   With not much more to lose, Ursinicus finally blurted out that if they carried on waging war the way they were doing, the emperor himself would not be able to defend the empire.

In the end this was put to the test.  Constantius himself took over to try to avenge the loss of Amida.  He led his army out and laid siege to Becabde – a Persian fortress.  But the weather turned against the expedition and he ended up returning to Antioch empty handed.

It was a miserable campaign from the Roman point of view.  Much blood had been shed but little had been achieved. Meanwhile, a stream of straight forward accounts from Julian reported success after success against the Germans for the young Caesar.

Here is the Blackadder episode referenced at the beginning. The line quoted is at 12:20

Constantius and Gallus – Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 19 Part 1

When the sons of Constantine massacred all their close relatives, they spared a couple of their cousins. Gallus and Julian were too young to pose any immediate threat so they didn’t have to be killed straight away.  But as their parents had been killed something needed to be done with them, so they were held captive.  Was there a long term plan for them?  It is hard to say.   Given that they had an empire to run, probably their captors forgot all about them.  They were safely out of the picture and there were plenty of other things going on.

So all the while the sons of Constantine were fighting each other and the enemies of the empire, their closest living relatives were growing up in quite obscurity.  At the time of the uprising of Magnentius they were being held together in a castle in Cappadocia.  Gallus the older of the two boys – who were half brothers – was 25. Not much is known about their early life together but I imagine they were close.  Neither had anyone else much in the world to turn to and their grim situation must have made them comrades in adversity.  They were treated well apart from the lack of freedom, but that was poor compensation for the permanent risk of being executed without warning.

But all of a sudden their fortunes changed.  Constantius, struggling to manage a vast empire alone, decided he needed them and summoned them to the court.  Gallus was the main focus as he was old enough to be of use.  He was elevated to the rank of Caesar and given charge of the provinces of the East.  To cement the arrangement he was married to Constantina.  I breathed a sigh of relief at this point.  She has been showing up regularly in the story so far and was obviously an ambitious woman.  At last the daughter of Constantine has managed to get to be the empress she so desperately wanted to be.  Julian was also released and taken to the court of Constantius in Constantinople.

The court at Constantinople must have been a nightmare to manage.   Everything now revolved around the emperor.  His was the last word, so if you wanted something done that was where you had to go.  And as the administrative centre that was where all the money was spent. This inevitably made it the destination of choice for the ambitious and the talented, and also for chancers and hucksters.  It wouldn’t always be easy to tell which category a particular person fell into – indeed the difference is often a matter of perspective – but there must have been a legion of people trying whatever means they could to get attention for their pet project.

Inevitably the emperor had to surround himself with gatekeepers to stop himself from being overwhelmed.  Having the ear of the emperor gave a favourite or an official enormous power.  No doubt the favourites had favourites, so knowing where to turn for a particular function would have been an impossibility for an outsider.  Or an insider come to that.  

The problem was staffing it.  If you are the guy right at the middle of this, how do you pick people who have your interests at heart?  This was what had motivated Constantius to turn to his family.  They at least had some common ground and interest.  Another solution to the shortcomings of the average subject was the extensive use of eunuchs.  A eunuch was not susceptible to a lot of the temptations of a regular official.  In particular they had no chance of founding a dynasty so that removed the biggest problem – the risk that they would replace the emperor altogether.  The bare minimum qualification for the role of emperor was having all your bits intact.

Castration does seem like an extreme response to time management issues to modern ways of thinking.  But when you think about it, the advantages were not to be despised.  It isn’t hard to think of modern politicians who could have simplified their career challenges if they had dispensed with their reproductive organs prior to running for office.  Reducing the total testosterone level around the emperor was probably a good idea and may well have increased the stability of the regime.

But it didn’t get rid of intrigue and plotting – far from it.  Eunuchs may not have been capable of the full range of human mischief, but they were still perfectly capable of jostling for power and position.  Gibbon expresses the prejudice of his time by assuming that eunuchs were effeminate, greedy and cowardly.  I don’t think that there is in reality any reason to believe that they behaved any worse than human beings in general.  But lets face it, that is bad enough.

So it isn’t hard to see the appeal to Constantius of setting up Gallus to help deflect some of the pressures landing on his desk.  Not everyone would have been pleased to see Constantius have more time and attention for day to day business. The eunuchs were well aware of the source of their power.  One of them was particularly influential. His name was Eusebius and he seems to have held particular sway over Constantius.   Gibbon records a joke from the time that mocks the pride and haughtiness of Eusebius by sarcastically observing that Constantius stood high in the approval of Eusebius.  Eusebius, from reasonably obvious motives, was an enemy of Gallus.

Gallus did not show immediate promise in his role as a Caesar.  Set up with his own court in Antioch, he immediately instigated a regime of extreme repression.  He set up torture chambers in his palace and recruited spies to keep an eye on his new subjects.  The Roman Empire wasn’t a cuddly place and the mildest of emperors transferred to our era would no doubt be dragged off to the court of human rights in the Hague within a fortnight, so to get a reputation for excessive cruelty in this era was something of an achievement.

But you can at least respect his willingness to walk the walk.  He undertook some spying activities himself personally, dressing up as a plebian to walk the streets hunting out sedition against, well against himself.  You don’t have to be a great psychology fan to wonder if his upbringing had something to do with this.  It is hard to know how living your life expecting death at any moment would affect you.  But it isn’t hard to imagine that it may have played some part in this enthusiasm for tight security measures.

Constantina also gets a bad press.  She is portrayed as both blood thirsty and avaricious.  She combined these two vices by accepting money in return for getting specified victims killed.  This isn’t particularly endearing behaviour at the best of times, but was made even worse by the relatively low tariff she charged.  Prices started at a pearl necklace for a nobleman’s life.  We all like a bargain, but for the victims it was just insulting.

The population of the east was soon crying out against their new leader.  On top of that, the overall situation in the region was getting a bit fraught.  There was a revolt in Palestine and preparations for the next stage of the war in Persia had led to an increase in grain prices.  Gallus had intervened in the food market – never an easy thing to pull off successfully – but had done so in such a way as to infuriate both buyers and sellers.

The eunuchs in the palace at Constantinople were studying the situation with interest.  The revenues diverted to the new court at Antioch were coming straight out of the pot they habitually used to play their games, so they had a vested interest in undermining this experiment in political pluralism.  Plots against Gallus were soon afoot.   And you can’t beat the court of an absolute monarch who happens to be fully occupied elsewhere  if you are looking for a breeding ground for a conspiracy.  Eusebius was, no doubt, in his element.

But Constantius was too pre-occupied to do much about it at first.  He was busy finishing off the revolt in Gaul and dealing with some trouble being posed by the Alemanni.   Freeing up time to deal with other matters was after all, the whole point of bringing Gallus into the administration in the first place.

But when things calmed down he had time to have his ear bent by advisors who no doubt had their own agendas.  His reaction was to send a praetorian prefect Domitian, and the palace quaestor, Montius, to bring Gallus back on track.  You can see what Constantius was thinking and it was sound enough reasoning.  The appointment of Gallus was working in the sense of relieving him of some of the pressures of ruling alone.  If he could just be brought in line with imperial best practice it could still become a successful partnership.  And it could well have done so if things had turned out a bit different.

In the event the delegation from the emperor didn’t handle things particularly wisely.  What should have been a quiet behind the scenes chat followed by some solid practical advice turned into a showdown.  Domitian played it hard from the beginning by threatening to withhold the allowance for the running of the palace.  Gallus took the view that he was an emperor and Domitian was a subject and so should not be talking to him like that.  So he proved his point by throwing him in prison.

This wasn’t a good start.  But things could still have been resolved if Montius had shown a bit of good judgement and persuaded Gallus to calm down and talk.  Instead he showed bad judgement. He pointed out that as Caesar Gallus wasn’t even entitled to dismiss a municipal magistrate, let alone bang up a direct representative of the Augustus.

One might have supposed that two such top ranking dignitaries would be well aware that threats and insults were unlikely to achieve what Constantius had mandated them to do.  Stupidity can never be totally eliminated as an explanation of human behaviour, but I wonder if we are seeing the hand of Eusebius behind this.  The last thing he wanted was a reconciliation between Gallus and Constantius.  Did he get at the envoys to ensure their mission was a failure?  We’ll never know, but if that was the case they overdid it.  In a final confrontation in the Senate the praefect attempted to assert his authority.  The response of Gallus was to call on his people to defend him.  And boy did they do so. The emperor’s men were torn to pieces by an angry mob and their dismembered bodies were thrown into the river.

On the whole, you don’t really endear yourself to an emperor by killing his emissaries.  If you are going to, at the least you need to be a bit discreet about it.  Doing it in public, indeed using the public, makes it that much worse.  Gallus had gone too far.  Constantius was going to sort him out.  The smart move would have been to simply declared himself an Augustus and hope to save himself by fighting.   But he didn’t realise this and carried on as before.

Constantius again showed that while he was never a match for his father in military matters, he did know how to implement a crafty political manoeuvre.  He quietly removed units from the East to weaken any rebellion should it arise.  He then invited Gallus and Constantina to a meeting with him in Milan, hinting strongly that it was time that he raised Gallus to the rank of Augustus.

And Gallus fell for it.  He set out from Antioch with a large retinue oblivious of the danger he was in.  At Constantinople he halted in his journey and put on some extravagant horse racing and sat in the imperial box as if he was already an Augustus.  Word of this would have got to Constantius who would have taken it as a gross insult.  Once again, are we seeing the result of some subtle manipulation going on here?  On the one hand, telling Gallus he was as good as an Augustus already is the kind of thing that he would have wanted to believe.  On the other, what better scare story for Constantius than ‘you should have heard how popular he was with the crowd at the games, sitting in your box and all.’

As he progressed towards his meeting with his cousin he found that the guards were starting to behave less like his retinue and more like his captors.  At Adrianople he received instructions to leave the bulk of his company behind him and to progress at speed to his meeting in Milan.  By now, even the poor political antennae of Gallus must have worked out that something was amiss.  But he must have been comforted by the thought that his wife Constantina was making her way separately to the meeting with her brother as well.  That ought to count for something.  He probably didn’t learn until he arrived that she had died unexpectedly on the journey.  This left Constantius as the last remaining direct descendant of Constantine.

The meeting in Milan did not go well.  On his arrival at court Gallus was imprisoned, and fell into the hands of Eusebius.  He was interrogated by the subtle courtier who succeeded in getting him to blame everything that had gone wrong on Constantina.

This was hardly noble behaviour on the part of Gallus, and in addition was extremely unwise.  Pointing the finger at his sister was going to enrage Constantius still further.  After a short captivity, the order came for his execution.  With his hands tied behind his back he was beheaded.  It was probably the end he always dreaded, but it was ironic that he should have gone to it with such initial high hopes.  And although he must have mentally prepared himself for death, he can’t have imagined that before he died he would himself kill his own reputation so effectively.

The wretched career of Gallus was not particularly significant in itself, but it does show how the empire now operated.  It was a despotism with all that that entailed.  Nobody, not even the grandson of an emperor and the nephew of another was safe. All rested on the whims of the main at the top, and a huge crowd around him devoted their whole lives to influencing him.  Courtiers, chamberlains, and palace dignitaries with bizarre titles can now be as important as generals and ministers.  Gallus had fallen foul not so much of the emperor himself but of the group of favourites around him.  Constantius lived in a bubble removed from reality.  This was a dangerous situation for an empire with enemies, but was the inevitable result of absolutism with any but the most able of rulers.

It is also worth remembering the stages in the downfall of Gallus.  Nobody can have been more interested in this episode than the one remaining member of the Constantine family aside from Constantius himself.  Julian was cut from a very different cloth to that of Gallus, but he was nonetheless his half brother and they had grown up together.  He was probably the only person Julian felt he could trust.  His death at the hands of his cousin must have been a bitter ending.

And Julian himself must have realised that his own fate was now on everyone’s lips.  With the death of Gallus, what would become of Julian?  The character and personality of Julian must have been the water cooler topic of choice in the courts.  In the next episode we’ll go back to Constantinople and pick up the story of Julian.  We’ll see that Eusebius was not the only person capable of plotting successfully.

Constantius – Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 18 Part 3

Constantius was the middle of the three sons Constantine had with Fausta.  Of the three he was the one that showed the most promise.

Those who occasionally mention the education or talents of
Constantius, allow that he excelled in the gymnastic arts of leaping and
running that he was a dexterous archer, a skilful horseman, and a master
of all the different weapons used in the service either of the cavalry
or of the infantry.

But like his brothers he was brought up as a royal surrounded by flatterers and subordinates.  Where Constantine himself had needed to get a good grip on the realities of human nature simply to survive growing up in the court of Diocletian, the princes of the blood had no such education.  But Constantius was lucky in one way in that he was sent at an early age to the East where conflict with the Persians was probably already underway.  It may well have been this early grounding in the reality of war that made him relatively speaking the most successful of the sons of Constantine.  He managed to rule reasonably effectively for twenty four years, died a natural death and had some successes.  His reign did very nearly end in the chaos of a civil war, but on the whole he seems to have done okay although he never really got a grip on the empire in the way his father did.

Lets look at the situation with the Persians where Constantius cut his teeth as Caesar.  He was officially appointed to that post at the age of 6 but seems to have been actively involved in the campaign on the borders at the age of 20 when his father died.

While Constantine was still alive and running a strong and united empire, the Persians had little hope of making any impression on the Romans.  They had fewer resources and could only make progress if the Romans were disorganised or distracted.  During the reign of Constantine, the balance of power was so much in favour of the Romans that the Persians basically kept their heads down.

The death of the long serving Tiridates of Armenia might have encouraged them to have a go.  My reading of the situation is that Constantine had Armenia pretty firmly within the sphere of influence of Rome all the time Tiridates was on the throne, and he was on the throne a very long time (385-330).  When he died the Persians tried to turn the situation more to their advantage.  Constantine’s response was to use force to restore the status quo.

This was bad news on paper for the Persians, but they did have the advantage of having a highly effective monarch in the shape of Sapor.  Sapor like Tiridates and Constantine had had an exceptionally long reign.  But unlike them he was still young and vigorous.  This was because he had got off to a very early thanks to the rather remarkable distinction of having been crowned before he was born.  The Persians had the same problems picking chief executives that the Romans did, and he had happened to be conceived during a particularly troublesome patch of dynastic history and there was a pressing need to get a monarch in place to prevent a civil war.

Previous peace settlements had left the Romans in a strong position with an easy to defend border. Being Romans they had used their engineering skills and had improved their defensive position still further by the creation of some powerful fortresses and walled cities.  So the Persians were faced with a powerful potential enemy who could attack at will but who would in turn be hard to attack.  The  Persians had a strong motive for trying to push the Romans back.

What is less clear is the precise chronology of the conflict.  If you were in Sapor’s shoes you might well calculate that waiting for the death of Constantine and then pouncing quickly before the new regime was established  would be a good plan.  But the sources seem to indicate that war had already broken out when Constantine died.

Gibbon at this point becomes uncharacteristically ambiguous.  I have a feeling that for once he couldn’t actually get a consistent narrative thread out of his sources.  He was the first historian to make use of Armenian sources and they may have been difficult to interpret.  But while it is a bit vague when things happened, what actually happened is a lot clearer.  And what happened makes a lot of sense when you consider the relative positions of the two empires.  The Romans were motivated to maintain the status quo.  This was just one of their borders and one that they were pretty happy with, and they had bigger threats on the Danube and the Rhine to worry about.  The Persians by contrast needed to hit hard and quickly to have any chance of making any impression.

There were seven pitched battles all won by the Persians.  This must have embarrassed the Romans.  But sieges of the fortresses by the Persians were unsuccessful.  The key one was Nisibis, which the Persians laid siege to three times.  In the third siege Sapor ordered a river to be diverted and flooded the plain outside the city, with the level of the water reaching the level of the top of the walls.  The Persians then attacked by boat.  It was creative, but it didn’t work.

So the victories of Sapor were empty because he got no real advantage from them.  Nobody enjoys a public humiliation and lack of success in arms could turn into political problems at home, but you have to wonder if the Romans were simply doing the logical thing.  Send enough troops to disrupt Sapor’s movements and hamper his logistics.  But don’t risk a big force that would be hard to supply and make sure the defensive pinch points are strong enough to withstand any assault.

So the events of the war could represent a cool and rational approach by the Roman high command.  Or maybe, the succession of defeats was not the result of Sapor’s genius but a clever attempt to discredit Constantius in order to benefit somebody else’s ambition.  That may sound a bit byzantine, but we are talking about the Byzantine empire now.

But whatever the truth of the matter, when the rebellion of Magnentius in the West broke Constantius was in the East with inadequate forces, a somewhat poor reputation for generalship and worst of all, a live and active enemy to deal with.  Magnentius must have been very well aware that it was he that held all the cards. He must have calculated that Constantius had no option but to recognise his fait accompli and acknowledge his position as emperor of the West.  That Constantius was not prepared to deal with him must have come as a suprise.

When Constantius succeeded in overcoming the admittedly somewhat half hearted rebellion of Vetranio by force of character and not much else, the match was suddenly a lot more even.   Magnentius still had more and better troops, but Constantius had legitimacy and had also succeeded in gaining the initiative.

The empire now faced the worst case scenario.  Thanks to the policies of Constantine there were huge forces available – it is quite probable that this would have marked the highest point of men under arms in its history.  And these forces were now divided very roughly in two and were going to fight each other.

Magnentius took the initiative.  He invaded the territory of Constantius and in early fighting came off best.  Both sides sought a large engagement to settle the matter.

The big clash came at Mursa where over 100,000 troops were involved.  This may not have quite been the largest battle in Roman history in terms of numbers of actual participants but it is the one with the highest recorded death toll.  The fighting took place on a level plain.  The army of Constantius was in a better position with a river guarding its flank and with a superiority of cavalry.  This enabled them to outflank and apparently surround the army of Magnentius.

In the days when fighting was hand to hand large numbers of deaths in a single battle are not a common occurrence.  But if one side can succeed in trapping the other in a small area they have the option of completely wiping them out.  Hannibal succeeded in doing this at Cannae.  Uncontrolled panic in retreat was another situation where deaths could be very high. There was an example in the English wars of the Roses at Towton where 28,000 were killed in a single day. The military technology of the pre-modern world was primitive but that didn’t mean that large numbers could not be killed.  It is best not to think about the details – the deaths would be both very numerous and very gruesome.   I just say all this to point out that the 54,000 killed at Mursa sounds very high and it might be put down to exaggeration.  But there is no reason in principle to doubt it.

Constantius was not actually leading the troops in battle.  He was nearby in a church praying for victory. I like the politics of that.  He was effectively sharing the danger since he was signalling his whereabouts.  If the day went badly the enemy would certainly find him and kill him.  But he showed that he had faith in his generals by letting them handle the actual battle. His prayers were answered with a decisive victory, but it was an extremely costly one.  In one day the Romans had lost enough men to form a large army.  The borders were going to be short of men for some time to come.

Even now Magnentius did not give up – and it took another battle the following year to finish him off finally and leave Constantius as the undisputed ruler of the Roman world.  And it was a major operation involving a wide scale of operations in Africa, Italy and Gaul before finally Magnentius paid with his head.  Both sides had hired barbarian mercenaries who continued to be a problem after the death of Magnentius, and the frontiers were not guarded properly for a couple of years allowing inroads particularly into Gaul.  The revolt of Magnentius was to scar the west for some time yet.

We have just got to the end of the eighteenth chapter of this work and although we have seen a lot of declining of political institutions, an economy turning into a train wreck and the establishment of a rigid totalitarian state with an absolute ruler we haven’t yet seen much in the way of decline in the size of the actual empire.  The area under the control of Constantius was still larger than it was under Augustus when Gibbon started his story.  It had only lost one province since the reign of Hadrian.

But things are starting to change on this.  Watch out for the mobility of the emperors from now on.  The story of Constantius takes us all over the map.  He is as likely to turn up in Milan, Rome or on the borders facing the Persians or the Germans.  His immediate successor, Julian, likewise will be actively taking part in events in Gaul, Italy and projecting the empire’s power across the border into Persia.

But the time is rapidly approaching when the empire will lose its capability to make the running anywhere it chose to deploy its forces.  Constantius ruled the empire alone and made a reasonably good fist of it.  But it was proving to be a strain for one man.  Despotism always put a strain on the despot.  The empire was a big thing for one man to handle.

Diocletian’s reforms had been swept away by Constantine and he had not left any other model than rule by one man.  Even brothers were prepared to fight one another.  But that one man could not be everywhere.   Delegating is something a lot of us find hard to do successfully, but it was an excruciatingly difficult business in the post-Constantine empire.  There were so few people that you could actually trust.  Able and ambitious people could turn into another Magnentius.  The unambitious and the untalented brought other  problems.

Family members posed another risk, but Constantius must have decided that they were the best option. Unfortunately most of them had been killed.  But there were still a couple of young royals still on two legs – Gallus and Julian. In the next couple of episodes we’ll see how Constantius got on with bringing them onto the main political stage.

Red Nails, an early Conan story by Robert.E.Howard

Conan the Barbarian (Thanks to Wikipedia)

With the financial crisis back on the agenda I decided I had better get planning for a worldwide economic meltdown.  There won’t be much call for development chemists in any financial armageddon so I’ll be needing an alternative career path.  I have decided to become a barbarian.  Steel is the currency of the warrior, and even Goldman Sachs can’t do anything to get a rake off from that so it seems like a good choice.

As part of my planning for this back up option, I read one of the early Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert.E.Howard. It seemed like a good starting point for tips for the barbarian lifestyle.  These stories weren’t by any means the first sword and sorcery writings, but for my money it was Conan that really created the genre for a mass market.  Originally written for pulp magazines they tend to be short and self contained, with characters that you can get to know pretty quickly.

It would be pushing it to call them great literature, but if you bear in mind what the objective was it isn’t hard to admire the skill with which they are are crafted.  Red Nails is a fine example.  The plot is simple, but not idiotically so.  Conan overcomes problems by his great muscular strength, but he also has recourse to brain power as well.  He also has a worthy enough character.  He is a bit more than one dimensional, though maybe doesn’t quite get to two dimensions.

The imaginary world in which the adventures take place isn’t really a believable alternative reality, it is more of a stage on which interesting things can be explored.  Dragons, wizards and long lost cities appear as props.  A bit of not that well disguised sado-masochistic titillation gets thrown into the mix. Howard’s greatest ability is to say quite a bit without too many words, and that works particuarly well for that last bit.  Although sex is hinted at (quite heavy hints) sexism isn’t.  Valeria, the female interest, is tall, blond and available for hot girl on girl action.  But as a pirate she is not a stereotyped little woman.  She is just as able as any male character, and more so than most.  If you have seen the film, you will have the idea.  For books written in the twenties, this was pretty progressive.

In the end Red Nails is pretty forgettable, but it holds your attention while you are reading it and you do want to get to the end of it.  Most of Howard’s work is freely available on the net nowadays.  If you are looking for some entertainment to fill up your Kindle or smart phone for when your brain isn’t up to tougher stuff, you could do a lot worse.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32759

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

The Way We Live now isn’t the best known of Trollope’s works nowadays.  His novels about politicking churchmen are a lot more familiar.  But in his own day he was as well known for being one of the few novelists who really understood money.  And this one is the one that is really worth reading if you want an insight into what goes on in board rooms among the people who read the numbers.   At this time of financial meltdown, this is more true than ever.  The plot is too complicated to summarise and as I urge you to read it I don’t want to spoil it anyway.  But it is a cracking read.

The bit I wanted to draw your attention to is a tiny part of the whole, but which is included by Trollope by way of an illustration of what else is going on.  One of the main characters is Sir Felix Carbury, a pretty worthless penniless aristocrat.  He doesn’t have many redeeming features as a man.  One of his many vices is gambling.  He gambles in a club with a group of his contemporaries who are equally disreputable and dislikable characters.  The card games distribute wealth around the members of the group fairly randomly.  But none of the group has much in the way of ready money.  So debts are settled with IOUs.  The IOUs are rarely redeemed for cash but can be used as stakes in future games.

At one stage in the novel Sir Felix has a run of good luck on the cards and becomes quite wealthy on paper.  But he can’t turn his impressive looking assets into hard cash.

The creditworthiness and willingness to pay affects the value and everyone knows that in reality some of the stakes are worthless.  But that doesn’t stop the game carrying on.

In the meantime in the real world, much the same thing is going on in a more subtle way.  Sir Toby gambles in that as well with equally unprofitable results.

The Way We Live Now has no need to be renamed The Way We Live Then.  The fraudulent nature of high finance it portrays is bang up to date and explains the current financial crisis better than a lot of the news reports.

It is out of copyright so you can find a free electronic version at Project Gutenburg and there is a full audio version on Librivox.