18 U.S. Code § 2384 - A Reminder

Two years ago this day a mob of Republicans, led by their fuhrer, committed treason.

Since then the entire Republican Party has embraced treason in support of its fuhrer.

I warned you what would happen if we let them get away with it.

By so doing we sowed the wind.

Now we're going to reap the whirlwind.

Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

Dictator perpetuo

 First. Sorry for the long absence. No excuses. I'm just a bad blogger.

Second, I'll try and do better.

Third...this is not really a new post. 

It's just the latest in a long string of posts that began back in 2007 - Jesus wept, that's sixteen years ago! - with this discussion of how I kept seeing echoes of the Late Roman Republic in the then-U.S.:

"A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company."

 My prediction for the coming years was...dark:

"Our system of government, designed for a small agrarian republic, is failing under the weight of size, wealth and power. I don't think we can reverse this cycle, this time. I think the system has broken down, overwhelmed by lucre, by fear and greed and cynicism. I think the American people have lost their zeal for liberty. I think that we are fated to decline into an increasingly turbulent diminution. I think that my children's lives will be more difficult than mine, and theirs more difficult still.

And like the Roman century left at the last frontier milecastle, sacrificed by our Emperor and ignored by our Senate, we can only hope to do our best to go down as slow as possible, die as hard as practical, before the fall of the gathering dark."

From my vantage point here, though, I don't think I was fucking dark enough.

Because I didn't anticipate this magoo:

That a massive plurality of the American public would vote for, and a series of relict institutions - that the Framers crafted to continue to ensure the political mastery of fellow rich guys long after their deaths - would empower, a sleazy nitwit real estate grifter?

Yeah, well...who the fuck would have wanted to anticipate that?

And yet. 

Here we are.

And here's where we're going:

Fucking pay attention to this. 

It's important, and it's not a coincidence or a just a casual aside or a mistake or some random Elmo outgassing. The pissy little Afrikaaner rich kid isn't just bloviating. He's a reliable peek into the wingnut MAGAt id fever-swamps, and this is 1) what they want, and 2) what they think they have with Tubby.

They see him hanging their enemies - and that's me, by the way - from his long red tie the way Sulla's troops hacked and hung their way through Sulla's enemies.

So it's a good moment to talk about ol' Sulla.

Bret Devereaux did a terrific look at the old bastard. I direct you to him; it's all worth the read but here's his nut graf:

"The real problem wasn’t the office of dictator, but the apparatus that surrounded it: the short duration of military commands, the effectiveness and depth of the Roman aristocracy (crucially undermined by Sulla and Marius) and – less discussed here but still crucial in understanding the collapse of the Republic – the willingness of the Roman elite to compromise in order to maintain social cohesion. Without those guardrails, the dictatorship became dangerous, but without them any office becomes dangerous. Sulla and Caesar, after all, both marched on Rome not as dictators, but as consuls and proconsuls. It is the guardrails, not the office, that matter."

And here's mine: Trump has already become our Sulla because he's gotten away with jumping the guardrails. 

The guardrails are already smashed. The attempt to seize power has moved one entire party to become Sulla-ites; they would choose a Caesar rather than accept defeat, so the arrival of Caesar is now only a matter of time and individual, because the GOP is willing to take power through illiberal means rather than accept any sort of United States that doesn't conform to their already-reactionary vision.

We the "liberals", the not-Sulla plurality, are still trying to pretend that these fucking MAGAts are "our fellow citizens" who just have some teensy policy differences with the rest of us, rather than a blood-hungry mob who will kill to seize power rather than consider the horrifying possibility of the existence of a ladyboy in a cocktail frock.

The only hope of avoiding that would have been that in January 2021 the entire US public and the political leaders of all varieties to have 1) turned decisively and violently - in legal terms - against Tubby's attempt at Doing a Sulla, and 2) after impeaching him prosecuting him, convicting him, and jailing him and everyone who helped him try and overturn a popular election loss.

It would have been the equivalent of the Senate and the People of Rome rising against Sulla in 83 BCE when he forced the Senate to appoint him dictator in defiance of the mos maiorum and the traditional forms of dictatorship that had worked for Rome during the Early and Middle Republic.

Would that have worked for the Romans?

Given that Sulla's troopers were out in the Field of Mars butchering thousands of people as he gently suggested that the Roman governance might be well entrusted to him?

Probably not.

But it'd have at least driven home what a chancy throw trying to Do a Sulla was.

Now?

The only way past this mess is for the Republicans to do the same; not just refuse to support but to massively, violently reject Sulla Trump and all and everything he stands for. 

Hmmmm. Let's see. How's that going, again?

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF.

Hyacinthum hora

"The sun has set, but night has not yet fallen. It’s the suspended hour… The hour when one finally finds oneself in renewed harmony with the world and the light," (Guerlain)

The sun has set on the brightest promises of the American Experiment.

Night has not yet fallen, but the darkness is visible in the person of Tom Cotton, the Republican Prince of Darkness that Charlie Pierce likes to call the "bobbleheaded slapdick from Arkansas" whose editorial in Wednesday's New York Times went full Nazi. He is the competent fuhrer that the GOP thought they had in Trump only to find that, while the Leader can be capricious and inane He cannot be too openly a buffoon.

Cotton is not a buffoon.

Dangerous. Unprincipled. Rapacious. Vicious.

But not a buffoon.

But here's why I think we're done, a dead republic walking; the current protests.

It shouldn't take genius-level civics to understand that a land where the state is openly run by and for the wealthy, where a substantial portion of the "citizenry" are obviously not citizens but subjects, bound by the law but not protected, liable to be arrested, injured, or killed by the state at any time, is not, in fact, a democratic republic ruled by "equal justice under law".

It should be painfully obvious to even the stupidest of inhabitants that if "they" can do to "them" what police regularly do to "them" that there is no legal reason "they" cannot do it to you.

No. The only reason "you" are safe is structural, and that structure is founded on oligarchy and built of racism.

We the comfortable, largely white, majority have never been willing to honestly see - much less actively tear out - the dark pillar of race and the ugly beam of plutocracy that support our house.

To do so would have required long and painful years and even decades of sacrifice and humility to tear down and rebuild our nation without those things. Humans have never been good at that; it's not like we're some sort of uniquely awful nation.

But that remains a uniquely difficult task.

To do the things the protestors are demanding; to rebuild the large police forces (and courts and legal codes...) across the country to provide that actual equal justice, to rejigger the national economy to provide true equality of opportunity, would require an M9-seismic-event level of change.

In a sensible nation, in a true democratic republic, dedicated to ensuring that all people are "We the People" these protests would have caused a massive national reflection, would have sparked a balefire of action, of decision, to make the sorts of changes that would provide and rejigger and do all those things.

Instead, this is a nation where roughly four out of ten "citizens" - who were just weeks ago prancing around with military rifle knock-offs claiming that having to wear a surgical mask and order pizza to go was the most horrific tyranny since the rule of the tsars, mind you - are at best silent and, at worst, prepared to use those rifles on the others of their own fellow citizens who are now in the streets demanding that equal justice.

That part of the People who are huge Tom Cotton fanbois and fangirls.

And because we are in fact a house divided there has been, after nearly a week of nightly protests across the nation, no serious discussion, much less action, about the changes in our nation and in our laws and how they are enforced, that would address what these thousands of people are in the streets demanding.

So it's not so much the line of armed and armored police that stand across the road the protests are trying to open.

Behind them stands Tom Cotton like a colossus and around his feet all the little Cottons who refuse those changes.

And around them...all of those people, like me, who are unwilling or unable to make the sacrifice to bumrush the line and risk ourselves and our lives to make them change.

We the People cannot even force our government to act sensibly about the Plague. We know better, we know how we can save lives, but to do so would require some of us to make sacrifices, to act with humility and patience, to spend money we have in excess but are unwilling to part with.

We won't, because enough of us won't, because enough of us are Tom Cotton and refuse to accept any alternative but a full-on charge through the minefield, because waiting for the engineers and the flail tanks is for cowards and pussies.

If we can't do that - in the face of a pathogen that can kill or maim any one of us - how will we take an even harder and more difficult path to equity when inequity only harms some of us, and those largely "them", the people the Tom Cottons despise?

Here's what I wrote thirteen years ago:

A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company.

Even the very structures of civilization itself crumble as, it seems, the nation both implodes and explodes.

So.

No.

It's been a long time fading but now the light seems to be failing fast. The darkness just seems all the more threatening loured by teargas smoke and backlit by the light of the flares and the flash-bangs and the burning barricades.

While we are still suspended in this blue hour it is difficult for me to see anything but darkness in the falling night ahead.

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 670, Verse 1

The genesis of this post is another one, a general discussion of a variety of topics over at Nancy Nall's place. One of the topics that came up was the uniform regulations of the Roman troops posted to Jerusalem circa 30-something A.D. Nancy - having watched some sort of television Bible series called A.D. The Bible Continues - observed that:

"...I never come away from these things unimpressed with the Roman soldiers. The ones in “A.D.,” etc. had breast plates with nipple rings on them. Yes, little rings dangling from the nipple part of the armor. I guess it’s so you can tie a rabbit’s foot there, or your keys. I know Rome was wealthy, but is it possible every Roman soldier had identical fighting gear? The production of all those leather minis and brush helmets must have been a logistical nightmare. I just figured out why the centurions wore those brush helmets. So their men could pick them out on the field of battle, right? Plan for retirement, should it ever come: Read up on that stuff."

...which given my magpie mind, my recent peculiar interest in religious incunabula, and my penchant for military history, got me thinking about the whole place of the "Roman soldiers" in the Bible stories, films, and television.

For one thing, I never really thought about it, but we just kinda assume "Oh, sure, Roman soldiers" in the Passion play. We know they'll be there, and, sure enough, there they are all in their little "Roman soldier" kit - red jumpers, hoop armor, beavertail helmet, shield-and-spear.

But their purpose isn't really to be soldiers, right? They're there to be plot devices, to be the Bad Guy's henchmen, to get our hero to his appointment with destiny.

For all that I've soldiered and been interested in soldering all my life I never really thought much about them; they're just...always there in the Bible stories, types rather than individuals, not really that much different from the freaking sheep in the freaking manger scene.

But this discussion made me actually stop and think. I was one of those spear-carrying "Roman soldier" extras and as such I can tell you; there was nothing generic to me about who I was and what I did, and those guys were soldiers just like me.

If you're the one with the sword you're not just a "Roman soldier". You're Private So-and-so of the First Contubernia, Second Centuria, Cohors I Something-or-other. Your unit, your assignment, your experience and background have a hell of a lot to do with how you look, how you act, and how you effect everyone and everything around you.

So I got to wondering; first, who would have been posted to Jerusalem that particular Passover, and, second, what would they have looked like? How would they have turned out to handle the crowds and take care of all that imperial business as it involved some troublemaking street preacher?

Here's how the makers of this Bible series (called A.D. The Bible Continues, by the way) think that they should have looked.

You'll note that its your basic Level 1 Hollywood-Roman; senior officers in the fancy breastplate (called a lorica musculata, by the way, and I don't see any nipple rings but maybe that's just me...) and the grunts in the bog-standard helmet, shield, spears, and the this-is-so-Roman hoop armor

(By the way, that sort of armor is typically called a lorica segmentata these days, but its worth noting that the term never appears in Latin documents of the period - if anything, that particular type of armor was probably just called a "lorica", although I'd pay money to know what the Roman GI's slang term for it was; the Latin equivalent of "full battle-rattle"..)

Think of every Bible epic you've ever seen from Ben Hur all the way to whatever the fuck the Veggie Tales lunacy did for Easter and that's what the "Roman soldiers" look like, right?

Okay. So. One thing we can discount right off; none of these guys would have had those movie-Roman cylindrical-rectangular shields like the guy on the left is carrying and the guys in the TV scene above are equipped with.

The rectangular scutum was a purely legionary piece of equipment, and so far as we know there were no legionary troops in the province of Judea that year. I poked around a bit and what I came up with from various Internet sources was that - given that Judea was pretty minor province and not one on or near a threatening frontier enemy like Sarmatia, Dacia, or the German tribes – the closest actual legions were in Syria. As far as I can tell the Roman infantry troops in Judea in the time of the events of this television series were not legionaries but auxilia.

The auxilia were not, as you might think, light troops or irregulars. They were armed and organized as the legions, and their primary distinction was that they were typically recruited from non-citizen volunteers; the legionary troops had to be Roman-Romans, citizens. By the 1st Century AD the auxiliaries were typically recruited either from Italians (who would have been Roman citizens by then, too, though) or non-citizen non-Latins from Roman provinces. Few would have been actual barbari, the wild men from outside the Empire

That's them above. Notice how much the guys look like legionaries? Only the round shield (clipeus) gives them away. Anyway, it appears that the Judea garrison was the equivalent of a brigade - three cohors, the equivalent of a modern infantry battalion - two in Jerusalem and the third in Caesarea, the Roman capital.

Among the units I read are known to have been posted to Judea are Cohors I Sebastenorum (supposedly recruited from Samaria, the hilly region of modern northeastern Israel - "good Samaritans", remember?), Cohors Prima Italica Civium Romanorum, Cohors Secunda Italica Civium Romanorum and Cohors Prima Augusta. The first two would have been originally non-Romans but Roman allies or vassals - what were called socii or "allies" - recruited from the Italian peninsula. After the Social Wars some of these units were given Roman citizenship, hence the coveted "civium Romanorum" designation. An ala (battalion) of cavalry was also reported to have been stationed in Judea, Ala I Sebastenorum that was also said to have been recruited in Samaria.

So...basically these guys weren’t ash-and-trash, but they also weren’t legion infantry. So they would have probably gotten older, non-spec equipment that the guys from Legio X Fretensis handed down to them, or procured their own from local contractors.

Because the 1st Century Roman Army was similar to the modern U.S. Army in that its equipment was produced by civilian contractors; not until the 3rd Century AD did actual government manufactories appear to supply the forces. The legion would have had a number of local armorers making their kit, and apparently repairing what they had – archaeological finds have included armor that showed signs of alterations or repairs made some time after the original construction – who were probably given some sort of pattern or guidance that showed what the “issue” arms and armor were supposed to look like. So there was SOME uniformity. But the armor finds typically show small differences related to the local guy making it. And armor in particular was expensive and hard to make, so it tended to be kept around and re-issued even after newer models were introduced.

In particular, you'll note that in the picture from the TV show that the Roman EMs are ALL shown wearing that hoop armor - which is another Hollywoodism. Archaeology and most historians I've read suggest that eastern Roman soldiers probably wore some version of scale or lamellar armor (lorica squamata) or the chainmail (lorica hamata) that the auxiliaries are wearing in the picture just above. Everybody in the The Bible Continues-version of the Roman Army is uniformed exactly alike, and alike in the hoop-armor way.

But how likely was that? Combining the local-manufacture issue with the Eastern-style-scale-armor likelihood and the armor-is-spendy-so-older-models-tend-to-hang-around-the-supply-room thing my guess is that in a typical Roman auxiliary squad in Jerusalem circa 30AD you’d probably have found a couple of guys with mail, another maybe one or two with the hoop-armor, and a bunch more with scale armor.

Similar? Yes? Identical, like modern troops? No.

But making your TV Romans look like that is hard on the prop person and not the Hollywood image of "Roman soldier", so instead we get the Hollywood version on the electronic teevee.

So we already know that the TV Romans are dressed as legionaries and not as the auxiliaries they should be, and they all look waayyyy more uniform than an actual Roman auxiliary outfit would have. What else might have looked different from the Hollywood version?

I should add that to make matters more difficult for us to figure this out our actual understanding of Roman dress and equipment is far from complete. A big part of the problem is that we have such little actual physical evidence of daily life in the Roman Army.

Statuary depictions were usually carved by sculptors who had only the local troopers to go by, if that (my understanding is that most military historians are of the opinion that many of the depictions on Trajan’s Column, for example, were done by Roman artisans who hadn’t seen many of the soldiers they depicted and guessed or inferred the uniforms and equipment from the ones that HAD, such as the guard units stationed in the capital that would have looked very little like frontline troopers).

The written documentation is often incomplete and sometimes contradictory. Because of the perishability of metal archaeological finds are typically sparse – the Kalkriese excavations I wrote about in the Teutoburg engagement back in 2008 have produced some tremendous revelations about legionary kit in the 1st Century AD simply because of the concentration and association of legionary metal artifacts.

So with what little physical evidence we have I'm left with trying to infer what might have been the “inherent military probability” of a detachment commander tasked with sending a couple of companies (centuria) on personal security detail with the local military governor. What would I have done, in his caligae?

Well, my guess is that, given the relative quiet of Jerusalem at the moment I’d have had the boys kitted out in their “Number 2″ or “Class B” uniform; not the fanciest parade outfits – that would have been too likely to get mussed tussling with unruly crowds or, worse, sold in the marketplace by Private Marcus whose thirst for wine, carelessness with issue equipment, and tendency to manage to exchange the latter for the former was notorious – but with their best field gear and sidearms only. I'd want them to look good, but not so fancy that if riot control was required that they'd be hampered by expensive and delicate parade geegaws that, if lost or damaged, would have to be replaced or repaired or worse - come out of my unit's fucking budget. The Hades with that for a game of soldiers.

The pila spear would be more of a nuisance than a benefit in an urban operation-other-than-war environment, so they’d likely get left in the barracks. Aid-to-the-civil-power-order, then: helmet without the fancy parade plumes (but officers with their sidewise helmet-brush, though, to look the smarter), lorica, clipeus and gladius-only would be my bet. So these guys fumbling with shield and spear? Not really.

I'll bet that at least one of the centuria would have been tasked as a reaction force in full combat kit – shield and pilum and all – somewhere close by in case real trouble started. Since what we know from the scriptural sources suggests that didn’t happen, however, my guess is that any sort of depiction of the Romans in the bible stories that shows them with shield-and-spear is pure Hollywood.

Does this really matter a lick? Of course not; the people who made this Bible-epic aren't telling history, they're telling a Bible story. Expecting them to fuss about accuracy is like expecting logic from an animated cartoon; pleasant when encountered but not really required.

Or, as a certain famous Bible-guy is supposed to have said: "Truth? Dude, like, WTF is that..?"

Mortem et censito

Bob Farley at Lawyers, Guns & Money has a link to a Stanford paper titled State revenue and expenditure in the Han and Roman empires (Scheidel 2012).

The entire paper is pretty wonkish but worth reading for a glimpse into half of the supposedly inescapable pairing of this stuff with death back in the day. I'll cook it down here for you into the Clif's Notes version:

The bureaucratic tax-and-spend set-up of Han Dynasty China (a period that extended about 400 years, roughly spanning the 2nd Centuries BCE to CE) included a lot of individual ("poll" or flat taxes per person regardless of income) taxes collected and disbursed by a small army of relatively low-payed local officials. A lot of the money stayed in the place it was collected, a relatively smaller portion went to pay the senior officials both civilian and military, and significantly less went to direct military costs.

The early Roman imperium (from roughly the end of the civil wars period in the 1st Century CE to before the crises of the 3rd), on the other hand, tended to try and capture more easily-extracted revenues; things like tariffs and fees on goods and transfers, the profits from imperial enterprises such as mines, and "luxury taxes" on great legacies and the enterprises of the wealthy such as slaves on the huge latifunda.

However, a very much larger proportion of these revenues was spent on "big projects" - public buildings and the like - as well as directed to Rome (the infamous grain dole, "bread and circuses"), and military expenses, as well as a proportionally much higher amount on the pay of the highest levels of officialdom.

Roman senatorial appointments such as the Praetorian prefect and consul-level provincial governors made something like 8 to 18 times what their Han equivalents made. This discrepancy gets smaller but persists at lower levels. A 1st Century BCE Han company commander (who ran an outfit similar to a modern infantry company, about 100-120 troops) was paid between half and two-fifths as much as his 2nd Century CE Roman counterpart (a centurio who ran a smaller outfit, typically about 80 guys at full strength).

The really pointed observation comes in the final section. Here's what Scheidel (2012) has to say about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two systems:

"By funneling resources towards high-level agents, a privileged capital city, and a military that were all far removed from local society, the Roman state weakened the nexus between taxation and spending. In the Han system...geography impeded massive transfer of staples, senior officials were paid less, the military less lavishly endowed and at least in times of stability more constrained by civilian leadership, and the local affairs above the village level were dealt with by formal state agents rather than self-governing urban elites.

This superficially paradoxical combination of greater cellularity and deeper state penetration may have strengthened the institution of the state at the local level. In the long term it may ultimately...explain the permanent dissolution of the Roman empire and the comparatively greater resilience or perhaps rather regenerative capacity of early Chinese state institutions."

You know I've remarked on what I see as some of the similarities of the late-republican United States and late Republican Rome. Well, here's what looks to me like some similarities between early imperial Rome and the early-oligarchic United States; a greatly increased social stratification and disconnection between the proles from whom the taxes are collected from (or who are simply too impoverished to pay more than local and state taxes - let's not forget that the really bullshit part of R-money's "47 Percent" bullshit was that federal income taxes are typically a small portion of what poor and lower-middle-class Americans pay; things like sales taxes, payroll taxes (the Social Security collection that is capped for the truly wealthy), gas taxes, state and local taxes, and property taxes (including the cost included in their rent).

In the place of the narrow Roman political elite we have an increasingly narrow American economic elite that has effectively captured the political process. Outside the truly brain-dead Teatards most Americans not in the two-yacht economy are well aware that the economic and political Game is rigged against them. It doesn't mean that they can or will stop playing. But it does mean that the tie between the citizen and the state is strained and frayed.

Add in the truly toxic Republican rhetoric about "government is the problem", the demonization of any taxation (and a deliberate drive to deflect inquiry into the actual structure and impact of taxation), and exaltation of the march towards open oligarchy as "Freedom!" and you have a system almost crafted to fail under pressure, either into a fractious anarchy or to a Man on Horseback.

I've said this before; my disgust lies not so much in the lies of the Right - after all, they're nothing but whores and whores lie to get paid - but that the rest of us, We the People, are happy to let those lies pass and let them become the language we use to "debate" our lives. At least the Romans had the excuse that they'd never seen this shit happen before.

The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

~W.H. Auden

Burnin' love

Speaking of ghost towns, did you know that the road into the Pennsylvania ghost town of Centralia - abandoned because of an accidental coal seam fire set fifty-one years ago - is a congeries of spray-painted art including (of course) the ubiquitous symbol of the human male with waaaayyy too much time on his hands, the graffiti penis?

Well.

Now you do.

Peckers aside, the story of Centralia is actually kind of a sad story, like the little towns of Doty and Dryad; once living places that were simply thrown away because they were no longer convenient, or wanted, or, in the case of Centralia, victims of an ignorant mistake.

At least one thing never changes through place and time.

If we have a dick, we're thinking about it.

Men.

Jayzus, we're worse than goats.

Vibennius' Revenge

I know, I know. You're thinking, what, has this sonofabitch just wandered off an left the damn blog? Has he up and died, like the poor dude over at Bats Left/Throws Right?

No, and no.

It's just that I don't really have anything to say at the moment on the subject of politics that isn't a profanity-laden rant full of vitriol and bile. The Great American Parade of Stupid seems to be endless, and I see how ranting on this blog will change that. Seriously. I can repeat "Ceterum censeo GOP delendus est" until Michelle Malkin hooks up with Te-Nisi Coates and it will do absolutely not a goddamn thing to change the central reality of my country's politics which is that the "conservative" of the two parties we allow ourselves has gone completely, utterly batshit crazy, gobbling on about Agenda 21, death panels, and deficits while half the country is out of work, living in the back of their Ford Fairmont, and scrounging meals off the Salvation Army.

So. I can't write about politics.

Battles? I've got a piece on the strategic aspects of the Stalingrad campaign I'm working on for the "Battle" in August, but that's a couple of weeks away.

Personal stuff? Domestic bliss? I've had little or no time for pondering the majesty of a Northwest summer what with work and kiddos and you can't possibly want to hear about either one. I don't have any really cute or interesting stories to tell. I have been getting worked up about our local women's soccer team but the product of that is on display over at my soccer blog Slide Rule Pass; gauging from the pageviews you could give two shits about my love affair with Thorns FC...

And speaking of pageviews that's really the other factor.

I don't want to write this blog for pageviews. I'm not Slate (thank God...). This is just a place for me to entertain myself, get whatever writing I have out of my system, and talk to the small group of people who come around to visit. But...

The reality is that it's the "Battles" pieces that are about the only thing that about 95% of the visitors here come to read. If you looked at the stats you'd see that the only posts with more than 100 pageviews is either a "battles" piece or something connected with p0rn, like the one with the Tom of Finland picture as the illustration. Ah, Internet, you ARE for p0rn, aren't you?

Almost every other post has less than 50 views; most of them much, much less, typically somewhere between 10 and 20 views.

So I'm pretty much talking to myself here.

So frankly, unless I have something to say there's no real point in talking.

My mother used to say that if you didn't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all.

Since I can't seem to come up with anything, then, instead let's go to a man who knew how to write when he wanted the venom to positively drip from his pen.

Take it away, Brother Catullus:

A Suggestion: to Vibennius

O first of the bath-house thieves
Vibennius the father, with sodomite son
(since the father’s right hand is dirtier,
and the son’s arse more all-consuming),
why not go into exile, to some vile place?
Seeing the father’s pillage is known
to us all, and the son’s hairy arse,
you can’t sell for a farthing.

Now THAT's poetry.

The Rains Come To Stay

It's not that late, but I have to be on the road again in the morning, early, so it's late for me. The kiddos have both been packed off to bed and the front room is a mess from a day forced indoors by the autumn's cold and wet. I'm too tired to try and pick up the litter.

My legs ache with the steady ache I've learned to live with for the past year. My neck and shoulders ache with too little exercise and the hard graft of entertaining small children over a long weekend. The back of my skull aches with the unpleasant knowledge that in less than six hours I will have to rise and drive 200 miles north and then walk a mile through the wet woods to work.

And over all of that I am soaked in a sort of quiet despair. I look around at my country and my world and realize that what I'm seeing isn't really new and it isn't really terrible. It's the same old tiresome horseshit that human beings have been doing to themselves and each other since Cain ambushed Abel out in the cuna grass; lying and pretending not to lie, grabbing everything around them regardless of what the long-term destruction they are causing. Indulging in every hate and stupidity and lust and whatever other evil toxic fucktardry they can think up.

When I was researching the last Decisive Battle I spent some time with the Praetorian Guard. You can't learn about the Guards without encountering a man named Lucius Aelius Seianus, better known merely as Sejanus. He was, perhaps the "original" Praetorian; one of the Emperor Tiberias' cronies who took the piss-ant garrison troop that had hung about the Forum for centuries and made them into the chooser and slayer of Emperors.

Anyway, you can follow the link if you want to learn more about ol' Lucius. Suffice to say that he was probably an evil little man who was brought down by others probably just as vicious and ambitious as he was. He got the chop, too, for his pains.

But I'm not thinking about an ambitious soldier now, sitting in the window seat looking out on a drizzly night. I'm thinking about a young girl.

Her name was Junilla, and she was the daughter of Lucius Aelius. Her right name was probably something like Junilla Aelia, and I have no idea who she was or what she was, down to her age at the time of her father's sudden encounter with the public executioner in 31AD.

We know nothing about her; not her age, or her looks, not how she walked, or talked, or stood up, or sat down. Being Roman she was probably dark-avised, and being young - at least, young enough that she was not considered a woman but a girl by the ancient chroniclers - probably slender and gracile. Based on the description of her arrest she sounds like a very young woman or little girl. Tacitus says of her:

"...the little girl, who was so unconscious that she continually asked what was her offence, and whither she was being dragged, saying that she would do so no more, and a childish chastisement was enough for her correction."

But we have no idea whether she was a silly or serious girl. Whether she was cheerful or solemn, light-hearted or glum, friendly or standoffish. Did she like to read, was she an indoorsy sort of girl, or one who liked to play outside and exercise with her friends, a sort of 1st Century tomgirl?

Was she one of those young women who grow up early, approaching womanhood with trepidation, or a late-bloomer still a child when her father ran onto the rocks of Roman politics and his own greed for power.

And of her last moments we only know this, as written by Cassius Dio some two hundred years after she died:

"His children also were put to death by decree, the girl (whom he had betrothed to the son of Claudius) having been first outraged by the public executioner on the principle that it was unlawful for a virgin to be put to death in the prison."

First, let me say this: I find this tale of prison rape, which is recounted only in Tacitus and Cassius Dio, to be hard to believe. There is no record of any such "law" in the Roman legal codes, while the punishment for rape (stuprum, that is, forcible intercourse) of a freeborn citizen was death.

But then let me add that regardless of the letter of Roman law the story is effective as horror. It strikes home because of the act itself and the young age of the victim.

Perhaps thinking about the recent awful clamor about abortion and rape got me thinking about what a fucking awful horror rape is.

Perhaps most of all because it takes the moment we are most intimate and defenceless and turns it into a waking nightmare. It takes what should be the most tender act of lovingkindness we can perform and turns it into the ultimate moment of powerlessness, hate, and fear.

So though I don't really think that one of the jailers of the Tullianum went and raped a little girl before he murdered her, I think that the ancient storytellers thought that story was the most awful thing they could think of to add to the horror of the end of the tale of Sejanus and his fall.

And what saddens me even more is that they felt they needed something more awful than the cold fact of a young girl casually strangled for the crime of being born to an ambitious father. Something more shocking to tittilate their readers' jaded tastes.

Something more frightful than the bald fact of her child-body cast down the Gemonian Stairs in a tangle of dirty clothing, her still-unformed arms and legs asprawl in the gross indignity not just of death but of careless cruelty. Something more awful than the thought of the vengeful citizens of Rome stepping casually over this sad little corpse, of the cold winds of December skirling the ragged clothes around her stiff limbs and the pale sun unreflected in the flat stare of her sightless eyes.

I don't really understand why the long-ago death of a girl two thousand years old so saddens and depresses me. But it does, and outside my window the night rain seems to weep for every little girl so lost, and torn asunder, and thrown away down the brutal stairs to lie forlorn under the careless feet of the passersby.

Decisive Battles: Milvian Bridge 312 AD

Milvian Bridge Date(s) 27 (or 28) OCT 312

Forces Engaged: I apologize for doing this twice in a row, but we've gotta start from a different place here; the fact is that we just don't know much about the actual battle of Milvian Bridge, and the "things we don't know" includes even the bulk numbers of troops.

I'll get to this when we talk about Sources, but none of the extant accounts of the battle provide anything like an accurate number of combatants. The numbers we do have are, frankly, speculative. The forces loyal to Flavius Valerius Constantinus (afterwards Emperor Constantine I) are given as something between 90,000 and 100,000, while the forces loyal to Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maxentius (at the time styling himself Emperor Maxentius) is accorded a higher total ranging from something around 100,000 to Zosimus' report of 188,000.

But...

The sources also state that these numbers could represent the TOTAL number of troops in the contenders' respective forces. Constantine is reported as having left three-quarters of his army along the Rhine frontier, while Maxentius was also engaged in a conflict with another claimant based in North Africa AND had already lost several north Italian cities and their garrisons.

So the actual forces engaged north of the River Tiber in October 312 seem likely to have been smaller than the reported numbers. The logistical constraints of 4th Century transport and comestible storage also argue for smaller numbers. The command-and-control technology of 312 would have tended to make an army of 100,000 almost uncontrollable; a smaller force (of, say, 20,000 to 40,000) would have been much easier to fight as well as to move and supply.

The accounts all suggest that Maxentius had the larger of the two forces at Milvian Bridge; the proximity of the logistical and administrative base in Rome, and the earlier campaign fought down through north Italy by the Constantinian forces, all suggest that the Maxentian force would have been larger than their enemies.

My guess is that the Constantinian force would have been roughly 30-40,000 while the Maxentian force might well have been twice that size, something like 50-80,000, but that's really all it is, a guess. We just don't know and probably never will.

The armies themselves were practically identical; a core of legionary infantry supported by auxiliary cavalry, light infantry, and projectile infantry (largely archers).

The 3rd and early 4th Centuries were times of great change and experimentation in the Roman armies. The "classical" imperial legion of 6,000 had been dominated by heavy close-combat infantry - the iconic legionary from his hobnail caligae sandals to his beavertail helmet, lorica segmentata armor, big cylindrical shield and stabbing sword. By the time of Milvian Bridge this had changed considerably.

Perhaps the most significant change was the fragmentation of the big legions. By 300AD the standard formation was a much smaller element. These had been originally termed "detachments" (vexillatio) but by the time of Milvian Bridge these were stand-alone units of 500 to 1,000.

The gradual rise of the heavy cavalryman was in progress as well. Units of cataphractarii - fully armored horsemen - are reported from earlier in the Constantinan campaign. Many of these new vexillia were mounted units, and the proportion of cavalry to infantry in Roman armies had increased since the days of Augustus.

The other major change was the inclusion of non-Romanized troops. The Wiki entry for the late Roman army notes that:

"From the 3rd century are the first records of a small number of regular units bearing the names of barbarian tribes (as opposed to peregrini tribal names). These were foederati (allied troops under a military obligation to Rome) converted into regular units, a trend that was to accelerate in the 4th century. The ala I Sarmatarum, based in Britain, was probably composed of some of the 5,500 captured Sarmatian horsemen sent to garrison Hadrian's Wall by emperor Marcus Aurelius in 175 There is no evidence of irregular barbarian units becoming part of the regular Principate army until the 3rd century."

The Maxentian army is said to have contained more of these "barbarian" units, although this could well be Constantinian propaganda to make the loser seem less "Roman" than the winner.

The late Roman trooper also looked very different from his "classical" counterpart, from his clothing to his weapons.

Long-sleeved single-piece tunics (basically a short dress), trousers (bracae), socks and boots replaced the short-sleeved tunic and caligae that were the underarmor wear of the classical infantryman. A chain mail body armor - known as the lorica hamata - replaced the classical laminated-strip steel lorica segmentata which, while better protection was complex, difficult to produce and maintain, and had proved very uncomfortable in action (modern reenactors have found that the segmentata tends to catch skin between the bands and - since it is relatively stiff and doesn't conform to the torso - chafes horrifically within minutes).

Expense and the general decline of imperial revenues showed in the manufacture of equipment; the helmet crown was no longer typically a single hammered bowl but made of two separate pieces joined by a riveted ridge in the middle, the so-called "ridge helmet" but was generally similar to the earlier type. Cavalry helmets tended to be heavier and covered more of the head; the closer formation of the infantry meant that the ground trooper was less likely to get whapped on the side of the head or back of the neck than the horseman.

The big cylindrical scutum had given way to the lighter, flat, round or oval clipeus and the gladius, the short stabbing sword had been phased out in favor of the spatha, a longer (about twice the gladius' length) weapon that had been a cavalry sword, but primarily the heavy hasta spear.

This, in turn, implies that the legionary formations of the 3rd and 4th Centuries had opened up, with fighting taking place at longer distances than in the earlier legionary infantry, which needed to get within embracing distance of an enemy to use the gladius.

The continued presence of short-range missile weapons, including throwing spears or javelins verrutum or lanceae, a heavy pilum called a spiculum, and unique lead-weighted throwing darts called plumbatae suggest that the early Roman tactic of preceding the clash of heavy infantry with a volley or two of missiles persisted into the time of Milvian Bridge.

The cavalry had proliferated, and now included a range of different types; light horseman for scouting and pursuit, mounted bowmen for harassment, and heavy cavalry for shock action. The disaster of Hadrianopolis lay nearly a century in the future but the day of the horseman was clearly approaching.

The army of Maxentius had one singular feature; the Praetorian Guard. This unit probably looked and fought much like the regular infantry legionaries (and the cavalry force, the equites singulares Augusti as regular legion cavalry) with the distinction of more expensive, better-quality kit. We'll get to these guys later, but Milvian Bridge was their swan song, and the last long day of 300 years.

But a lot of this is very speculative, and we'll talk about why when we start talking about the Sources, below.

Sources: We have, basically, four documentary sources for our knowledge of the battle that was fought at Milvian Bridge.

The earliest is a panegyric dated 313AD. This oration is supposed to have been given in Trier, one of many in the Roman tradition of praise-speeches to powerful men. This particular panegyric was collected in a manuscript known as the Panegyrici Latini, a total of 16 orations from the 4th Century and earlier; 12 complete and four fragments. This source is known from a single manuscript that was discovered in 1433 in a monastery in Mainz.

The primary importance of this work is that it appears to largely pre-date the official adoption of Christianity by the Roman government as the state religion. The orator appears to have been either a follower of the old Olympian gods or some sort of prevaricating pantheist. Other than Zosimus the contemporary accounts are explicitly Christian and, in particular, want to use the events of October 312 as a vindication of Christianity rather than an after-action report of a military engagement.

I also want to go into this particular manuscript a little to expand on why we are so unsure of the details of Milvian Bridge and many other pre-movable-type events.

So.

The original 15th Century object, called the "M" (for Moguntinus) manuscript, no longer exists - it was destroyed, or misplaced, or eaten (who the hell knows?) some time after 1433. The cleric that found the MS, a man named Johannes Aurispa, made copies, and all the modern versions are descended from these. Two copies went to Italy; these are called X1 and X2.

These are ALSO lost.

A total of 27 manuscript copies were made from them before that were misplace, however. But the internal evidence suggests that Aurispa's original copy of M was not particularly good; either because he was just not that good a copyist or was rushed, or some other reason. This "lineage" is considered poorer than the other copies.

These are known as the "H" line (from the Harlein Library at Oxford where it now resides) which also includes the "N" manuscript (located at Cluj in Romania), and the "A" version (which is at the Uppsala University Library).

These are described as

"H and N are both fifteenth-century manuscripts, transcribed in a German hand. H shows corrections from a near-contemporary. N was copied at some time between 1455 and 1460 by the German theologian Johannes Hergot. Detailed investigation of the manuscripts by D. Lassandro has revealed that A derives from N and N derives from H. H is usually considered the best surviving manuscript." (Wiki, 2012)

All these manuscripts contain errors and corrections; for all that the X versions are described as "inferior" the Wiki entry notes that "...when X1 and X2 are in agreement, they sometimes preserve the true reading of M against H. They also contain useful emendations from the intelligent humanist corrector of Vaticanus 1775."

Get the idea? This manuscript stuff is extraordinarily chancy.

OK, so we have three other "primary" sources. Well, really two other primary and a sort-of secondary source

One of the two primary sources is a guy named Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius. The written work which gives an account of the engagement at Milvian Bridge is Lucii Caecilii liber ad Donatum Confessorem de Mortibus Persecutorium, usually referred to in English as The Deaths of the Persecutors.

Lactantius (as he is better known) was a career Roman bureaucrat. He first turns up as Diocletian's appointee to the faculty of the University at Nicomedia in about 300AD. He turns up next in 317 as tutor to Constantine's son Crispus.

Other that these meager details Lactantius is known only through his surviving writing, which is described as

"...more adept at showing the incongruity of heathen polytheism than in establishing Christian teaching...designed to present Christianity in a form that would be attractive to philosophical pagans. In practice this resulted in a uneasy amalgam of Christianity, Platonism, Stoicism and Pythagorianism. His views led to his posthumous condemnation as a heretic. Interest in his works was revived during the Renaissance not because of their outstanding theological content, but rather due to their "excellent Latin style".

His de Mortibus Persecutorium is referenced hereafter as "Lactantius"

The second primary-source author is Eusebius of Caesarea (better known as simply Eusebius). This character was appointed the Bishop of Caesarea about 314AD. Another of the many early Christians who wrote Christian tracts, the particular work which provides a synopsis of Milvian Bridge is his Vita Constantini (The Life of Constantine). As a eulogy or panegyric to Constantine as well as a Christian apology it is not particularly interested in the military details of his campaigns.

There are several issues with the Vita. Eusebius wrote to glorify Constantine, and consistently omits anything that tends to negate that. Some of this propaganda, such as his accounts of Constantine's campaigns against his fellow imperial wanna-be Licinius, is a outright lie. He also portrays himself as a much closer associate of Constantine than he really was. Still the Vita is perhaps the most complete work we have covering the events of 312.

The third source is the Historia Nova of Zosimus. This "new history", however, isn't a primary source; Zosimus was a Byzantine who lived more than a century after the events of Milvian Bridge, and gets his information about the events of the early 4th Century from the work of another guy called Eunapius, a Greek who lived in the second half of the 4th Century. Eunapius, at least, was a pagan and a pretty fierce one; what we have of his works are full of bile at the New Order, and Zosimus doesn't seem to take issue with that attitude.

What we know of Zosimus comes from a single 10th/11th Century Byzantine manuscript that currently resides in the Vatican.

Given the paucity of information about the battle proper it is nor surprising that there is little secondary writing that addresses the engagement itself. Two recent works turn up to a cursory search; a 2011 work titled Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge (van Dam 2011) and Battle of the Milvian Bridge (Russell and Cohn, 2012).

Neither appear particularly useful for the student of military history. The former is described as a study of "...the creation and dissemination of the legends about that battle and its significance.", while the latter displays a large badge on the cover identifying its content as "High Quality Content by Wikipedia Articles"!

The Campaign: The road to Milvian Bridge really began with the Emperor Diocletian in 293AD.

OK, well, we actually need to start earlier, with the so-called "Crisis of the Third Century", an unholy mess of civil war and foreign invasion that nearly brought down the Roman Empire.

This little fracas is worth - and has been accorded - a full study, but to make it brief the Emperor Aurelian's forces managed to stabilize the Empire, but in the process Rome suffered great physical and economic damage. The troubles of the Third Century also made it clear that the Empire was now too big, and under too many threats, for a single administration to effectively control.

Diocletian "solved" this problem by inventing something called the Tetrarchy.

This involved setting up two "senior" rulers, each called Augustus with two juniors designated Caesar. This was emphatically NOT intended as a formal divison of the empire; these rulers were really the equivalent of military region commanders and their functions were more military than civil. The four rulers were treated as a sort of ruling Committee of Four, an "imperial college".

What's more, the arrangement was highly flexible. For example the situation in the western regions was fairly formal; Caesar Constantius ran Gaul and Brittania while Augustus Maximian controlled everything else. Diocletian and his Caesar, Galerius, were much less rigid about the way they ran their eastern bits.

This worked out fine for about 20 years. But when the next couple of Caesars were appointed things pretty much went to hell.

One of the new augusti, Constantius, died the following year. In the reshuffle that followed Maxentius, son of the former Augustus Maximian, was odd-imperial-wannabe-out. He proceeded to raise an army, whip one of the tetrarchs and murder him, and declared himself an Augustus.

By 308 there were four guys claiming to be the Big Kahuna; Galerius, Constantine, Maximian, and Maxentius, oh, and Maximinus who, rather ridiculously, wanted to be Junior Kahuna - Caesar.

In 308 an imperial get-together at Carnuntum (led by Diocletian and Maximian) agreed that Licinius would become Augustus of the West, with Constantine as his Caesar, and Galerius would be Augustus of the East with Maximinus as his Caesar.

Maximian was supposed to retire, and Maxentius was, again, odd-man-out - he was declared a usurping bastard, all-around obnoxious party-crasher, and worthless git.

This worked like cement water wings; Maxentius took most of Italy and North Africa without any official title, and both Constantine and Maximinus had issues with that fucking noob Licinius as their superior.

By 309 the Senate had to make them Augusti, too.

Four Augusti did not bode well for the Tetrarchic system.

So between 309 and 312 civil wars or disease whacked most of the imperial wannabes.

By the spring of 312 Constantine had had enough; he decided to put his brother-in-law Maxentius (Connie was married to Fausta, Maxentius kid sis, whose later part in Constantine's life is both bizarre and terrible) out of his misery.

The northeastern border and Gaul were always trouble spots; the orator of 313 claims that Constantine left the bulk of his forces along the Rhine, marching south with little more than a quarter of his troops (the number 40,000 is alluded to but may be a rhetorical device).

Regardless of the numbers the Constantinian forces beat the Maxentians like a drum all down north Italy. Turin fell, and then Verona; most of the battles are reported to have been as one-sided as Milvian Bridge would be.

Finally the last redoubt left to Maxentius was Rome itself, and the final battle would be just outside the gates of Rome, north of the Tiber across the Milvian (or Mulvian) Bridge.

Since I'm just that sort of person, a little history of the bridge itself.

Aurelius Victor says the original bridge was built in 110BC by the censor Aemilius Scaurus.

Sallust places one of the events of the Catiline Conspiracy at the bridge:

"When arrangements had been thus perfected and the night for the departure appointed, Cicero, who had been informed of everything through the envoys, ordered the praetors Lucius Valerius Flaccus and Gaius Pomptinus to lie in wait for the Allobroges and their company at the Mulvian Bridge and arrest them."

Tacitus Annals say that by Nero's times the neighborhood was full of sleazy wine bars:

"The Mulvian bridge was then a famous haunt of nightly profligacy, and Nero used to go there that he might take his pleasures more freely outside the city."

But perhaps the most famous bit of history involved in the campaign is supposed to have occurred the night before the battle.

Or not.

Lactantius describes the "Vision of Constantine" thusly:

"At length Constantine, with steady courage and a mind prepared for every event, led his whole forces to the neighborhood of Rome, and encamped them opposite to the Milvian bridge. The anniversary of the reign of Maxentius approached, that is, the sixth of the kalends of November, and the fifth year of his reign was drawing to an end.

Constantine was directed in a dream to cause the heavenly sign to be delineated on the shields of his soldiers, and so to proceed to battle. He did as he had been commanded, and he marked on their shields the letter X, with a perpendicular line drawn through it and turned round thus at the top (P), being the cipher of CHRISTOS. Having this sign, his troops stood to arms."

Eusebius' accounts of this incident are more troublesome because they differ not just with Lactantius but with each other.

In his church history (which was written within a short time after the engagement and before the author had encountered Constantine) Eusebius doesn't mention any sort of dream or vision, and doesn't mention any kind of Christian symbol carried by the Constantinian forces.

But in the Vita Eusebius tells a much more elaborate story, and one that is frankly not credible. He places the vision in Gaul, early in the campaign, and makes it happen at noon, on the march, where Constantine sees a cross of light over the sun with the Greek words "In this win!" (Τούτῳ Νίκα!).

Not just Constantine but the whole army sees this miracle.

That night Christ himself shows up - the ultimate Military Assistance Command, a sort of MAC-J - to advise the would-be Emperor to make symbols like the sky-light and thus ensure victory. Eusebius says that Constantine himself told this version late in his life.

Frankly, Connie or no Connie, the Eusebius version is just ludicrous. Such a public vision would surely have been reported by others, including the anonymous orator of the Panegyric and Lactantius (who as a fellow Christian and Connie-lover surely wouldn't have missed anything that would have looked so good on his boy and his faith...).

While the Lactantius version at least seems more "buy-able" we don't have any outside confirmation of his story, either.

The entire business gets more complex because of the lack of physical evidence. For example, the first archaeological evidence we have of this symbol (termed a "chi-rho" and, where used on a Roman military standard as a labarum) is on coinage from 317AD. Even then, there is some question of this as a purely Christian symbol; it had been used elsewhere as a manuscript editor's mark!

Certainly it appears widely in the conflict that Constantine fought against Licinius in the 320's, but it is nowhere in evidence on the Arch of Constantine constructed just three years after Milvian Bridge.

In early Constantinian coinage the sun-symbol of Mithras (that could also be interpreted as Helios or Apollo by Olympian-pesterers) was still present, not disappearing until after the defeat of Licinius in 325.

So while there seems to be some evidence that the engagement at Milvian Bridge might have been a "Christian versus pagan" encounter the evidence also seems by no means decisive. We'll talk about this more when we discuss the impact of the battle.

Right now, let's fight.

The Engagement: Here's what we're told about the actual Battle of Milvian Bridge.

Zosimus says that Constantine "encamped in a field before the city," (presumably part of the Tiber floodplain north of Milvian Bridge) "...which was broad and therefore convenient for cavalry." Zosimus gives the two army strengths as 90,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry for the Constantinians while assigning a larger force to Maxentius; "...eighty thousand Romans and Italians, all the Tuscans on the sea coast, forty thousand men from Carthage, besides what the Sicilians sent him; his whole force amounting to a hundred and seventy thousand foot and eighteen thousand horse."

The crucial element of this engagement appears to have been construction of some sort of pontoon bridge by the defenders. Here's how Zosimus describes it:

"Both being thus prepared, Maxentius threw a bridge over the Tiber, which was not of one entire piece, but divided into two parts, the centre of the bridge being made to fasten with irons, which might be drawn out upon occasion. He gave orders to the workmen, that as soon as they saw the army of Constantine upon the juncture of the bridge, they should draw out the iron fastenings, that the enemy who stood upon it might fall into the river."

Leaving out Zosimus ridiculous tale of owls flying down on Maxentius, we next find the two forces in combat order on the battle plain north of the bridge. Zosimus says that

"Constantine sent his cavalry against that of the enemy, whom they charged with such impetuosity that they threw them into disorder. The signal being given to the infantry, they likewise marched in good order towards the enemy. A furious battle having commenced, the Romans themselves, and their foreign allies, were unwilling to risk their lives, as they wished for deliverance from the bitter tyranny with which they were burdened; though the other troops were slain in great numbers, being either trod to death by the horse, or killed by the foot. As long as the cavalry kept their ground, Maxentius retained some hopes, but when they gave way, he tied with the rest over the bridge into the city. The beams not being strong enough to bear so great a weight, they broke; and Maxentius, with the others, was carried with the stream down the river."

And that was that.

The typical Roman order of battle called for a central block of heavy infantry with light troops in front to skirmish and missile troops behind to provide indirect fire. Auxiliary cavalry would be stationed on the wings, prepared either to defend against outflanking maneuvers or to attempt them.

So what appears to have happened at Milvian Bridge is that the Constantinian cavalry engaged the Maxentians on both flanks and broke them. We can't be sure why this occurred, especially since failure seems to have struck the defenders quite quickly. It may be that the Rhine legion cavalry were better trained and more experienced, that their commanders were more capable, that the attackers were better motivated and led, or some combination of the above. But what seems clear is that here, as with the subsequent heavy infantry clash, the Maxentian troops did not fight particularly well.

Once their flanks had been turned the Maxentian center really didn't have much choice; it would be retreat to the river or be cut down from behind. This probably was in the process of happening when the Constantinian legionary infantry charged, and in short order the Maxentian force completely collapsed.

We've seen this before; at the Greasy Grass in 1876, and at Adowa in 1894. In combat events can hang by a thread; in a moment retreat may become rout and defeat disaster. In this particular case Maxentius' dispositions ensured that disaster would be destruction, in that his forces could not retreat other than across the bridge (or bridges) to their rear.

The tradition states that the Praetorian Guard was the last Maxentian element to resist. This is not texturally supported; Zosimus, Lactantius, and Eusebius do not mention any of this "Guard dying but not surrendering" stuff. We can imagine that as the army unit most intimately associated with the defending ruler the Praetorians might have suspected that they would find little mercy in their conquerors, but this is pure supposition. And previous imperial spats had seldom resulted in wholesale slaughter of the losing troopers. At worst a handful of the senior officers might have met an executioner's dagger or strangling-cord.

I consider it likely that the Praetorians had formed around their emperor near the rear of the Maxentian array, and probably - once their commander sensed the flanks folding in - tried to edge back towards the bridge and keep their order. But a unit of several thousand in a rout of tens of thousands is unlikely to remain formed for long; it seems likely to me that the Praetorians were torn apart, small knots of troopers without officers and officers without troops in the swirling chaos, unable to do more than try and struggle towards safety.

Whatever the Praetorians were doing, their boss was attempting to get back inside the walls of Rome and failing. Somewhere in the clusterfuck on the Tiber Maxentius fell, or was pushed, into the river. With his lovely parade armor weighing him down he sank like a stone; supposedly his body was difficult to drag up but was recovered, as we have reports that his head was sent to North Africa to suppress the rebellion there.

With their Emperor dead the Maxentian troops had no further reason to resist. The emperor was dead; long live the new Emperor! Constantine crossed into the city the following day and was proclaimed "the greatest Augustus" by the Senate.

The Outcome: Decisive victory for Constantine I with subsequent effects on the Roman imperium

The Impact: The immediate effect of Milvian Bridge was simply to consolidate Constantine's hold on the western part of the Empire. The Tetrarchy of Diocletian was effectively over, with two administrative and military divisions within the empire, East and West. In 325 Constantine finished reuniting the imperium under his control. His reforms, and his military victories, helped the Empire continue on for another several hundred years.

Constantine himself has something of a troubled life. In the spring and early summer of 326 he had his oldest son, Crispus, murdered. His much younger wife Fausta was killed a month or two later. The emperor ordered the damnatio memoriae of both of them; every public record of the two people was destroyed. No one has ever presented an unquestionable explanation of why this happened.

Zosimus says that Fausta was jealous of Crispus' ability and his father's favoritism in preference to her own sons (Crispus was the son of Constantine's first wife). According to the Zosimus story Fausta invented a tale of step-incestuous desire and attempted rape. Constantine murdered his son in rage and then, when Fausta's scheme came apart, had her killed as well.

But there are darker tales that this.

That Fausta and Crispus were step-incestuous lovers.

That the bizarre "suffocated in a hot bath" method used to murder her was also an abortifacient intended to erase a fetus not implanted by her husband.

Whatever the truth, the year of 326 must have been a terrible one for Constantine.

The other people who disappear after Milvian Bridge are the Praetorians.

The Guard had simply become too dangerous to the Emperors. The ugly tradition of picking rulers that had begun with the machinations of Sejanus and Macro in the days of the Julians had become too imbedded.

The Guards were disbanded, the surviving troopers and officers posted individually to the frontier legions, and the Castra Praetoria, the big fortified camp in the northeastern section of the Augustian Walls demolished.

Ironically, Constantine replaced the Praetorians with a huge body of troops, guard units called Scholae and Palatini, and overall with a comitatus - a personal field army - that far exceeded the household troops of the earlier imperium. Some scholars think that the Constantinian comitatus reached a quarter of the total imperial force.

The reasons for this are still debated. Some believe that this represented a recognition of the need for a large central reaction force in light of the increased likelihood of successful border incursions. But other researchers think that this was a more sinister reaction to the increased risk of internal treason.

Aside from his political and military triumphs, and personal tragedies, Milvian Bridge handed the Roman imperium to a man who, while he may or may not have been a Christian by beliefs was a patron of the Church by political hard-headedness.

Constantine made sure that the growing Christian movement got official recognition early on; in 313 he co-signed a law that made Christianity legal, as well as giving special recognition to the churches and individual Christian citizens.

This was important, not for religious reasons but for political.

Christians were prohibited from their religion from accepting and publicly attesting to the divinity of the Emperor.

They were also a source of social and political friction; the Roman Empire had existed for centuries by being publicly indifferent to religion.

While the Olympian gods combined with peculiar Roman deities like the lares and penates were the more-or-less "official" gods of the Roman state that state had no interest in how its subjects scratched their religious itches, so long as those itches didn't make the state break out in hives.

The Christians did; both by fussing about others' worship AND denying the divinity of the Emperor.

The Edict of Milan elided this problem, rather than solved it.

What did "solve" in, in a sense, was that Constantine bought into the idea of using Christianity as a political tool. He was the first Emperor to recognize that the empire could be stronger with the Christians inside the tent pissing out. Over the next century Christianity (of one sort or another - the century after Milvian Bridge was full of Christian on Christian conflict) became the official religion of Empire, and so the Christian hagiography and mythology makes Constantine a captive of Christ, the first Christian ruler and saint.

But in a larger sense it is Rome that captures Christianity.

From the fertile chaotic broth of the first centuries of Christian belief Constantine personifies what happens when a religion takes on the temporal power of a state. Cohen (1998) lays this out in detail:

"One of the first things Constantine does, as emperor, is start persecuting other Christians. The Gnostic Christians are targeted...and other dualist Christians. Christians who don't have the Old Testament as part of their canon are targeted. The list of enemies goes on and on. There's a kind of internal purge of the church as one emperor ruling one empire tries to have this single church as part of the religious musculature of his vision of a renewed Rome."

The result is a Church, and a religion, that becomes more like the state that is is supposed to have taken and the Empire less like the Christ of the gospels; there is little interest in meekness and poverty, much in strength and wealth. This little anecdote by the same author is revealing:

"[T]here's a beautiful mosaic in Ravenna, a city in northern Italy, which I routinely show my classes. It's of a beautiful, very handsome, well muscled, beardless man. He's dressed in a Roman officer's uniform. And he's stepping on the head of a lion, and he's holding a standard. And the standard says in Latin, "I am the way. The truth. And the life." And usually my students can't read Latin and I say, "Who's this a picture of?" And they guess, "The Roman Emperor." But it's not. It's a picture of Jesus."

And there you have it; the Jewish rabbi, who died on a criminal's cross for preaching his Father's insistence that true power and glory came from weakness, submission, and faith has become a resplendent soldier in the armor of conquest, bearing a standard instead of his cross.

In victory the Christ becomes the crucifier, in glory the carpenter's son trades his lathe for a sword and leaves the company of lepers and whores for the society of dukes and commanders.

The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone in a military gate, and the projectile cast by a war engine.

If there is a better moral from the opaque history of Milvian Bridge I cannot find it.

Touchline Tattles: from the Wikipedia entry on Ponte Milvio; "love padlocks":

"In late 2006, the bridge began attracting couples, who use a lamppost on the bridge to hang love padlocks as a sign of their love. The ritual involves the couple locking the padlock to the lamppost, then throwing the key behind them into the Tiber. The ritual was invented by author Federico Moccia for his popular book and movie "I Want You".

After April 13, 2007, couples had to stop this habit because that day the lamppost, owing to the weight of all padlocks, partially collapsed. However, couples decided to lock their padlocks in other places. In fact, all around the bridge, road posts and even garbage bins have been used to place these love's padlocks.

As an online replacement, a web site has been created allowing couples to use virtual padlocks.

But in July of that year the mayor and city council of Rome placed new steel posts on the old bridge so that Roman couples might continue to lock the symbols of their love and fidelity in the place where the might of Imperial Rome first began to subdue the Son of God.