Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (39 page)

Corbulo spent four years building the two legions into a crack fighting force, until, in the spring of a.d. 58, he launched his Armenian offensive.

His unheralded drive from Cappadocia east into Armenia involved two forces in a classic pincer movement. Taking the enemy completely by surprise, Corbulo led one force made up of the 10th Legion and auxiliary and allied support that swept through the middle of the country and went against the major Parthian fortress at Volandum, which is believed to have been to the southwest of Artaxata and just north of Mount Ararat.

His deputy, Brigadier General Cornelius Flaccus, took the second force against several lesser forts farther south. His battle group was made up of his own 6th Victrix Legion and six cohorts of the 3rd Augusta Legion under Camp Prefect, or Major, Insteius Capito, who had come up from their bases in Judea—where they’d left their remaining four cohorts on garrison duty. Corbulo had personally trained the tough little Syrian legionaries of the 3rd Augusta when they’d been stationed with him on the Rhine a decade earlier, and he was well aware of the ferocious capa-bilities of these worshipers of the Syrian sun god Baal—or Elagabalus, as the Romans were to call him. General Flaccus’s troops proceeded to overrun one enemy fortress after another—three on a single memorable day.

Volandum looked to be a tougher nut to crack. Urging his men to win themselves both glory and spoils, General Corbulo divided the 10th Legion into four divisions for the Volandum assault. He had undertaken a careful engineering survey of the defenses, and now he personally led one group in an attack beneath a
testudo
of shields, against a section of the outer wall considered the most vulnerable to undermining. While this group labored at the base of the wall, two more went against other parts of the rampart with scaling ladders. The fourth group covered the other three with dense artillery fire from prepared artillery mounds.

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The assault lasted eight hours. By the time they had finished, the men of the 10th had stripped the walls of their defenders, had overthrown the fortress’s gates, and had scaled its fortified bastions and taken them one after another. The 10th Legion massacred the adult defenders of Volandum to a man. All the nonmilitary survivors were auctioned off to the traders following the army. During the attack, Corbulo’s units had suffered a few wounded, but not a single fatality. Now the men of the 10th were allowed to plunder Volandum to their hearts’ content.

The two assault groups then linked up to the south of the Armenian capital, Artaxata, a walled city not far from Lake Sevan that sat in a formidable position beside the Avaxes River, the modern Aras River. Arch-aeologists suggest that Artaxata was actually on an island in the middle of the river, but this is not mentioned by Tacitus, who indicates only that it was reached by just a single bridge. The last Roman general to venture near Artaxata had been Germanicus, forty years before.

Crossing the Aras well downstream, Corbulo led his task force on Artaxata from the southeast. As they advanced along the Aras valley floor in battle order, with elements of the 10th Legion in the center, the 3rd Augusta cohorts on the right flank and the 6th Victrix on the left, the Romans were shadowed by tens of thousands of mounted Parthian archers led by Tiridates, the Parthian prince who had taken the Armenian throne.

At any moment the Romans expected the fearsome Parthians to attack. Many in the 10th would have remembered how General Crassus and his legions had perished at the hands of mounted Parthians like these at Carrhae back in 53 b.c., and they would have shuddered at the thought that history might be about to repeat itself. But apart from a Roman cavalry lieutenant on the right wing who ventured too close to the archers and was drilled with arrows, there was no blood spilled this day. As night fell, the enemy melted away. The Parthians, daunted by the reputation of General Corbulo and his by now crack legions, didn’t have the stomach to take them on.

Artaxata fell without a fight. The city opened its gates to Corbulo, just as it had to Germanicus four decades before. But knowing he could be cut off and destroyed here if he tried to hold the 250-year-old Armenian capital, the pragmatic Corbulo gave the residents a few hours to collect their valuables and flee, then burned the city to the ground. Having decided that the more accessible southwestern city of Tigranocerta would make a better capital, he led the army down through central Armenia toward it.

The men of the 10th had only one complaint as they tramped through Armenia—the task force ran out of grain, and the troops were forced to eat meat. There is an old joke, put into writing by Juvenal, that Romans c20.qxd 12/5/01 5:40 PM Page 209

could be kept happy on a diet of bread and circuses, and it was true.

Roman legionaries loved their daily bread.

Arriving at Tigranocerta on the Nicephorius River, General Corbulo installed a king of Rome’s choice on the Armenian throne, Tigranes, a Cappadocian prince, making the substantial 120-year-old city his capital.

For the next four years, a cohort from the 10th Legion and one from the 6th Victrix were stationed at Tigranocerta as bodyguard to the king, supported by fifteen hundred auxiliaries.

In a.d. 62 the Parthians invaded Armenia and laid siege to Tigranocerta. In response, Corbulo, who was now given the wide-ranging powers of a modern field marshal by Nero, promptly sent a relief force across the border. Led by Brigadier General Verulanus Severus, latest commander of the 6th Victrix, the force was made up of the balance of the cohorts of the 6th and the 10th. The Parthians rapidly withdrew from Tigranocerta, but their king, Vologases, began to make preparations to invade Syria.

To defend Syria, the field marshal dug in along the Euphrates River.

Retaining his best units, the 10th and the 6th Victrix, he once more brought six cohorts of the reliable 3rd Augusta Legion up from their station in Judea to add to his force. At the same time, to help Corbulo, Lieutenant General Caesennius Paetus was sent out to the East by the Palatium, Rome’s combined White House and Pentagon. General Paetus, a man apparently afflicted with both a squint and a massive ego, subsequently led the 4th Macedonica and 12th Legions into Armenia against the Parthians.

The Parthians avoided a full-scale battle and withdrew ahead of this advance, unaware that neither of these units had benefited from Field Marshal Corbulo’s personal training, unlike the 10th, the 6th Victrix, and the 3rd Augusta.

General Paetus had boasted that he would show Corbulo how to deal with the Parthians, but the omens for his operation were not good from the start—as he was crossing a bridge over the Euphrates into Armenia, the horse carrying his lieutenant general’s standard bolted and galloped to the rear.

While Paetus overran several outposts, the main Parthian forces kept a wary distance for months, and with the weather deteriorating, the inept Paetus made camp for the winter at Rhandeia in northwestern Armenia beside the Arsanias River, the modern Murat River. He let many of his troops go on leave, sending a message to the emperor at Rome declaring that he had as good as won the war against the Parthians.

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along the eastern bank of the river, the 3rd Augusta and the 6th Victrix, fought off one desperate attack after another. To increase his firepower, Corbulo threw a wooden bridge across the river, and on the bridge he built towers, and on the towers he installed heavy artillery, which raked the Parthian cavalry whenever they came near. In the end, unable to penetrate the defenses of the 10th and its fellow elite legions, the Parthians gave up on their assault along the Euphrates, and turned north against General Paetus at Rhandeia. They swiftly surprised and surrounded his army at their camp on the Murat.

With his quickly demoralized troops putting up a halfhearted defense from their camp walls, Paetus sent desperate pleas to Corbulo for help, and the field marshal carefully prepared a relief force inclusive of men of the 10th and a column of camels from the Dromedary Wing carrying tons of grain—he was determined that his men wouldn’t run out of bread the way they had four years before. Only when he was satisfied that all was in readiness did he march up from Syria and through Commagene and Cappadocia. Just as Corbulo was about to cross the Euphrates into Armenia, he met Paetus coming the other way, withdrawing with his disheveled army. To escape with his life, Paetus had agreed to humiliating peace terms with the Parthians—he’d made his legionaries build the enemy a bridge across the Murat, and he’d left his fortress at Rhandeia intact for them, inclusive of his artillery, heavy equipment, and baggage train. His men were forced to leave behind all personal possessions apart from what they could carry on their backs.

As Paetus returned to Rome in temporary disgrace—he would be forgiven by Nero and given important posts by a later administration—Field Marshal Corbulo prepared a new Armenian offensive. The Palatium sent him reinforcements, the 15th Legion from the Balkans, along with its attached auxiliary light infantry and cavalry. He also brought his reserve unit, the 5th Legion, down from Pontus. Leaving the dependable 10th dug in along the Euphrates defense line to cover his rear, Corbulo swept into Armenia early in a.d. 63 with the 3rd Augusta, 5th, 6th Victrix, and 15th Legions and sent the Parthian army scampering out of the country, as much by his fearsome reputation as any shedding of blood. He then settled the Armenian question by putting on the throne Tiridates, a Parthian prince who swore fealty to Nero, emperor of Rome.

Following this campaign, the 10th returned to base in Syria and prepared for its next discharge and reenlistment in the new year. This would be the legion’s eighth enlistment since Caesar raised the legion in 61 b.c.

Already the recruiting officers, the
conquisitors,
were out looking for re-

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cruits in the legion’s home province if Baetica, Farther Spain, and a contingent of 10th Legion centurions would have now set off from Syria to take charge of the product of their efforts.

:

Precisely how the legion’s latest enlistment day played out is not recorded, but all the evidence points to something very much like the following. On a fall day at the beginning of December a.d. 63, in the ninth year of the reign of Emperor Nero, who would turn just twenty-six in several weeks’

time, thousands of young men gathered on the sands of the amphitheater at Córdoba, capital of the province of Baetica. To ensure that none of the youngsters tried to go home, fully armed auxiliary infantrymen from the military base outside the city would probably have circled the perimeter of the amphitheater, which they normally used for their training drills, when gladiatorial contests weren’t taking place there for the pleasure of the local populace.

Roman citizens all, the youngest men in the arena had just turned twenty. City boys, country boys, the sons of blacksmiths, shopkeepers, farmers, and fishermen. Their heads would have been full of tales they’d heard about bloody battles and brutal legion discipline, tales of fabulous adventures told by retired legion veterans that invariably involved wine, women, plunder, and crushing victories over barbarian hordes. Some were volunteers—the out-of-work, even a few petty criminals. Most were draftees. All were about to enroll in the Roman army’s 10th Legion.

They would sign a binding contract with the state to serve for an enlistment period of twenty years, during which time they were not permitted to marry—although many would form relationships with female camp followers and father children out of wedlock in years to come. In return, they could expect to be paid nine hundred sesterces a year—in-creased to twelve hundred sesterces a year by the emperor Domitian twenty years later—plus bonuses and booty, and the legion would feed, clothe, and house them. On retirement, they were guaranteed a discharge bonus of twelve thousand sesterces plus a small grant of land, although the location of that land would be at the discretion of the government. After their retirement, they would also be required to make themselves available in times of emergency for service in the Evocati, a militia made up of retired legion veterans. Once they signed that contract, as a legionary they would no longer be subject to civil law. But they would have to follow rigid legion regulations and obey their officers’ commands without question, on c20.qxd 12/5/01 5:40 PM Page 212

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pain of death. And they would have to swear allegiance to the emperor, a vow they would renew every January 1, and put their lives on the line for him time and time again.

To reach this stage, the recruits would have passed physical inspections by the recruiting officers, who sent home the lame, the obese, the mentally deficient. Ninety years earlier, Augustus had set the basic requirements for Rome’s legion recruits before the Senate. According to Cassius Dio, they had to be “the most active men in the population, those who are in their physical prime.”

Members of a party of 10th Legion centurions recently arrived from Syria would have moved among the recruits. They would have separated several score of them from the rest, men who professed riding skills—they would go to the legion’s own small cavalry unit. The centurions then quickly, roughly sorted the rest into groups of eight. No discussion, no argument, lining them up with a gap of perhaps three feet between each man. Each group of eight was a
contubernium,
a squad. Unless he perished or was promoted, a man would spend the next twenty years in this squad.