The Fall of Rome, VII: One, Two, Many Irans

 

The real story of the week is that I finally dragged my ass out to the library on Wednesday, cleared my account, and placed my next batch of requests Thursday morning. The other story is this stupid ass war with Iran that someone is having. The robots at ASRS have so far agreed to hand over Fortune out of all my requests. Flight and The Engineer usually take longer to surface, and Aviation Week, The Economist, and Newsweek come from PARC, the new facility on the former experimental farm at the south end of campus that was built after it was realised that "tearing all the old magazines apart and putting them online" was not actually going to happen. Ha ha, enshittification, watchagonnado. This is a pretty long walk from the holding shelves or something, which is why I expect delivery on Monday or whenever. So postblogging is next week, and given a slack week, how about some "public engagement?" Obviously no one is talking about  the war any more because it's boring and we want to focus on the high cost of produce. Which, we have to admit, is related to this stupid war, but we can't do anything about the war, and we can complain that there's no out-of-season corn on the cob. 

I've already put some markers down. The story of two weeks ago was the rescue of the crew of an F-15E downed over Iran, which was very reminiscent of EAGLE CLAW, which provoked a safety review of the practice of having pilots wear night vision goggles, which gave us a tiny tiny bit of light(!) on the development of night vision equipment in U.S. service, a topic which is super obscure because of physicists making terrible historians. I made a heroic effort to avoid topical references last week, and also in a Quora answer I wrote on the subject of Third Century Gothic seapower, which is such a bizarre sentence to write even though it's absolutely a thing. 

 

So, now, what the hell, time to go all in. It's hard to stress enough how the world is getting fucked up over all of this, so some comment is surely warranted, and as far as the state of the research goes, I'm not sure I've blogged about the history since Gunther Martin's working group in Vienna promulgated the most recent of the fragments of what is probably Dexippus' Scythia Vindobonensia, they have recovered, which was  2017, per the Internet. But we all know the real reason is that ever since I talked about the subject on Quora, I've been thinking about the hapless twats who occupy the Trump White House and the Roman Emperor Valerian,

(Exactly like that)

who was captured by Shapur I some time between 257 and 260 (David S. Potter thinks that 260 is pretty secure, but I remain completely gobsmacked that the sources don't allow us to assert the year with complete confidence). Per Lactantius, Shapur treated his captive with great cruelty, while the early Muslim historian, Abu Hanifa Dinawari says the reverse. Neither historian seems impeccably credible, but there's a strong energy of  Valerian effectively defecting from a hapless Rome in Dinawari's account, and that's definitely in the spirit of the times. Potter, intrestingly, points out that the story that Valerian and his troops/staff were put to work building dams in the new Roman masonry tradition. The dams traditionally associated with Valerian do survive, and how could I possibly pass up a topical aside about Harvard failing its students by omitting civil engineering from the law school curriculum?  

Back before we learned what real decadence looked like, there were two Suicide Squads and Birds of Prey, and I thought it was weird that we were making whole movies challenging norms around feminine beauty standards, and we weren't going to talk about it, which leads to Cara Delevingue, whose militant absence of charisma helped sink Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.  Supposedly all of this left us no choice to vote for Donald Trump in 2024, and let's not even pretend that Internet Nation isn't complicit, even outside the United States. This is all about personality, personality, personality, and the point of talking about "many Irans" is to imply a systemic problem.

Romans kept going to war with Persia in spite of steadily mounting evidence that it was just not a very good idea. Crassus' failure and defeat at Carrhae  is moderately legendary. I've heard about Crassus getting his ass handed to him by Parthian horse archers since I was just a little boy, but spellcheck doesn't recognise the name (partly because it's actually Harran, to be sure.) Julius Caesar was preparing to go to the Middle East to sort things out when he was assassinated, and there is an argument that Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was in the Middle East during the constitutional crisis of 23BC because he was negotiating the return of Crassus' standards and implicitly threatening the Senate with an unencumbered army under Augustus' colleague if the crisis wasn't properly sorted out. That takes us deep into the career of Agrippa, which briefly attracted my interest due to the remote possibility of Agrippa being involved in the development of Rome's transalpine livestock trade before I decided to pull in my horns. (Classicists are as interested in filling out their scant details as physicists are uninterested in even reading their own professional literature before pronouncing on their own history.) Thereafter Lucius Verus's Parthian war was deemed a great success in spite of the man's terrible press, and one might imagine that Trajan thought Parthia was an easy mark. If so, he was wrong, and after Caracalla and then Alexander Severus' mixed experience, one might imagine that Gordian III, never mind Valerian would have been more cautious. One can imagine a Third Century John Bolton or Benyamin Netanyahu campaigning for a Persian war through the second quarter of the century, but Valerian was not the end of the story, as we still have to get to Julian. 

This brings me back to Dexippus, who has been known since Antiquity as a very distinguished Athenian, and a very readable writer, if a poor historian. This might explain why so many later historians epitomise Dexippus. We remain far from 100% clear why there is no surviving Roman-style eyewitness historian preserved for the Crisis of the Third Century, but perhaps they really had no alternative to Dexippus. After all, even he does not survive in the original text, and that is clearly for no sinister reason, since there was still an edition extant in the eleventh century, perhaps even the one that the Vienna group is working with. 

Per Dexippus, there were two major "Gothic" incursions into the Roman Balkans, in  251 and 268/9. In the first, the "Scythians" invaded, attacked one of the Roman cities established to anchor the provinces created in various administrative reforms over the previous two centuries, captured another, and led off captives to points unknown, presumably in the Pontic steppes. The Emperor Decius caught up with them at a place called Abritta, and was not only defeated, but killed in battle, which is just about unprecedented for a Roman princeps to this point. with either Crassus or Gordian III depending on what exactly happened to the latter being the last comparable case. What exactly happened to the captives after that is unclear, as is that of the "Italian citizens" carried off by the Jugunthi in 260 and recovered in southern Germany per the Augsburg Victory Altar, and the captives or exiles that Trajan captured back from the Dacians in his conquest of that trans-Danubian kingdom in 112. I'd speculate on what all of that means if seizing and carrying off captives weren't a common thing in Antiquity. 

The second incursion was that of the Herulians/Helurians, who, as far as we can reconstruct the narrative, decided to have a navy, snuck through the Bosporus  somehow, and turned into Vikings, complete with landing an army in Greece with which Dexippus tussled as the leader of a Greek militia. 

For an empire built around its large professional army, the third century empire sure extruded a lot of militias. Which is weird but not as weird as it seems, since yeomanries seem to be pretty typical of aristocratic equestrian societies. There's no indication that Dexippus led a yeomanry, but the Roman Empire was definitely evolving into a society dominated by an horsey aristocracy, this being one of the hoariest chestnuts of historical explanations for the fall of the Empire. The more historically significant Palmyran army that secured the Middle Eastern provinces during the 260/70 period of complete imperial collapse, was definitely such an institution, and at some point in the crisis period or just before the Emperor began to be accompanied by an entourage/strategic reserve of cavalry. It's generally thought that the sequence of "Danubian" or "barracks room" emperors of the 270s that culminated in Diocletian came out of this milieu. 

Since I've talked recently about the Antique Black Seas commercial fishery, it should come as no surprise that this is my explanation for the "Heruli/Helurian" outbreak of 268/9. After all, a Classic navy is rooted in supplies of timber, cordage, iron, and sailors/rowers, and none of these seem abundantly available on the Pontic steppes, but are indispensable to running a fishery. If we're to understand the Crisis at all, we have to start with the traditional numismatic evidence and in particular the sudden and catastrophic reduction of silver content in the coinage. While the Roman mint may not have had access to silver, the implication is some kind of political/economic/social omnicrisis, which, anyway, is the most parsimonious explanation for the sudden collapse of the Empire into three or more states. At the very least, one can easily imagine the fishing camps in the Danube basin and Sea of Azov rising in revolt when the merchant buyers arrived with supplies of silver-washed coinage, especially if they were selling the coins for their bullion value to their Pontic neighbours. It is left to observe that the region is traditionally the nursery of cavalries. A great deal of words have been expended over the years on purported changes in saddle furniture leading to the enabling of heavy cavalry in the Sassanian period. 

That's a fancy way of saying "they invented the stirrup." I think there's an ongoing argument involving the usual suspects (were saddles really invented in Han China? Sure. Why not?) and it is hard to argue "Third Century Crisis caused by stirrup," or, for that matter, the treed saddle, since the former isn't definitely attested before the Fourth Century and the former as early as the Third, but the Romans definitely felt the need for great masses of cavalry outside their traditional army structure after the sorting out of the Crisis, and it is in this context that the Goths start becoming a bit less obscure. I'll note here that there's not as much as we might have hoped that is novel about the newly available fragments of Dexippus, but we do learn that the leader of the "Scythians" who invaded the Empire in 251 was "Ostragotha," which really ought to have upended Gothic studies more than it has considering that we thought that the "Ostrogoths" were the "East Goths."

Sure. Carve a city out of the side of a mountain  steped up and
down over 1000m of vertical so no-one can walk anywhere. 
It's not like the price of gas won't stay low forever!

Anyway, it will not surprise the reader to hear that I think that both "Goths" and "Heluri/Herulians" are ethnogeneses of the Crisis, and, therefore, of the collapse of the Roman economy, and, perhaps, therefore some more, of one too many failed Iranian expeditions. As to why this might have been, with an eye to the clock I am going to wave at the long distance livestock trade, clearly so profoundly important to the Empire right up to the point where it was not. 

Don't fuck around with a fragile and declining economic system, is what I'm saying. It might not come back. And certainly don't depend on human beings hewing to constructed identities when the costs of those identities begin to add up!