Harry Sidebottom, the novelist and lecturer in Ancient History, explains why he writes both fiction and history relating to a period of Roman history which is so little known about that he describes it as obscure. What is it about the third century AD that makes it a goldmine for scholars and for novelists?
Why the Roman Empire in the third century AD? It is profoundly obscure. Very few people today know anything about the period. The ancient sources are patchy and unreliable. This makes any certainty difficult. No two modern scholarly reconstructions agree even on the chronology of events, let alone their causes or effects.
Yet this is the setting for my new Warrior of Rome novel, Falling Sky, as it was for 12 previous novels, as well as my just published biography The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome. So, why?
First, it was a very important time. Second, it was a period of many exciting events. Finally, I am going to suggest, the very things I just listed as problems turn out to be advantages. Let us start with its importance.
We know a lot about the Roman empire in the second century. The principate, as it is known, was pagan, its government remarkably decentralised, and the emperor in a meaningful way a first among equals.
We know a lot about the empire in the fourth century. It was Christian, with a highly developed bureaucracy, and the emperor a distant, hierocratic figure. The roots of these changes lurk in the ‘dark tunnel’ of the third century. No denying its importance.
The ‘Great Crisis‘ of the third century was marked by severe political instability, civil wars, and defeats by barbarian armies. The average reign of an emperor in the previous two centuries was about nine and a half years. In the third it shrank to 18 months (these figures, like all statistics, are extremely malleable – it all depends which ephemeral pretenders you count as emperors). Roman armies had lost battles before, but no emperor had been killed or captured by barbarians, as were Decius (AD251) and Valerian (AD260) respectively.
Taking a long view the Romans were responsible for this instability in three ways. On two fronts it had made its enemies more dangerous. In the East repeated Roman invasions had undermined the credibility of the Arsacid dynasty of Parthia, leading to its overthrow by the much more aggressive and militarily capable Sassanids, the royal house of Persia.
In the North, beyond the Rhine and the Danube, the increased trade with the empire, along with Roman diplomacy, and their hiring of barbarian auxiliaries, had encouraged the myriad small tribes to coalesce into a few much more threatening confederations, such as the Franks, Alamanni, and Goths.
The final area of Roman responsibility for the crisis was the monopolisation of military glory by the emperor. An emperor could not be everywhere at once. If a general won a victory over the barbarians, he had demonstrated that he had the ‘right stuff’ to be emperor, and his troops would clad him in the purple, sometimes very much against his will. The general had no way out. If he declined, either the troops would kill him, or the reigning emperor would execute him. There could be only one emperor. It meant civil war.
To fight this, troops were stripped from the frontiers, thus encouraging further barbarian incursions. If one of these was defeated by a local commander, his troops would acclaim another pretender, and the cycle continued. Any successful general who took Rome, and was voted the necessary imperial powers by the Senate (and notionally the people) was as legitimate as the ruler he had overthrown. As Sir Ronald Syme remarked, “the empire was a military autocracy tempered by the legal right to revolution.”
Eventually the emperor Diocletian (AD284–305) found a way to break the vicious circle by creating the Tetrarchy. It was a ‘college’ of emperors. Diocletian first took Maximian as fellow Augustus, then added two junior rulers, Galerius and Constantius, as Caesars.
These are the men depicted embracing each other in a show of solidarity in the famous sculpture in St Mark’s Square in Venice (ignore the local guides who spin elaborate tales of Corsican brothers stabbing each other in the back!).
Now there was a member of the Tetrarchy for every frontier. The system was intended to be self-perpetuating; when the two Augusti retired, the Caesars would assume their role, and appoint two new Caesars. The tetrarchy only functioned for a generation, but it brought the empire a vital breathing space.
All that intrigue, revolution and war, along with the rise of Christianity and the changes in the structure of power, make the third century a wonderful field to explore, either as a novelist or historian. That our ancient literary sources are poor actually adds to the attraction. After the history of Cassius Dio ends in the AD220s, and that of Herodian in AD238, we have to turn to the Augustan History (often known in Latin as the Historia Augusta).
This is one of the most fascinating texts from antiquity. It is a series of biographies of emperors from Hadrian (AD117-138) to Carinus (AD282-5), and claims to be the work of six authors writing about AD300.
In reality it was written by one man about AD400. The reason for this literary fraud is unknown (I rather like the idea it was an embittered schoolteacher getting his own back on a world that undervalued him!). Half way through, in the middle of his life of Heliogabalus, the writer cut loose from biography, and turned to historical fiction.
This was his true vocation. Among his luxuriant inventions are any number of fictitious relatives, friends and enemies of emperors (some of whom are also unlikely to be historical). It is a goldmine for both the modern scholar, and the contemporary novelist.
Finally there is the freedom obscurity brings. Modern readers have few, if any, preconceptions. For once you don’t know how a historical novel ends. When I told my Oxford colleague Professor Bert Smith that I was writing my first Warrior of Rome novel, he congratulated me on “picking a period so obscure no one could prove me wrong about anything.”
Falling Sky by Harry Sidebottom is published on 13 October, 2022.
See more about this book.
Harry is Fellow and Director of Studies in Ancient History at St Benets Hall, and Lecturer in Ancient History at Lincoln College, Oxford. His main scholarly research interests are Greek culture under the Roman Empire and warfare in classical antiquity.
He is also the author of a number of historical novels set during the Roman Empire, including the Warrior of Rome series.
You may also enjoy Harry’s Historia features I’m Spartacus! Slave revolts in Rome and Why the Roman Empire grew so big by Harry Sidebottom.
Other features linked to Roman history include:
A game of gods: religion in a changing Roman world by Simon Turney and Gordon Doherty
LJ Trafford’s features, Sex in Ancient Rome and Gladiator sweat and leech hair dye; how to survive in Ancient Rome
Anthony Riches asks: Did Roman Soldiers Suffer PTSD?
And the HWA’s collection of short stories, Rubicon
Images:
- The Four Tetrarchs, St Mark’s Square, Venice: Erik Törner for Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- Antoninus Pius, Emperor from from AD138 to 161, cAD150: Munich Glyptothek via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Cameo of Shapur I capturing Emperor Valerian, AD260: Bibliothèque Nationale de France via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.5)
- The Four Tetrarchs: see above
- Bust of Elagabalus (Heliogabalus): Capitoline Museums, Rome, via Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0
