IV

FLAVIAN WARS AND FRONTIERS

VII.

THE DACIAN WAR

In the course of AD 85 the Dacians crossed the Danube and harried the province of Moesia. The governor, Oppius Sabinus, was slain in battle, forts and their garrisons were overwhelmed: the camps of the legions, however, were successfully defended. Summoning reinforcements from different provinces, Domitian marched at once with the Guard and its prefect, Cornelius Fuscus, to the seat of war.

After more than a century of weakness and disunion, the tribes of the Dacians had come together again and formed a kingdom. This change is associated with the name of Decebalus. Whether his assumption of undivided supremacy in Dacia preceded or followed the invasion of Moesia is uncertain, but if that supremacy did not originate in the wars against Rome, it was confirmed by them. About the causes of the conflict there can only be conjecture. The Romans had maintained a claim to suzerainty over many of the Transdanubian peoples and had intervened in their affairs. The revival of Dacian power may have caused a clash of interests among the tribes in Wallachia between the Carpathians and the Danube and so have precipitated the crisis of AD 85.

Apart from the Dacians, a new and alarming enemy was surging against this frontier, Sarmatians from Moldavia and Bessarabia. In the winter of 67/8 the Roxolani cut to pieces an auxiliary cohort, and in the early spring of 69 they swept over the Danube again. Though the Roxolani were defeated, later in the same year a host of Dacians assaulted the legionary camps; nor is it likely that the Sarmatians neglected this favorable opportunity. But Mucianus, on his way to Italy, repelled the invaders. The respite was only temporary. In the next year the Sarmatians defeated and killed the governor of Moesia, Fonteius Agrippa. His successor, Rubrius Gallus, restored order and sought to prevent the recurrence of these raids by the building of a number of forts.

What further provision was made by the government of Vespasian for the defense of the Danubian provinces is not known. No great changes appear to have been introduced: Dalmatia still retained a legion, the new IV Flavia felix, stationed at Burnum. In Pannonia, XV Apollinaris returned from the East to Carnuntum; the other legion, XIII Gemina, garrisoned Poetovio, as before. The army of Moesia, raised to three legions by Claudius, but subsequently depleted by the demands of the East, was restored to its strength in the last year of Nero. Under Vespasian it comprised at least three legions, I Italica, V Macedonica and VII Claudia. As for their camps, VII Claudia was probably stationed at Viminacium, some forty miles east from Belgrade, V Macedonica at Oescus and I Italica at Novae, both facing the valley of the Aluta. A fourth legion and a consequent strengthening of the garrison are to be admitted if it is true that the legion V Alaudae survived after AD 70.

Before long more troops were sorely needed in Moesia and in Pannonia. The literary sources betray no trace of trouble on the Danube between AD 70 and 85, which, from the character of those sources, is in no way surprising. Signs of unrest can, however, be detected. In 82 three regiments detached from the army of Upper Germany were serving in Moesia3: they never after returned to the Rhine. The storm had long been gathering: though violent, it may not have been unheralded.

The first task that confronted Domitian and Fuscus was to expel the Dacians from Moesia and prevent their return. Only Dacians are named as the enemies of Rome in Domitian's war on the Lower Danube: but Sarmatians may well have seized the chance of plunder, as in 69/70, even if they were not acting in concert and in co-operation with the Dacians. To the measures taken against the invaders in the autumn and winter of 85 may belong the erection of the great vallum of earth in the Dobrudja. Where the Danube changes its course from east to north, it is barely forty miles distant from the Black Sea. Here, running across the low and bare plateau of the Dobrudja, roughly from Rasova to Constanta, are to be seen the remains of no fewer than three parallel lines of defence, more or less continuous from the river to the sea, a stone wall, a small vallum and a large vallum. The latter is probably of Domitianic date; it resembles a line of entrenchments for an army in the face of an enemy rather than a fortified frontier: it might be conjectured that a Roman army wintered in the Dobrudja and that a part of it garrisoned the line of the vallum and its forts.

Some twelve miles to the south of the vallum, on the crown of the plateau above the village of Adamclisi and visible from afar, stand the massive ruins of the trophy which Trajan erected to commemorate the conquest of Dacia: close beside the Tropaeum Trajani is another monument, an altar bearing the names of soldiers who had fallen in battle. Neither the date of the erection of the altar, nor the events it recorded, nor the purpose it was designed to serve, can be ascertained. Whatever it may be, the choice of the site at least is not fortuitous—Adamclisi may have witnessed a battle (perhaps the defeat of Oppius Sabinus) or the presence of a Roman emperor. Adamclisi is a position of some strategic importance. It possesses—a rarity in the Dobrudja—a spring of water and is the natural headquarters for an army holding the vallum.

It was not enough to have restored order in a Roman province. Domitian resolved to send a punitive expedition across the Danube, an operation which is probably to be dated to the early summer of 86. Wherever it was that Fuscus bridged the river, his advance into Dacia was soon arrested by a shattering defeat. Fuscus fell—if he still retained the dash and vigor that had contributed to the winning of a civil war, they served him ill in the forests and mountains of Dacia. The army suffered further losses in its disastrous retreat, and the booty captured by the Dacians included a military standard—perhaps an eagle.

Tacitus withheld the total of the Roman dead, imitating the patriotic reticence of certain earlier historians, and enhancing thereby the disaster and the discredit of Domitian. The choice of Fuscus the Prefect of the Guard as commander was Domitian's, a natural choice if the Emperor himself was at the seat of war. Tradition preserved the picture of Domitian slaying the innocent and the helpless in Rome while on the frontiers his generals waged disastrous wars. None the less there is evidence that on this occasion Domitian was not far from the scene of operations. According to one account he took up his abode in a city of Moesia and sent others against the enemy, for the most part with disastrous results; moreover, rejecting Decebalus’ overtures for peace, he dispatched Fuscus against him, in reply to which Decebalus sent a derisive message, offering to let the Roman army depart from Dacia in return for a ransom. If this be not all fiction, Domitian was still in Moesia after Fuscus had crossed the Danube.

When Domitian returned to Rome it was not to celebrate the triumph he had once expected: he arrived in time to inaugurate the Capitoline Games in the summer of the year 86.

The Dacians were contented with a victory beyond their hopes. But they were not to enjoy it for long. If the success which was subsequently achieved is any measure, the Roman preparations must have been thorough and comprehensive. A second miscalculation would be fatal. Nor can diplomacy have been neglected in the endeavor to isolate and encircle Decebalus. To the west in the great plains between Transylvania and the frontier of Pannonia extended the Sarmatae Iazyges, allies of Rome: but it is not known whether Rome could command their active co-operation, or had been able to buy the neutrality either of Dacian tribes in Wallachia or of Sarmatians farther to the east beyond the Lower Danube.

After a lull in 87 the war was resumed in 88 and prosecuted in the next year. Its climax was signalized by a remarkable victory. A Roman army commanded by Tettius Julianus reached the plain of Caransebes, facing the Iron Gates—perhaps after a converging approach in several columns. At a place called Tapae, where Trajan was to meet with indifferent success in his first campaign; a great battle and a great slaughter of Dacians ensued. Vezinas, next in power to Decebalus, was left for dead on the field. Julianus, however, did not march on Sarmizegethusa: he was baffled, it was alleged, by a Dacian stratagem. Other causes might be invoked, not least the difficult approach through the Iron Gates. If the battle of Tapae was fought in the autumn of 88, it might be supposed that the Romans remained in occupation of Dacian territory through the winter and prepared to consummate their triumph by a further advance in the direction of Sarmizegethusa by another route.

At Rome in the meantime Domitian had celebrated the Secular Games in September 88. But before he could come to the Danube to contemplate the achievement of his armies and receive in person the submission of Decebalus, a civil war had been fought on the Rhine, and on the Danube a rapid turn of fortune compromised and impaired the success that had been won in Dacia.