The conspirators—for there seems to have been a widespread conspiracy—had chosen their time with skill and were able to use the difficulties of the Empire for their own ends. The continuance of hostilities in Dacia tied down a considerable Roman army, and the East was disturbed: the Parthians supported—or had just been supporting—a false Nero with the threat of war. A civil war more than any other can be determined by promptness of decision and rapidity of movement. While Verginius yet wavered and all the West was in suspense, the cause of Nero had been far from hopeless. Courage might have saved him: cowardice or folly prevented him from joining the army which was mustering for him in northern Italy. The same dangers confronted Domitian. Upper Germany was in revolt. Lower Germany and Britain, too, for all that could yet be known, were in the plot—all the great military provinces of the West and a dozen legions. But Domitian displayed decision himself and expected it of others. Summoning, before it was too late, the Spanish legion VII Gemina, which its commander Trajan conducted with dutiful rapidity towards the seat of war, Domitian hastened with the Guard to northern Italy, there to concentrate his troops and, if necessary, fall back upon the Danubian armies. Everything promised a long and tenacious struggle, but the storm was dispelled as suddenly as it had gathered. Swift couriers had brought the ill news from Germany to Rome: by the twelfth day of the month Domitian was on his way to the north; on the twenty-fifth the tidings of victory, heralded by rumor and prodigies, were cel­brated by the Arval Brethren.

On the Rhine events had moved swiftly. Miscalculation or misfortune ruined the designs of Saturninus. Maximus, the governor of Lower Germany, stood by Domitian, and his army won a victory against great odds. On the day of the battle a host of Germans was seen beyond the Rhine, intending to cross the frozen river to the help of Saturninus. A sudden thaw set in, and the Germans were frustrated. The scene of Saturninus' defeat is probably to be sought in the plain near Andernach, between Coblenz and Bonn.  Saturninus was hastening northwards to win to his cause or force by persuasion the army of Lower Germany, while the Germans in whose presence the armies fought were the Chatti who had descended from the upper reaches of the Lahn to the Neuwieder Becken opposite Coblenz and Andernach.

The news of the victory did not interrupt the march of Domitian. He came to the Rhine and punished the officers and accomplices of Saturninus with a severity as merciless as it was intelligible. Maximus had taken care to destroy the private papers of Saturninus, an action which will not have commended him to a suspicious and resentful emperor: the historian Dio praises him for disinterested virtue1. The treasonable designs of Saturninus can hardly have been matured without reference to the attitude of the commanders of the armies of Lower Germany and of Britain. By the former, he was deluded or repulsed, the latter may have been privy to the conspiracy—at least a governor of Britain, Sallustius Lucullus, is named amongst the senators whom Domitian put to death on trivial or spurious charges. The army of Lower Germany had saved the Emperor and the Empire. The legions, I Minervia, VI Victrix, X Gemina, and XXII Primigenia, the auxiliary regiments and the Rhine fleet were honoured with the title pia fidelis Domitiana.  Maximus later received a second consulate.

Rewards and privileges were showered upon the soldiery. But precautions were also taken. Domitian limited the sum of money that might be deposited at the headquarters of a legion, and abolished double camps. XIV Gemina was left at Mainz, where it remained for three years longer. Its partner in treason and armed revolt, the notorious XXI Rapax, marched with Domitian when after a brief sojourn on the Rhine he set out for Pannonia.

Before his departure it is to be presumed that Domitian settled accounts with the Chatti. They agreed to respect the Roman frontier in the future, a transaction sanctioned by the imposition—or renewed imposition—of some kind of treaty. There is evidence enough that the Chatti had been in arms and had broken into Roman territory. On the line of the frontier from the river Lahn to the Taunus the wooden watch-towers were all destroyed by fire. In the Wetterau, the bath-houses of three at least of the forts, Okarben, Heddernheim and Hofheim, show traces of destruction. It would appear that the Chatti had descended in two bands from their haunts beyond the Taunus, the one sweeping down the Wetterau stripped of its garrisons by Saturninus, the other making for the Neuwieder Becken opposite Coblenz. In the years immediately following, the damage caused in the Wetterau was made good by the construction of new bath-houses and perhaps of new forts as well. The incursion of the Chatti may well have had another immediate result. At some time in the late years of Domitian, the frontier was extended some twenty-five miles north-westward of the Lahn to enclose the Neuwieder Becken. This was a region where many routes from the interior reached the bank of the Rhine: and it was now strongly occupied by the Romans, with no fewer than three forts.

The Chatti are said to have come as allies at the invitation of a Roman governor. This might be doubted, but it was an interpretation which could not be refuted after the event, and it had much to recommend it. Treason in the army and its associates in Rome were thereby branded with a deeper infamy and Domitian secured an opportunity and an excuse for celebrating a triumph later in the year de Germanis. Victory in a civil war was not the proper occasion for a Roman triumph. As it was, Domitian's double triumph over Chatti and Dacians presented certain equivocal features.

 

IX.

PEACE WITH DACIA

 

The Roman victory at Tapae had reduced Decebalus to sore straits. He was saved by a catastrophic turn of fortune. Beyond the Danube from Bohemia eastwards to the borders of Transylvania the peoples that acknowledged the suzerainty of Rome and protected the frontier of Pannonia, the Marcomanni, the Quadi and the Sarmatae Iazyges, cast off their allegiance and prepared for war.

The Marcomanni and the Quadi failed to send help to Domitian in the Dacian War. He came to Pannonia from the Rhine in the spring of 89 and, after putting to death the members of an embassy of excuse and protestations (the second that they sent), made war upon them. The brief notice in an epitome, the only record of this affair, fixes on Domitian the blame for an arrogant and unwise attack. If the circumstances were adequately known, his action might not appear to have been both criminal in its disregard for the law of nations and misguided in its object. Domitian refused to tolerate an affront to the majesty of Rome: but no emperor of the Flavian house had any liking for the risks and the costs of war if war could be avoided. If his was the aggression, it had a purpose—to forestall the attack of the Germans and avert a greater danger: it is unfortunate that the ulterior causes of this change of front of the German and Sarmatian allies of Rome on the middle Danube are beyond recovery.

The army which Domitian conducted or dispatched across the Danube met with a reverse, and the Iazyges allied themselves with their German neighbors, a peril not only to the Pannonian frontier but to the army in Dacia. The changed situation demanded a rapid decision. When Tiberius invaded Bohemia in AD 6, all Illyricum rose in his absence, and he was compelled to make terms with Maroboduus, recognizing him as a king and friend of the Roman People. Decebalus had been hard pressed: he had asked for peace before, more than once, and even now that Germans and Sarmatians were in arms against his enemy he had no wish to continue the struggle. On both sides expediency prevailed and honor was saved. Decebalus gained Roman recog­nition, and more than that, the Roman support for which Maroboduus vainly hoped and vainly appealed. Domitian lent him skilled workmen and engineers and promised an annual subsidy. A well-grounded distrust prevented Decebalus from putting his valuable person in the power of Rome. At a ceremony of vicarious homage Diegis, a Dacian prince, received a diadem from the hands of Domitian. In the course of the year the Emperor returned to Rome and celebrated with great pomp a double triumph over the Chatti and the Dacians.

There remained other enemies. Before, or just after, the termination of the war in Dacia, a column was detached from the army of occupation and sent north-westwards across the Banat of Temesvar to take the Iazyges in the rear; it was led by a soldier of tried merit, Velius Rufus. Of the course taken by the war on the Pannonian front, nothing is known. Warfare might be supplemented by the resources of Roman diplomacy—either now or in the course of the next few years attempts were made to stir up the tribes in the rear of the recalcitrant Marcomanni and Quadi. Before now the Hermunduri had intervened in Bohemia to the advantage, if not with the encouragement, of the Romans: of their attitude at this time, however, there is no evidence. North of Bohemia in Saxony dwelt the Semnones, whose primacy among the Suebic tribes was consecrated by antiquity and religion: the visit which their king, accompanied by an influential priestess, paid to Domitian was hardly the result of chance or idle curiosity. Domitian also entered into negotiations with the powerful Lugii in Silesia, to whose aid he sent a small force of cavalry. By these means he sought to prevent the growth of a hostile power or confederacy with its centre in Bohemia—both the Semnones and the Lugii had once acknowledged the supremacy of Maroboduus—and he was able to isolate the Marcomanni and Quadi.

Despite the use of diplomacy and an increase of the garrison of Pannonia to a total of four legions, unrest prevailed along the middle course of the Danube, culminating in another Suebo-Sarmatian War. In the early spring of the year 92 the Iazyges crossed the river. A Pannonian legion met the invaders and perished in the encounter. It was probably XXI Rapax: a fitting end for a legion whose name and whose history were so intimately associated with scenes of violence and sedition. To replace this legion, Domitian summoned from Mainz its companion and associate in the recent civil war, XIV Gemina, and once again visited the endangered frontier. Detachments were drawn from the five legions of the Moesian provinces. Whether Decebalus lent help against the Iazyges is, like almost everything else about the war, unknown. Domitian assumed one imperatorial salutation and after an absence of eight months returned to Rome in January, 93. He did not celebrate the triumph which a servile Senate was ready to decree, but contented himself with depositing a wreath of laurel in the temple of Juppiter on the Capitol.

After this the Iazyges were kept in order—perhaps by fear of Dacia, their eternal enemy: but operations against the Germans in the autumn of the year 97 provided a happy omen for Nerva's adoption of Trajan and an additional name in the titles of each emperor.