The Last of the Antonines
by Michael Kulikowski
The Triumph of Empire takes readers into the political heart of imperial Rome and recounts the extraordinary challenges overcome by a flourishing empire. Michael Kulikowski’s history begins with the reign of Hadrian, who visited the farthest reaches of his domain and created stable frontiers, and spans to the decades after Constantine the Great, who overhauled the government, introduced a new state religion, and founded a second Rome. This excerpt looks at the struggle for control of the throne between Marcus and Cassius.
In 172, while Marcus was proclaiming success on the Danube front, there was either a fully edged uprising or an outbreak of intensive banditry in the Egyptian delta. At the same time, the Parthians attempted to bring Armenia back under the tutelage of Ctesiphon, no doubt emboldened by the detachment of some imperial troops from Cappadocia to the Danube. But the scale of the Danubian war meant Marcus could not give the east the attention it needed, and there was no longer a Lucius Verus available to serve as the face of the imperial dynasty. Avidius Cassius, the long-serving governor of Syria and a native Syrian himself, was granted extraordinary imperium in the east, of the kind that no one outside the imperial family had possessed since the days of Augustus’s trusted lieutenant Agrippa a century and a half before. In practical terms, Cassius had become Marcus’s plenipotentiary east of the Bosporus and the suppression of Lower Egypt was his first task.
Meanwhile, Marcus passed most of the campaigning season of 173 beyond the Danube, possibly reaching as far as the headwaters of the Vistula. The Quadi were certainly one target, perhaps because they had broken their oath not to help the Marcomanni. In the following year, he turned against the Iazyges beyond the Danube bend, in the Great Hungarian plain between the river and the Carpathians, or, in Roman terms, between Pannonia and Dacia. He did well enough to refuse the Iazyges the peace terms they sought, preferring to continue the fighting in 175. That year brought something far worse than another round of frontier warfare: Avidius Cassius, perhaps the most reliable man Marcus had, revolted and claimed the imperial title.
The proximate cause of rebellion was a rumour that Marcus had died on the Danube. Our sources, retrospective and unreliable, suggest that Faustina became worried that Marcus would die of an illness he had contracted and sent word to Cassius to prepare to seize power if Marcus died. While not intrinsically implausible, the story cannot be proved. But whether he believed the rumour to be true, or whether it served as a useful pretext for his ambitions, Cassius was acclaimed emperor by his troops early in 175. The governor of Cappadocia, Martius Verus, stayed loyal to the emperor and sent word to the Danube as soon as he learned of the uprising beyond the Taurus mountains. When Cassius learned the truth — Marcus was not dead and thus he was now de facto a usurper — he decided to press ahead with his rebellion and fight for the throne. He was popular in the east — his royal Seleucid background lent him real status there — and backing him he had the powerful Syrian army, which had won the throne for generals in the past. The whole of the Roman Near East south of the Taurus sided with him, including Egypt and its vital grain supply. But he got no encouragement from his fellow senators in the west, and he would need to deal with the loyalist Martius Verus, at the head of the Cappadocian legions, sooner rather than later.
For Marcus the situation was very alarming. In bad health himself, he was fully aware of Cassius’s strengths. He moved quickly, sending Vettius Sabinianus, governor of Pannonia Inferior, to hold Rome. The senate had obligingly condemned Cassius as a hostis publicis, but Marcus knew it would duly reverse itself if the ‘public enemy’ looked likely to pull o his coup. The teenage caesar Commodus, back in Rome when news of the coup arrived, oversaw the distribution of liberalitas (the emperor’s free gift of coined money) to the people to calm them in their emperor’s absence. He rejoined his father on the Danube, where he immediately assumed the toga virilis, well before the March festival of the Liberalia when Roman boys traditionally marked the transition to adulthood. He received the title princeps iuventutis and was presented to the army, which was meant to signify that Marcus had an heir who would succeed him when he died, and to play on the long-standing military habit of dynastic sentiment.
Marcus declared publicly, to the army and the senate, that he hoped Cassius would not be killed or take his own life, still less force war upon the empire, and that he should instead allow Marcus to make him an example of his mercy. is was implausible, even from as forbearing and philosophical an emperor as Marcus: it was an iron law of Roman history that, once committed to his usurpation, an imperial challenger should not be permitted to live. Before Marcus was forced to take action, however, one of Cassius’s own centurions assassinated him, to the emperor’s great relief. Martius Verus advanced into Syria to settle a airs. On the emperor’s orders, he burned Cassius’s correspondence unread. With this act of leniency, Marcus not only exculpated those genuinely implicated in Cassius’s rebellion, but also any innocents who might have been suspected by dint of having written to the usurper in times long past.
Given how much support Cassius had enjoyed, Marcus could not afford to delay a trip to the east. He concluded a peace with the Iazyges, took the victory title Sarmaticus and enlisted a large number of their cavalry into the auxiliaries, sending them to faraway Britain. Pompeianus was left on the Danube frontier as Marcus’s proxy, while the imperial family began a tour of the eastern provinces that had supported Cassius. Along with Marcus, Faustina and Commodus went one of the year’s consuls, none other than Helvius Pertinax, son of a freedman, and thus even more than his patron Pompeianus an indicator of the changes overtaking the ruling class of the empire. The imperial party overwintered in the east, where Faustina died, at the village of Halala near Tyana in Cappadocia. Marcus renamed the village Faustinopolis and the senate, as was customary, deified her as diva Faustina.
On the whole, Marcus was extremely lenient, granting Cassius’s younger children freedom of movement, and only banishing his elder son Heliodorus. He did, however, ostentatiously spurn the city of Cyrrhus, where Cassius had been born, and forbade public spectacles at Antioch, the capital of the revolt, also stripping it of its rights as a metropolis. He treated Alexandria in Egypt more lightly, and Antioch would have its privileges restored by Commodus a er his father’s death. More significantly, Marcus decreed that henceforth no man should be allowed to govern the province of his birth, lest that kindle dangerous ambition. On the overland journey back to Rome, the imperial party stopped in Athens, where Marcus and Commodus were together initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries. The emperor also endowed professorships of the arts and sciences in the city in, among other topics, Stoic, Epicurean, Platonist and Aristotelian philosophy.
