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    Refugees and the Roman Empire

    In the recent Australian federal election, the issue of refugees and boat-people once again reared its head. It got me thinking about the history of Displaced Persons and Refugees, especially in the Roman Empire.

    The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that at the end of 2009, over 43 million people were identified as Displaced Persons globally.  More than 15 million of these were identified as refugees. Pakistan, Iran and Syria hosted over  one million refugees each while in Australia, where the issue of refugees plays a major role in political campaigns, just over 13,000 refugees were granted entry in 2009, approximately 2,500 arriving by boat.

    In the Australian context, refugees have often made many positive contributions to society and the economy – Jewish refugees such as Frank Lowy, founder of Westfield is a prominent example.

    When you think about it, Displaced Persons and Refugees have arguably been a part of human history since the first migrations of humans from east Africa began approximately 100,000 years ago. Population pressures, famine, the prospects of a better life were probably all contributing factors to humans first leaving Africa and eventually radiating out around the globe.

    After humans began the shift to agriculture as the main way of acquiring food around 8,000 years ago, societies produced and hoarded more surpluses and this gave birth to states, empires and the inevitable wars that go with them.  The earliest significant example is the conquest of much of the Middle East by Sargon the Great (2270-2215 BC) of Mesopotamia and warfare on this scale saw a marked increase in Displaced Persons and Refugees (some of them slaves).  This has been a feature of warfare across Africa, Europe and Asia (Afro-Eurasia) ever since.

    In the Roman Empire, Displaced Persons and Refugees emerged as a significant issue in the third and fourth centuries AD – especially in the western (European) provinces. The best known of these are the Goths who were essentially a collection of tribes from Germany and Eastern Europe. They came under increasing pressure in the third and fourth centuries AD from migrations of other tribal groups further east in southern Russia and Central Asia. The best known of these groups are the Huns.

    The pressure of these migrations saw the Goths displaced from their homelands and pushed further west towards the Roman Empire. In some cases, this ended in disaster with the Roman emperor Decius killed in AD 251 in battle against the Goths who had entered Thrace (Bulgaria)in search of a new homeland.  Over a century later, the Roman emperor Valens struck a deal with the Goths, allowing some of them to settle in the Roman provinces of Moesia and Thrace (modern Hungary and Bulgaria) in exchange for the provision of soldiers to the much depleted Roman army.

    The Goths were not treated well by Valens’ officials and in 378 they revolted. Valens undertook a campaign against them which ended in a disastrous defeat in the Battle of Adrianople on 9 August, 378. Nearly 20,000 Roman soldiers were killed and Valens himself died in the battle.

    In time it became clear that the Goths wanted to be a part of the Roman system rather than overthrow it. An agreement with the emperor Theodosius in 382 saw them receive territory on the Danube in Thrace but, once again, poor treatment at the hands of the Romans saw the Goths revolt which culminated in their infamous sack of Rome on 24 August 410.

    Despite events such as these, the Goths came to play increasingly important roles within the Roman army and they kept alive considerable elements of Roman culture long after the Romans departed the political stage in the west.  For example, after the last western Roman emperor (Romulus Augustulus) abdicated in 476, the Gothic king Theodoric was sent by the Byzantine emperor Zeno to invade Italy in 493 and ruled as king of Italy with the agreement of the Byzantines until his death in 526.

    The Goths were great admirers of Roman culture and had an increasingly important impact on it from the fourth century AD.  One of the key elements in this respect was their conversion to Christianity in the 340s. While the Roman Empire collapsed politically in the west in the fifth century AD, important elements of Roman culture were preserved and transmitted by the Goths into the medieval and modern periods due in part to their Christianity.

    Most Displaced Persons and Refugees in today’s world are fleeing wars and persecution, just like the Goths.  Society’s which offer political, economic and cultural stability are clearly the most attractive to these desperate people, and similar to the Goths they are likely to preserve and enrich the cultures to which they seek to flee. Rome’s shabby treatment of the Goths resulted in serious crises such as the death of Valens and the first sack of Rome.

    We can be thankful that today’s Displaced Persons and Refugees rarely behave in this way but we should take the warning that desperation can drive them into the arms of groups who take advantage of their desperation.

    Refugees and the Roman Empire

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    Ancient Rome and the Global Financial Crisis

    The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is often referred to as the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, and it probably is, but the GFC and the Great Depression are nothing new. The recent discovery in Somerset County, England of a hoard of 52,000 coins is a good reminder of a much earlier GFC which is thought by many to have swept through the Roman Empire in the third century AD. (See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10546960 for more on this exciting find.)

    Hundreds of Roman coin hoards have been found all over the empire, especially in Britain, dating to the third century AD. Some of these hoards contain many thousands of silver and bronze coins and all of them appear to have been carefully buried.  
    In the case of the Somerset hoard, why would anyone bury 160 kg (350lb) of coins and even more intriguing, why wouldn’t they come back for them at some stage?

    The early part of the third century AD saw a sharp increase in the number of Roman soldiers serving in the army and it also saw their pay increase sharply too. The emperors were forced to mint more coins to pay them. Difficulties in mining enough silver to meet these needs meant that the silver content of the coins dropped as well.

    The combination of more coins in the market and that they contained less silver content saw huge spikes in inflation. By about AD 280, Roman silver coins contained less than 1% of actual silver and were virtually worthless. This partly explains why so many large hoards have been found dating to the third century AD.

    The coins that people saved were eventually not that valuable when it came to buying things so people didn’t bother coming back for them – that’s what I call a financial crisis and in the Roman world, it was global.

    Another explanation for hoards such as the one found in Somerset, is that the third century AD was a period of military and political calamity for the Romans.  There were major invasions of Rome’s territory in its eastern provinces and also from tribal groups in Eastern Europe and Germany into the western provinces.

    As well as these invasions there were large-scale rebellions against the emperors by individuals who set themselves up as alternate emperors. The Palmyrenes in Syria took control of all of Rome’s eastern provinces around AD 270 and in Britain and northern Gaul (France & Belgium) there were also major rebellions by pretenders to the imperial throne from AD 260-295.
    The Somerset hoard comes from the period of the British usurper, Carausius, around AD 290. When large-scale invasions and usurpations took place, people (especially soldiers) were more likely to be killed, enslaved or had to flee from the areas where they were based. This meant they were more likely to lose the savings they had buried.

    So, why did people bury their savings when the Romans had banks and safe-houses and why might they not come back to collect their savings if they could?

    Overspending by governments on the military eroded the currency and this, together with the political and military turmoil of the third century meant people lost faith in both banks and the currency.

    All of this sounds familiar doesn’t it? The biggest difference is that we have a complex understanding of economics and why these crises take place. The Romans didn’t and it took many decades into the fourth century for the financial situation to stabilise.

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    Teenage military commanders in the Ancient World

    It would be unheard of today for a 19 year old to command a major army. Most parents  are concerned enough about placing a 19 year old in charge of a motor vehicle.  Military commanders around the world today and for many centuries past have generally had decades of experience and hold authority partly on the basis of their seniority. Lee, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Cosgrove and Petraeus are all good examples. In the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, however, it was not unusual for large armies to be led or even raised by young men who in modern terms were barely young men at all.

    Perhaps the most famous example is Alexander the Great who began preparations in 336 BC to lead an army of 40,000 men against the Persians when he was 19. Alexander stamped his authority on the army early, winning an impressive victory over the Persians in Asia Minor only two years later at the age of 21. Over the next 11 years he would  lead this army as far south as Egypt and as far east as India. At no stage, it seems, does his youth seem to have been an impediment to leading such a large expeditionary force with many of his senior generals considerably older than him.

    Nearly 300 years later, one of the ancient world’s greatest generals, Julius Caesar, wept in frustration over the sarcophagus of Alexander because the young Macedonian king had achieved more militarily by his late twenties than Caesar had by his early fifties.

    Interestingly, Julius Caesar’s own adopted son and heir, Octavian/Augustus, would lead an army on the city of Rome at the age of 19 to avenge Caesar’s assassination in 44BC. Before the age of Caesar and Augustus, the Romans had prohibited anyone leading an army until they were 43 but as the Roman Empire expanded and more adventurous military leaders were required  this rule became more and more difficult to adhere to. Forty years earlier, Caesar’s great rival, Pompey, had raised a private army at the age of 23 and made himself indispensable to the most powerful Roman leader of the day, Sulla, despite the illegality of his actions.  This set the example which Octavian/Augustus would later follow and there are numerous cases in the Roman imperial period of teenagers and young men commanding armies.

    How did such young men so successfully lead armies and would it be possible for a man of 19 today to lead an army of 40,000 men in a major territorial invasion? Life expectancy was clearly shorter for the Greeks and the Romans. For a male it was probably around 45, although there are known examples of people living beyond the age of 100 in antiquity. Young men of the Roman nobility, for example, came of age when they took the toga virilis at the age of 14. Greek and especially Roman society was also much more influenced and dominated by military matters with children of soldiers and the nobility sometimes marked out as infants for later military service and military service was a fundamental part of achieving political success. It might worry some of us today when 18 and 19 year olds organise overseas trips and set about beginning a career but spare a thought for Alexander the Great’s mother, Olympias, on the eve of his invasion of Asia.

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    The end of the Mayan Calendar and the end of the Roman World

    Many of you will be aware of the looming end date of the Mayan Long Count Calendar which is due to take place on 21 December 2012. There is considerable interest in this event which is obvious if you simply type the words “Mayan Calendar” into Google.  The recent release of the movie 2012 starring John Cusack is based on the cataclysm which some predict will take place when the Mayan Long Count Calendar comes to an end and this has been an important contributor to increasing interest in the event.

    There is a diverse range of suggestions as to what might happen.  These include physical events such as earthquakes, floods, famines and other natural disasters.  Other predictions are based around economic and political catastrophes. An increasingly larger number of predictions suggest that the end of the Mayan Calendar will usher in a new spiritual age rather than a physical one and a number of these suggestions claim that this will be a positive event rather than a negative one.

    If you want a summary of some of the ideas out there have a look at the articles at Helium.  There are, of course, many sceptics who present fairly convincing arguments that much of the hype surrounding the end of the Mayan calendar is just that and more directed at financial gain than anything else.

    Who were the Maya?

    Very briefly, the Maya were a people who dominated southern Mexico and parts of Central America from ca. 250-900 AD and were also important in this region centuries before and after. The Mayan calendar is actually a system of calendars which is thought to have its origins as early as the sixth century BC. In all, there were three main Mayan calendars, one being the Tzolkin calendar of 260 days which was possibly based on the pregnancy cycle and revolved around religious events and festivals. The second was the Haab which had 365 days like our Julian calendar and focussed on civil events.

    Both of these calendars operated on an annual basis like our calendar but unlike our calendar did not include consecutive years as part of its formula. It was the third calendrical system, the Long Count calendar, which did this and it is this calendar which will revert to 0 in the last days of 2012. The Long Count calendar counted the days from the mythical origins of time but the system used to do this had an upper limit meaning that there would be a date in the future when the calendar would revert back to 0.  This date is the Julian equivalent of 21 December 2012 which is the basis for all of the present interest in what might happen when the Mayan calendar reverts to 0, or as some might interpret it, when the Mayan concept of time comes to an end and the world with it.

    We do not have enough evidence from Mayan civilisation to determine whether the Long Count calendar was designed to point to the end of the world or not. We have significance evidence, however, from the Mediterranean world to suggest that many people living in the Roman Empire were looking to the end of the world as we know it and using certain dating systems to predict it. The two groups who were especially interested in when the end of the world would come were Jews and Christians.

    From quite early in their history, the Jews had been looking for the arrival of the Messiah who would essentially save them from dominant imperial powers such as the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans. For some Jews the Messiah would do more of a spiritual nature and for some this was Jesus Christ. These Jews, of course, became Christians. The Christians looked for signs of the second coming of Jesus Christ as a way of predicting the end days of this world and the eventual beginning of a new Heaven and a new Earth. Initially, for most Jews and Christians much of the motivation for establishing when the end of the world was coming was related to persecution by empires of various persuasions. The Jews had suffered under Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek rulers and they continued to suffer persecution at times throughout the whole of the Roman period. The Christians suffered sporadic persecution by Roman emperors from as early as the reign of Nero (AD 54-68) and periods of persecution sparked great interest in when Jesus would return and the end of this dangerous world might come.

    The main focus on establishing when Jesus would come a second time and bring an end to this world comes from the New Testament book of Revelation. Revelation was written at the end of the First Century AD and it provided Christians with a detailed vision of what the end times would like. An important part of this vision was to give coded details of a series of events which would take place before the second-coming of Christ.

    In the following centuries and right up to today, a lot of ink has been spilled on trying to establish what these events might represent in reality and whether they have happened yet or not.  More specifically, Revelation 20 predicted that Jesus would come again and rule for 1,000 years before God would bring the whole of creation to an end and establish a new Heaven and a new Earth. The thousand year reign would come after the reign of the anti-Christ referred to in Revelation 13 who Christians variously identified with a number of Roman emperors, especially Nero.  Following Nero’s reign, however, the thousand year reign of Christ was increasingly delayed and this led to numerous attempts at identifying other indicators of the end times and deliverance for persecuted Christians.

    By the end of the third century Christians had begun to establish a chronology of historical events since Creation which showed the historical centrality of Jesus as Messiah and the emergence of the church following his ascent to Heaven. Eusebius of Caesarea  (ca. 260-340) was one of the key figures in developing this style of recording history which is called Chronicle. Eusebius collated available lists of events which took place in the various kingdoms since Creation. These lists included king lists written down centuries earlier by the Babylonians and also the Egyptians.

    The tradition of Christian World Chronicles became very popular and there were many Christian writers in later centuries who followed the tradition of writing Chronicles continuing on from Eusebius. Christian World Chronicles were initially designed more to demonstrate that Christianity was a religion which could be traced back to the earliest days and that it wasn’t a new religion with no respectable antiquity as many of its critics claimed. As the delay in Jesus’ return to Earth grew longer, however, Christian World Chronicles also began to be used as a means of identifying the end times prophesied in Revelation. The collation of the lists of historical events in Christian World Chronicles was compared with the various visions and predictions of historical events before the second coming in Revelation in an effort to break the code in Revelation and indicate the exact time when Jesus would return and the thousand year reign of peace commence.

    It appears that the end of the Long Count Mayan Calendar is used by some today in the way that Christian World Chronicles were used in the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. The purpose of the Mayan Long Count Calendar was similar in some ways to the original aim of the Christian World Chronicle, which was to provide a means of recording historical events since the beginning of time.  The resetting of the Mayan Long Count Calendar to 0 does not necessarily mean the end of time itself and there are many who acknowledge this.

    For Christians who were being persecuted, the end days predicted in Revelation could not come fast enough. Once the Roman world had become heavily Christianised from the Fourth Century AD onward, persecution of certain Christians stopped but this coincided with a period in which the Roman Empire itself came under significant threat from outside forces, especially in the West. The end of days came to be represented by the possible end of the Roman Empire itself and Christian World Chronicles played an important role in indicating just how bad the times had become for the Roman Empire.

    Given all of the perceived threats we feel  today and serious concerns over the viability of Earth as we know it due to issues such as Global Warming, it is little wonder that such interest has been sparked in an ancient  and mystical calendrical tradition which could be interpreted as indicating dramatic and permanent change.

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    The Wonderful World of Ancient History

    “Oh, that’s Ancient History”, it sure is and you’ve come to the right place to learn all about it.

    The wonderful world of the ancients seems long ago but we love learning and talking about it. The ancient world and its people fascinate us because they are mysterious but much like us.

    The ancient world has fascinated me for years and has taken me to interesting and unusual places around the globe.  I hold a PhD in Ancient History and have many years of teaching and research experience at university.  I am passionate about sharing my experiences and love of learning about the ancient world with you.

    You will find this site clearly organized to provide you with easy access to the best quality information on the ancient world. Join in discussions about all things ancient history. From archeology to Roman emperors, gladiators and the clash of great empires, you will connect with the ancient world in new and exciting ways.

    Make sure you visit this site frequently because there will be regular updates on the ancient world. Even better, why not join this site using your gmail address and then you’ll be notified automatically whenever I add a new post.

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