10 Wars That Shattered the Pax Romana

“In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.”

This was how Edward Gibbon, in his magisterial epic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, characterized the Golden Age of Rome—two centuries of relative peace, political and economic stability and progress, and a flourishing of the arts, literature, and technology. From AD 27–180, Rome basked in the light of the Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”), which was supposed to be one of humanity’s happiest periods.

But the Pax Romana was anything but peaceful. The era witnessed some of the most brutal savagery and mayhem ever recorded. It was “peace” on Rome’s terms, as no one dared challenge its military might. Well, not everyone. In this list, we meet the brave people who stood up against an empire at the very pinnacle of its power.

Related: 10 Things Few People Know About the Woman Who Defied the Roman Empire

10 Conquest of Britain

Claudius, the only adult male of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, was proclaimed emperor by the Praetorian Guard upon the assassination of his nephew Caligula in AD 41. Slightly deaf and walking with a limp, he felt insecure in his office and sought a way to prove himself a worthy ruler. (Link 3) He decided to take up Caligula’s aborted project to invade an island Romans had known of since Julius Caesar’s time, which they could see across the channel from Gaul on a clear day—Britain.

The conquest of Britain promised Claudius glory, booty, and the affection of the army. He made a pretext out of the expulsion of the pro-Roman ruler Verica of the Atrebates by the hostile Catuvellauni to invade. A 40,000-strong force led by Roman general Aulus Plautius landed on the south coast in AD 43. The brave but disorganized British warriors were defeated near the Thames, ending the threat of the Catuvellauni.

The Romans proceeded to conquer other British tribes, overawing them with their vaunted martial skill and efficiency. The Britons were particularly terrified by the Roman war elephants, beasts they had never seen before. Eventually, 11 other kings submitted to Roman rule. Claudius himself arrived in Britain to accept their surrender.

The Romans continued to expand to the north in the succeeding years, consolidating their gains and solidifying their rule. They had to put down numerous revolts, the most serious being the one led by the famed Boudicca, queen of the Iceni. These rebels burned Colchester and London, massacred 70,000 Romans and their native allies, and decimated the IX Legion before being defeated. It was not until around AD 85 that the Roman hold on Britain was secure.^[1]

9 The War of the Armenian Succession

The Kingdom of Armenia, wedged between the Roman and Parthian empires, was a neutral buffer zone between the two rival powers. In AD 52, Parthian king Vologases I invaded Armenia and placed his brother Tiridates on the throne, declaring Armenia a vassal state in AD 58. This challenge to Roman prestige was unacceptable, and emperor Nero dispatched his best general, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, to teach Parthia a lesson in respect.

It would not be easy. The last time these empires clashed in 53 BC, the Romans were severely mangled at Carrhae. They were particularly wary of the Parthian cavalryman’s ability to fire arrows behind him—the “Parthian shot”—and their tactic of feigned retreats. Pinning the more mobile Parthian army on the battlefield would be difficult, so Corbulo embarked on a campaign to besiege fortresses and cities. So successful was Corbulo in destroying these stationary targets that when he approached the Armenian capital of Artaxata, the inhabitants surrendered without a fight. Corbulo spared them but razed the city anyway.

By AD 60, the Romans had control of Armenia, Tiridates fled back to Parthia, and the pro-Roman Tigranes V took over the throne. One final attempt by the Parthians to recoup in AD 63 was dashed by Corbulo, and they had to submit to the Treaty of Rhandia, which gave both powers joint rule over Armenia.^[2]

8 The First Jewish War

When the disciples of Jesus gazed admiringly at Jerusalem and its temple from the Mount of Olives, Jesus ominously told them, “And he answering, said to them: Do you see all these things? Amen I say to you there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed… For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be” (Matthew 24:2,21). Thus, the humble preacher from Nazareth prophesied that the apocalyptic disaster was about to befall the Jewish nation.

In the first century, Judea was a land of seething discontent and rebellion against Roman rule. Many Jews were expecting a conquering Messiah to defeat the Romans and establish the Kingdom of God. Zealots, messianic pretenders, and end-time prophets roamed the land, stoking revolutionary fervor to a fever pitch until it finally exploded in the autumn of AD 66.

In that year, the Roman procurator Gessius Florus robbed the Temple of a large amount of silver. This outrage triggered a riot in which the Roman garrison was wiped out. A relief force was defeated as well, raising Jewish morale. The small bands of Zealots offering sporadic resistance to the Romans were inspired to join forces, killing fellow Jews who would not join the revolt. The Romans sent 60,000 troops to crush the rebels and surrounded Jerusalem.

“And when you shall see Jerusalem compassed about with an army; then know that the desolation thereof is at hand” (Luke 21:21). Inside the city, Jewish factions fought among themselves. Starvation and disease, cannibalism, robbery, and murder ran rampant. Outside the city walls, Romans crucified some 500 victims a day. On September 8, AD 70, the Romans finally broke into the city, flattened it, and burned the holy Temple. It is estimated that a million Jews died in the revolt. In AD 73, the remnants of the Zealots holed up in Masada committed mass suicide rather than surrender.

The fall of Jerusalem had implications that reach even to the present. It marked the beginning of the loss of Palestine as the Jewish homeland and their 2,000-year diaspora. It is the root of the continuing crisis between Palestinians and Israelis today.^[3]

7 The Year of the Four Emperors

By AD 68, the Roman people could no longer tolerate the depravities of the tyrant emperor Nero. In March, a revolt broke out led by the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis and his ally Servius Sulpicius Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis. As Galba marched on Rome, Nero tried to escape but found all exits cut off. Desperate but too cowardly to kill himself, Nero had to ask his servant to stab him. The Senate proclaimed the aged Galba the new emperor, and the Praetorian Guard swore their loyalty, expecting a handsome payment as a reward.

Marcus Salvius Otho, governor of Lusitania and an ally, also expected to be named successor by the childless Galba, but the emperor instead designated Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi Licinianus rather than Otho. Angered by the betrayal, Otho bribed the Praetorians, who were also impatiently waiting for their money, to support him. They assassinated Galba on January 15, AD 69, sweeping Otho into power. Otho lost no time in having Piso murdered.

Ambitious and greedy, Otho did not endear himself to the people or the army. The legions along the Rhine refused their allegiance, hailing the governor of Germania Inferior, Aulus Vitellus, the true emperor, while the legions of Asia Minor rallied behind the governor of Syria, Flavius Vespasian. In April, Vitellus overwhelmed Galba at the Battle of Bedriacum. Upon Galba’s suicide, the Senate proclaimed Vitellus emperor, the third in a year.

The fourth was coming. Vespasian, just fresh from fighting the Jewish rebels, hurried to face Vitellus, and their two forces collided at Cremona on October 28. Vitellus, defeated, fled back to Rome, where he was hunted down by Vespasian’s men, captured, dragged out into the streets, and killed. They threw his body into the Tiber. Vespasian proved to be a popular emperor, and his Flavian dynasty ruled the Empire for the next 27 years.^[4]

6 The Revolt of Saturninus

Vespasian’s youngest son, Domitian, was a ruthless and cruel emperor, a notorious persecutor of Christians, and was compared to Nero behind his back. He evolved into a cult of personality, and the Senate, which theoretically held supreme power, hated him. Plots against him abounded.

On January 1, AD 89, the governor of Germania Superior, L. Antonius Saturninus, launched a rebellion to wrest power from Domitian. The troops were opposed to Domitian’s plan to send them to a dangerous campaign along the Danube, and Saturninus gained the support of Legion XXI Rapax and Legion XIV Gemina and secured the alliance of the Germanic Chatti tribe. Domitian led an unprovoked attack on the Chatti five years before, and the tribe had a score to settle.

But the Rhine unexpectedly thawed, and the Chatti could not cross over to send help. With only the two legions at his disposal, Saturninus was easily defeated and killed. Domitian himself marched north and, in vengeful wrath, ordered a purge of army officers suspected of disloyalty. Their severed heads, along with that of Saturninus, were sent to Rome and publicly displayed as a warning, particularly to the Senate, of the fate awaiting any who would rebel against Domitian.^[5]

5 The Dacian Wars

Dacia was a relatively young kingdom founded in the 1st century BC around the area of modern Romania. In AD 84–85, the Dacians got the attention of the Romans when they crossed the Danube to plunder the imperial province of Moesia and kill its governor. A war with Domitian followed and was ended by a treaty of friendship with Rome in AD 89, which many felt favored the Dacians too much. By the time of Trajan’s accession, Rome’s supply of gold, iron, and copper was running out, and as Dacia had plenty of these metals, Trajan felt the time had come to rectify Domitian’s unsatisfactory treaty.

In AD 101, the Romans advanced on Dacia and swept away the defenders at the Second Battle of Tapae. Dacian king Decebalus used the winter lull to invade Moesia but was pushed back at Nicopolis and Adamclisi. Decebalus requested a truce, which he exploited by gathering more allies for a second round and harassing Roman settlements along the Danube. Trajan knew he had to grind down Dacia permanently.

In AD 105, Trajan had a permanent bridge, the largest arch bridge to exist for a millennium, built across the Danube to carry his legions into Dacia quickly. By AD 106, the capital, Sarmizegetusa, was under siege. It eventually fell and was razed to the ground. Decebalus, facing the prospect of being paraded around Rome and executed in Trajan’s triumphal procession, committed suicide rather than be captured. The Column of Trajan in Rome commemorates the Roman victory.^[6]

4 The Invasion of Parthia

The Parthian Empire had long been a constant threat on Rome’s eastern frontier. In AD 113, Trajan decided to resolve the issue once and for all after about half a century of uneasy coexistence. There was an economic motive: the Parthians were exacting high tariffs on goods coming to Rome. Then there was the perennially thorny Armenian question. Parthian king Osroes had placed Parthamasiris on the Armenian throne without asking Rome’s permission, a violation of the Treaty of Rhandia, giving Trajan the casus belli for war.

In AD 114–115, Trajan invaded Armenia and deposed Parthamasiris. Armenia and Mesopotamia were annexed to Rome, and Trajan crossed the Euphrates and Tigris in AD 116 to invade Parthia itself. This time, the Roman army had expert archers to match the Parthians, who tried in vain to stop the river crossings. Their capital of Ctesiphon and the entire Euphrates-Tigris basin down to the Persian Gulf were soon in Roman hands. Trajan was prematurely celebrating in Babylon when the Parthians counterattacked, forcing him to retreat all the way back to Antioch.

Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, restored the status quo before the war with Parthia, but in AD 162, it was the Romans who tried to install a king over Armenia without informing Parthia. With roles reversed, the Parthians under Valaksh III invaded Roman Syria, where the Jews welcomed them as liberators. The Romans retaliated by moving into Parthia once again, recapturing Ctesiphon and burning down Valaksh’s palace in AD 164. Parthia was close to collapse when a plague swept through the Roman army in Seleucia, which it carried to Europe. Emperor Marcus Aurelius, beset by troubles elsewhere, threw in the towel.^[7]

3 Kitos War

In AD 115, the Jews of the diaspora in the east took advantage of Trajan’s preoccupation with Parthia to rise in revolt to avenge their mistreatment and Roman brutality. In the summer of that year, the rebels from Cyrene, led by the rabble-rouser Lukuas, took control of the surrounding region and marched on Alexandria in Egypt, burning government buildings, temples, and bath-houses and killing 220,000 Gentiles along the way (most likely an exaggerated estimate by historian Cassius Dio). The bloodshed followed them into Alexandria, which was partially burned, and its tomb of Pompey the Great was destroyed.

In Mesopotamia, Jewish rebels wiped out the Roman garrisons left by Trajan and took Nisibis and other cities. A simultaneous uprising in Cyprus under Artemion saw the provincial capital of Salamis razed and thousands of Greeks and Romans killed. In Judea, Luilianos and Paphos captured Lydda and made it their capital. Meanwhile, Lukuas had proclaimed himself King of the Jews, probably with delusions of Messianic grandeur. It was an unplanned, uncoordinated uprising, simply a spontaneous explosion of pent-up hatred by downtrodden and abused people.

The Eastern Roman Empire was now aflame in revolt. Trajan dispatched General Lucius Quietus (corrupted into Kitos by Jewish sources, after whom the war is named) and Praetorian prefect Quintus Marcius Turbo to crush the rebellion. After two years of fighting, Lukuas was driven out of Africa, and he fled to join Luilianos and Paphos in Judea. Quietus and Turbo followed in hot pursuit and besieged Lydda. It was inevitable that the city would fall; when it did, all its inhabitants were massacred.

The Kitos War left both Jews and Gentiles traumatized by its horrors. In Cyprus, no Jew was allowed hereafter to set foot on the island, even if shipwrecked, on pain of death. Tensions in Judea remained, a ticking time bomb set to explode in one final cataclysm.^[8]

2 The Bar Kochba Revolt

After the first and second Jewish-Roman wars, things were deceptively calm in Judea. Emperor Hadrian began his reign in AD 118, sympathetic to the Jews. He allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and offered to rebuild the Temple. But Hadrian soon changed his mind and instead built Jerusalem as a Roman city called Aelia Capitolina with a temple, not to Yahweh, but to Zeus/Jupiter.

Messianic fervor resurged among the Jews. When a man of Davidic descent named Simeon bar Kosiba appeared to lead the rebellion, he was hailed as the Messiah and given the nickname Bar Kochba (“Son of a Star”), a reference to Numbers 24:17: “I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not near. A STAR SHALL RISE out of Jacob and a sceptre shall spring up from Israel: and shall strike the chiefs of Moab, and shall waste all the children of Seth.” Christians regarded him as one of the false Christs that Jesus warned them about and refused to join the uprising.

Initially successful, Bar Kochba raised hopes that God would intervene this time around. The Jews captured Aelia Capitolina and gave the Roman legion XXII Deiotariana a severe beating. In AD 134, the Roman position was so precarious that Hadrian had to summon the governor of Britain for reinforcements. Supremely confident, Bar Kochba styled himself a prince and minted his own coins marked “Year 1 of the liberation of Jerusalem” and “The freedom of Israel.”

But the Romans gradually regained the upper hand and recovered Aelia. The rebels were worn down by attrition and starved out of their strongholds. In AD 135, the Romans besieged Bar Kochba’s headquarters at Bethar, where many Jewish refugees had fled. In this final battle, every Jew in Bethar was killed, including Bar Kochba. The revolt cost 580,000 Jewish deaths, not including those from hunger and disease. Hadrian forced the Jews to assimilate, forbidding practices like circumcision and keeping the Sabbath. They were barred from Jerusalem, and the land was renamed Syria Palestina. Judea was no more.^[9]

1 Marcomannic War

The imperial frontier north of the Danube River was the home of several Germanic tribes, among them the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Sarmatians. By the 2nd century AD, their increasing power and expansion spurred by a growing population were threatening Roman provinces like Noricum and Pannonia. The pressure along the border broke out in AD 166 when the tribes spearheaded an invasion aimed at Italy.

The Romans held back an initial attack by 6,000 Germanic warriors, but weakened and decimated by the pandemic, they were unable to organize in time to halt the Marcomanni and Quadi from ravaging Pannonia. The Romans were pushed back to Aquileia, and with his co-emperor Lucius Verus in assistance, Marcus Aurelius personally took charge of the defense. He gradually rebuilt the army’s strength and began recovering lost territory. It was in the midst of his campaigns, probably at night by the light of a campfire, that Marcus Aurelius wrote down his thoughts in what would become a classic work of Stoic philosophy, the Meditations.

By AD 167, the situation in Italy had stabilized. In AD 172, the Romans crossed the Danube into the heartland of the Marcomanni and Quadi. There was fierce resistance, and in one brutal battle, the Roman XII Legion Fulminata found itself surrounded, its men weak and desperately thirsty under the scorching sun. Miraculously, an unexpected torrential downpour brought relief, and the Romans beat back the barbarians. Cassius Dio attributed the miracle to an Egyptian sorcerer accompanying the army; Church father Tertullian credited the prayers of Christian soldiers in the legion for the divine intervention.

By AD 179, the Marcomanni and Quadi had been totally defeated but not subjugated. Marcus Aurelius strengthened the frontier defenses against future attacks. But the myth of Roman invincibility was shattered, encouraging future barbarian incursions. In AD 180, Marcus Aurelius was succeeded by his worthless son Commodus, beginning the long process of Rome’s decline and fall.^[10]