Christians in the Roman Army: Countering the Pacifist Narrative
Christian pacifism has raised its profile in recent years, likely prompted by dissatisfaction with increasing political polarization, and promoted by some influential writers. Ideas promoted in the past century by Cecil John Cadoux and John Howard Yoder with little headway have found a modern defender in Stanley Hauerwas and a popularizer in Shane Claiborne, whose books, speaking tours and radical lifestyle have attracted many admirers if few followers.
Central to all of these authors’ ideas is the concept of the “fall of the church.” They hold that early Christianity was pacifist and anarchist in character, and rejected the ideas of military service and loyalty to the state. As Christianity came to be accepted by the Roman government at around the time of Constantine, the church became corrupted by its relationship with state power. After Constantine the church became willing to acquiesce to state power and wage war, execute people in the name of the state, force conversions, and recognize the authority of rulers other than Jesus. According to Yoder, the behavior of the early church is important because the early Christians “read the Bible in a first-century context. They read the New Testament in the same world in which it was written, in the same language in which it was written. They probably read it, therefore, with more understanding than we do. Hence, how they read the New Testament is helpful to us in our reading of the New Testament, whatever the limits of their faithfulness.”[1]
While the emperors and soldiers of the late Empire clearly used Christian symbolism, what about the army before Constantine?
I shall leave the theological portion of this debate for other websites. What I will do is examine the central historical claim of the “fall of the church” thesis: That Christians before the era of Constantine were pacifists who did not enlist in the Roman military. Unfortunately, none of the pacifist authors who have tackled this question have much experience in ancient history and it has led them to make certain errors which have led to erroneous conclusions.
First, to cover some basics of the Roman Army from Augustus to Constantine. The Roman army during this period was an all-volunteer force. No one was in the army who didn’t want to join. The Army was made up of two groups: The Legions and the Auxilia. Recruitment for the legions was open only to Roman citizens, who served for 20 years unless they were injured and medically discharged or were kicked out. On the other hand, the auxilia were recruited from the peregrini, the non-citizens of the provinces. Their term of service was 25 years, after which they received Roman citizenship as well as conubium, the right to marry a non-Roman wife but still pass on Roman citizenship to their children. The navy was smaller and accepted more non-citizens, but the model was essentially the same. As a result, service in the auxilia was a common route for social and economic advancement for those who were not Roman citizens. In 212, the emperor Caracalla decreed that everyone in the Roman Empire was now a Roman citizen, but the auxilia did not disappear (many units were now centuries old with a storied battle history they were loath to part with), rather, they ceased to be a method for social advancement and became just another type of unit which included special units such as cavalry and archers.
Like everything else in Roman society, the army also had a pagan religious element. Festivals, sacrifices, and sacred ceremonies honoring the gods, the emperor, the Legion’s standards, and nonspecific virtues such as virtus and disciplina were commonplace. How Christians in the ranks would deal with the requirement to partake in these ceremonies would become a major issue.[2]
In the 1st century, we have some scraps of evidence of Christians in the Roman military. The gospel of Luke states that some soldiers (possibly from the Roman puppet Herod’s auxiliary forces) asked John the Baptist for religious advice, and he told them “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.” Matthew mentions that Jesus was visited by a centurion in Capernaum who asked him to heal his sick servant. Later, the book of Acts records that Peter preached at the house of a centurion named Cornelius who was stationed in Caesarea, and the man and his household became some of the first non-Jewish converts to Christianity.[3]
From the conversion of Cornelius at about AD 39 to AD 173, we have absolutely no sources referencing Christian participation in the army. None. It may have happened, it may not have happened. Either way, we know nothing about it, so speculating is futile.[4]
In 173, we have a story that would be easy to dismiss were it not documented by five sources. During the Marcomannic Wars, emperor Marcus Aurelius was leading the Legio XII Fulminata (“Thunderstruck”) campaign along the Danube against the Quadi, erstwhile allies of Rome who had switched sides. The Quadi met the legion with a superior force and drove them to an open field away from water sources. It was a hot day, and the Quadi halted their attack to allow heat and thirst to take its toll.
Surrounded, outnumbered, out of water, growing weak from thirst and in desperate straights, what is clear from the sources is that lots of men began to pray. Soon, a thunderstorm materialized. Lightning struck the treeline where some of the Quadi had gathered, scattering many of them. Rain and hail poured from the sky. No battle could be fought in such weather, so the Quadi withdrew, which was fortunate for the Romans as they were so busy gulping down water collected in their helmets and shields that they were hardly in a position to fight.
Relief on the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, showing Roman troops surrounded by the Quadi as a rain god arrives with a thunderstorm on the upper right.
Parthians at Philippi
The Parthian empire had once been an ally of Rome. Parthians and Romans had fought together to finish off the Seleucid Empire in 63 BC, and enjoyed peaceful relations after. This all changed in 54 BC, when the ambitious Roman Marcus Licinius Crassus launched an unprovoked invasion of Parthian Syria with the intent to march on Seleucia and conquer the Parthian empire. Instead, his army was annihilated in the Syrian desert at the Battle of Carrhae. Of Crassus’ 38,000 men, only 8,000 or so made it back to Roman territory. 20,000 Romans were killed, and 10,000 were prisoners in Parthia.
The immediate result of the campaign was a Parthian invasion of Roman Syria under the command of a general named Osaces and Pacorus, the son of the Parthian ruler Shah Orodes II. The death of Crassus and many of his officers left Gaius Cassius Longinus as the ranking Roman commander in Syria. While the Parthians besieged Antioch, Pacorus was recalled to Parthia by his father. Cassius rallied the remaining Roman troops in the area and broke the siege, then defeated the Parthians again at Antigonea. In this battle, Osaces was killed and his troops dispersed.[1]
The first round of Roman-Parthian conflict thus ended in a status quo ante bellum. As a result, like the United States and USSR 2000 years later, the two superpowers of the ancient Near East in the 1st century BC saw continued direct war as too risky and destructive when compared to its potential benefits. Therefore, the struggle between them for regional supremacy turned from confrontation to war by proxy. Struggle between armies was replaced by each side meddling in each other’s internal struggles, supporting rebel factions and fighting proxy battles with client states.
Shah Orodes II of Parthia (ruled 57 BC to 38 BC). He meddled in Roman affairs for much of his reign, seeking to prevent factions hostile to Parthian interests from gaining power.
The first shot of the proxy war came from Cassius’ replacement as governor of Syria. Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus arrived in 51 BC to take control of the province from Cassius. He sought to divide the Parthians against each other so as to preclude further invasions of Roman territory. Bibulus befriended a Parthian satrap named Ornodapates, who carried an old grudge against Orodes. Using Ornodapates as a go-between, Bibulus constructed a plot to stage a coup d’etat, overthrow Orodes and install his son Pacorus on the throne in his stead. The plot failed, but the resulting strife temporarily distracted Parthia from any westward expansion.[2]
While the Parthians were otherwise preoccupied, the political situation in Rome was spiraling out of control. Once allies, Julius Caesar and Ganeus Pompey were now enemies. In 49 BC, their rivalry and refusal to disband their armies spilled over into open civil war. Julius Caesar rapidly marched on Rome, forcing Pompey to withdraw to Greece without a fight. Pompey spent the winter of 49-48 BC regrouping in Greece and preparing for a decisive showdown against Caesar.
The Trojan Horse
The Trojan Horse is one of the most recognizable literary motifs in the western world. The legend is familiar: Odysseus came up with the plot to open the gates of Troy by a trick. Epeios the carpenter built a wooden horse in the camp, and Odysseus and a handful of picked men hid inside. The Greek fleet sailed away, the Trojans took the horse inside the city, where the Greeks emerged and opened the gates for the returning Greek army. And thus the term “Trojan Horse” entered the western world’s vernacular to describe any method of gaining access through deception.
(In fact, while writing this post my computer was infected with the modern version of the Trojan Horse, an event partly responsible for the delayed posting of the past two weeks).
Ironically, the most recognizable symbol of the Homeric age is barely mentioned in Homer. The horse does not appear at all in the Iliad and only appears briefly in the Odyssey, where Menelaus is recounting Odysseus’ deeds during the siege of Troy:
What a piece of work the hero dared and carried off
in the wooden horse where all our best men encamped,
our champions armed with bloody death to Troy…[1]
The most detailed account of the horse appears in Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid. The Greeks build the horse, hide their chosen men inside of it, and sail away. The Trojans take the horse inside their city, thinking it is a votive offering. The Greeks wait until nightfall, break out and open the gates. The same story is told by the 4th century AD Greek poet Quintus Smyrnaeus in his The Fall of Troy.
The Mykonos Vase, one of the earliest depictions of the Trojan Horse legend.
Even though detailed accounts of the Trojan Horse legend appear only in later works, art from around the time of Homer indicates that the legend was widely known in early Greece. A fibula brooch from around 680 BC shows a fragment of a horse with wheels. A detailed relief on the outside of a storage jar from Mykonos which dates to between 675 and 650 BC contains a much more detailed depiction of a horse hiding armed men inside.[2]
Therefore, while the Trojan Horse is barely mentioned in Homer, the story was obviously part of the collection of folklore surrounding the Trojan War which swirled around the popular consciousness of early Greece. Some of these stories found their way into Homer’s authoritative collation, and some did not.
As has been discussed before on this site, the ancient Greeks knew that Homer was writing fiction and that the stories and folklore were not works of history. A few ancient writers mentioned possible explanations for the Trojan Horse legend. The Greek 2nd century AD travel writer Pausanias wrote of the legend that “Anyone who does not suppose that Phrygians are utterly stupid will have realized that what Epeios built was an engineer’s device for breaking down the wall.”[3] In a chapter on the origins of various inventions, the Roman Pliny the Elder wrote that “The battering-horse, for the destruction of walls, which is at the present day styled the “ram,” was invented by Epeus, at Troy.”[4] Generally, ancient writers seemed to have believed that the Trojan Horse had been some sort of siege weapon, probably a battering ram.
The Battle of Carrhae, 53 B.C.
Scarcely had Alexander the Great destroyed the Persian Empire than it began to rise from the ashes. While most former Persian territory was under the control of the Seleucid Empire, in 247 BC, Shah Arsaces I founded the Arsacid Dynasty in Parthia. Parthia had been a minor outlying province in what is now northeastern Iran, but after much hard fighting they seized Iran from the Seleucids, and finally allied with the Roman general Pompey the Great to finish off the Seleucid Empire in 63 BC, leaving Parthia and Rome as the major powers in the Near East. Between them lay minor buffer states and client kingdoms.
At this point, the two sides were at peace. The Parthian king Mithridates III wanted no further territorial expansion, and Rome had its hands full consolidating its newly acquired territory in the East and did not want trouble with another great power.
Yet by the 50′s B.C., Rome’s internal political machinations spilled over into Parthia. In 59 BC, Julius Caesar, Pompey Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus formed a powerful but informal political alliance known as the First Triumvirate. Crassus and Pompey were both elected consuls in 55 BC after instigating mob violence against their opponents on election day. Their first acts were to extend Caesar’s term as governor of Gaul (which he was still in the process of conquering), and make themselves the governors of Spain and Syria once their term in office expired. They cast lots to see who would govern which territory. Pompey won Spain, and Crassus won Syria.[1]
Bust of Marcus Crassus.
Crassus was fabulously wealthy, with a net worth in 54 B.C. of an estimated 7,100 talents or about $142 million. He made much of his fortune through seizing the property of those murdered in Sulla’s purges of 88 BC. Other sources of income included his ownership of silver mines as well as a profitable business in real estate development.[2] Crassus was fond of saying that no man was truly wealthy unless he could buy his own army.[3]
Crassus was also brazenly ambitious. Plutarch would later condemn this as “foolish ambition, which would not let him rest satisfied to be first and greatest among many myriads of men, but made him think, because he was judged inferior to two men only, that he lacked everything.” After he was assigned the governorship of Syria, he immediately began laying plans for the conquest not only of Parthia, but of Bactria and India as well until Rome’s borders stretched all the way to the “Outer Sea.” Crassus was exceeding his authority here, as the law making him governor of Syria carried with it no authorization for war with Parthia. What’s more, his plans were highly unpopular with the Roman public. Many people viewed Crassus’ plan to launch an unprovoked surprise attack on a Roman ally who presented no immediate threat to Rome’s interests as both dishonorable and unwise. The anti-war faction was led by the tribune Ateius Capito, who tried to have Crassus arrested to prevent him from leaving Rome for Syria. He was dissuaded by the other nine tribunes, and had to content himself with placing a ritual curse on Crassus as he passed through the city gates.[4]
Coin of Shah Orodes II.
In Parthia, on the other hand, in 54 BC Mithridates III was overthrown in a coup d’etat and fled from the capital of Ctesiphon across the river to Seleucia. His brother Orodes seized the throne and besieged Mithridates III in Seleucia with the aid of his brilliant general Surena, finally forcing the city’s surrender and seizing full control of the throne of Parthia. He was still in a shaky position, which led Crassus to think that victory would be easy and that many Parthian cities needed only a little prodding to revolt and side with Rome.[5]
On the Possible Near Eastern Origins of the Catapult
The generally accepted history of the catapult holds that it was first invented in the Greek city-state of Syracuse on the island of Sicily in 399 BC. The Syracusan general Dionysius I had led a military coup in 405 BC that overthrew Syracuse”s democratically elected government and installed himself as a dictator. His first acts as dictator were to put Syracuse’s society and economy on a war footing. Dionysius planned to go to war with Carthage, who controlled the western half of Sicily, and seize total control of the island.
In order to do this, the Syracusans sought new weapons. Dionysius brought in engineers from around the Greek world to work on new technology. The Greeks in Italy had previously invented an early crossbow called the gastraphetes, which had superior range to a manually drawn bow. Dionysius’ engineers took this a step further and created arrow and stone-throwing machines to be used in assaulting Carthaginian fortifications.[1]
An early Greek catapult, basically a scaled-up crossbow.
These early catapults developed into the double-armed torsion catapults used all over the ancient Mediterranean world (the Chinese developed catapults independently at around the same time). They were used by the Romans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Macedonians and all the Hellenistic kingdoms. Some catapults grew to very large sizes and packed enormous destructive power.
Yet, there are indications here and there that the Syracusans were not the first to come up with the idea of using levers, springs and torque to fling boulders at their enemies. Several vague clues from ancient writers indicate that the idea of the catapult might have a more eastern origin.
The first comes from the Biblical book of Chronicles’ record of the reign of King Uzziah of Judah. Uzziah reigned for 52 years in the mid 8th century BC. During his reign Judah undertook a large-scale military buildup, including improving the fortifications of Jerusalem. As part of the fortifications, he “made devices invented for use on the towers and on the corner defenses so that soldiers could shoot arrows and hurl large stones from the walls.”[2]
The Power of the Catapult
The fourth century B.C. saw a massive proliferation in catapults throughout the Mediterranean world. Catapults were fielded by the Greeks of Syracuse in 399 B.C. and quickly spread. The early Syracusan catapults were in fact early crossbows meant to be used by a single soldier. In order to fire larger stones and massive arrows (called bolts), double-arm torsion catapults (called ballistas or scorpions) were invented:
The catapult works by pulling back on the rope which connects the two arms. Each arm is attached to a spring made of tightly wound tensile material, usually animal sinew or horse hair. The rope is pulled back by a system of gears and pulleys, which causes the arms to bend back against the tensile material. When the trigger is pulled, the rope is released and the arms snap back into place, rapidly propelling the projectile forwards towards the target.
The Battle of the Nile Delta, 1178 B.C.
This is the first in a monthly series which will examine battles in the history of the ancient Near East.
Egypt in the early 12th century BC was still one of the most powerful countries in the world. But Egypt’s power was falling from its height 50 years earlier under Rameses II. After Rameses II died in 1212 BC, his son Merneptah had to contend with a Libyan invasion in 1207. Civil war came to Egypt in 1204 as Amenmesse and Seti II fought over who would succeed Merneptah. Seti II emerged the victor two years later, but within the next decade the kingdom was plunged into war again between Sethnakhte and Queen Tewosret. This conflict ended with Sethnakhte’s victory, and ended Egypt’s 19th dynasty and ushered in the 20th.[1]
When Sethnakhte’s son Rameses III took the throne in 1186, Egypt was clearly weakened by the internal and foreign wars. Yet, Egypt’s condition was enviable compared to the rest of the eastern Mediterranean world. In a series of events which marked the end of the Bronze Age in ancient history and ushered in the Iron Age, most of the other powerful empires of the time were going up in flames. The Hittite capital of Hattushas had been sacked and burned. Troy was destroyed, Ugarit sacked, most of the Mycenean cities in Greece were obliterated. Dozens of cities all along the Anatolian coast were wiped out.
The culprits were a disparate group of maritime-inclined cultures known as the Sea Peoples. Who the Sea Peoples were and where they came from has been much discussed. Each ancient writer who listed the names of their peoples listed different but overlapping names. Generally, they seem to have come from the Aegean, the southern coast of Anatolia, Crete and possibly Greece. Like the Viking raiders of early medieval Europe, they first took to the sea to engage in piratical raiding, possibly due to harsh economic times at home and the abundance of readily available loot abroad. Again like the Vikings, their focus soon changed from raiding to finding new places to settle their populations.
The Sea Peoples first attacked Egypt in 1181 BC, during the reign of Rameses III. A few tribes of the Sea Peoples aided a large force of Libyans in attacking Egypt from the western desert. The result was a disaster for the Libyans, as their force was defeated, scattered and many of its members sold into slavery in Egypt. Despite the disaster, a different and much larger coalition of Sea Peoples planned another invasion.[2]
Countdown to Invasion
Rameses III’s inscription at the temple at Medinet Habu describe the beginnings of the war:
The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered into the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at one time. A camp was set up at one place in Amor. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward to Egypt while the flame was being prepared before them. Their confederation was the Philistines, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: “Our plans will succeed!”[3]
The Sea Peoples had already, according to Rameses, destroyed Hatti (the Hittite empire), Kode (Cilicia), Arzawa (in southwestern Anatolia), and Alashiya (Cyprus). They gathered in Amor in Syria to plan the combined attack on Egypt.
