Characters

"By the sword the empire was lost, and by the sword it shall be restored."

A peasant's son from Illyria who rose through the ranks to command the cavalry, Aurelian became emperor in 270 and in barely five years reassembled the shattered Roman world. Iron-willed and ferociously energetic — his troops nicknamed him 'hand-on-hilt' — he beat back the Goths and Vandals, abandoned the indefensible province of Dacia, and then reconquered both breakaway empires: he crushed Zenobia's Palmyra in the east and reunited the Gallic Empire in the west. For these feats the Senate hailed him 'Restitutor Orbis,' Restorer of the World. He walled the city of Rome for the first time in centuries, reformed the debased coinage, and promoted the cult of the Unconquered Sun as a unifying imperial religion. Stern to the point of cruelty, he was murdered in 275 by his own officers, tricked into a plot by a frightened secretary — a reminder that in this age even the empire's saviour could not escape the assassin's knife.

"While the centre holds, the empire is not yet lost."

The emperor who held the crumbling centre together through the very worst years of the Crisis, Gallienus reigned for fifteen embattled years — including seven after the capture of his father Valerian left him to face catastrophe alone. Beset on every side by invasions and by a swarm of usurpers (the 'Thirty Tyrants'), and with the Gallic and Palmyrene empires breaking away, he fought ceaselessly to preserve the core of the Roman state around Italy and the Balkans. He was a genuine military reformer, creating a powerful mobile cavalry reserve and promoting able Illyrian officers — the very men, like Claudius and Aurelian, who would go on to save the empire. A cultured man, patron of the philosopher Plotinus, he was caricatured by hostile senatorial writers as a frivolous incompetent, but modern historians credit his grim endurance with keeping Rome alive long enough to recover. He was assassinated in 268 by his own generals while besieging a usurper.

"Let the Goths learn that Rome still has emperors who fight."

An Illyrian soldier who came to the throne after the murder of Gallienus, Claudius II reigned barely two years but struck one of the decisive blows of the recovery. In 269 he confronted an enormous coalition of Goths who had poured across the Danube and ravaged the Balkans and Aegean, and at the Battle of Naissus he crushed them, reportedly killing or capturing tens of thousands and breaking the great invasion. For this he took the title 'Gothicus,' the conqueror of the Goths. He seemed poised to lead a full Roman revival — but in 270 he died, not by the assassin's knife that took so many of his peers, but of the plague still stalking the empire. He was remembered as a hero, and later emperors, including Constantine the Great, would claim descent from him to burnish their own legitimacy.

"Rome does not treat with barbarians — yet here I stand, a prisoner."

A senator of old family, Valerian became emperor in 253 and shared power with his son Gallienus, taking the eastern half of the crumbling empire for himself. Facing the resurgent Sasanian Persians under Shapur I, he marched east — but his army was ravaged by plague, and in 260, near Edessa, he was defeated and, during a parley, seized and taken prisoner by Shapur. He became the only Roman emperor in history to be captured alive by a foreign enemy, and his fate was a byword for humiliation: Persian and later Christian sources claimed Shapur used him as a living footstool to mount his horse, and that after Valerian's death his skin was flayed, dyed, and hung as a trophy in a temple. His capture, celebrated in Shapur's monumental rock-carvings, marked the nadir of Rome's Crisis.

"Order must be imposed, or the world dissolves into chaos."

The Illyrian officer whose accession in 284 ended the Crisis, Diocletian was one of Rome's great reforming emperors. Recognising that no single man could govern and defend the vast empire, he divided its rule among four emperors — the 'Tetrarchy' — to end the endless succession wars. He overhauled the army, the provinces, the tax system, and the debased coinage, and remade the imperial office into a remote, sacred autocracy hedged with ceremony. His reforms stabilised the empire and gave it another century and more of life, transforming the classical Roman state into the bureaucratic, militarised world of late antiquity. His reign was also marked by the 'Great Persecution,' the last and most severe Roman assault on Christianity. In an act unique among Roman emperors, he voluntarily abdicated in 305 and retired to grow cabbages in his vast palace at Split — the only emperor of the age to leave power alive and by his own choice.

"I am Shapur, who seized the Caesar of the Romans with my own hand."

The second Sasanian king of kings and the great adversary of Rome in the east, Shapur I brought the young Persian empire to a peak of power and dealt the Romans the most humiliating defeat of the Crisis. He raided deep into the Roman East, sacked the great city of Antioch, and in 260 defeated and captured the emperor Valerian alive — the only time in history a Roman emperor fell into enemy hands. He proclaimed his triumphs in a monumental inscription and in the famous rock-reliefs at Naqsh-e Rustam, which depict the mounted king towering over the humbled Roman emperor. A builder as well as a conqueror, he founded cities, patronised the prophet Mani, and settled captured Roman soldiers and engineers in Persia. His reign established the Sasanian Empire as Rome's equal — a rivalry that would endure for four more centuries.

"I am a queen, and while I live, I shall reign."

One of the most extraordinary figures of the ancient world, Zenobia was the queen of the desert caravan-city of Palmyra, ruling as regent for her young son after the murder of her husband Odaenathus. Beautiful, learned, and fiercely ambitious — she claimed descent from Cleopatra and made her court a centre of Greek philosophy — she exploited the vacuum left by Valerian's capture to build an empire. Between 267 and 272 her armies seized Syria, conquered Egypt (Rome's granary), and overran much of Asia Minor, carving out a Palmyrene Empire that stretched across the Roman East. For a few years she rivalled Rome itself. But she met her match in the emperor Aurelian, who defeated her at Emesa, besieged and took Palmyra, and captured her as she fled toward Persia. She was carried to Rome to walk in his triumph, reportedly bound in golden chains, and — in the kinder versions of the story — allowed to live out her days as a Roman noblewoman.

"I rule the Gauls not against Rome, but to save them where Rome could not."

A Gallo-Roman general on the Rhine frontier, Postumus founded the breakaway Gallic Empire in 260, when the central government's collapse left the western provinces undefended against the Germanic tribes. Proclaimed emperor by his troops, he took Gaul, Britain, and Spain under his rule, setting up his own senate, consuls, and capital — a fully functioning Roman state in miniature. Crucially, Postumus made no attempt to march on Rome or overthrow the central emperor; his aim was simply to defend the west, which he did with real success, holding the Rhine and beating back the invaders for nearly a decade. His stable, effective regime showed that the Gallic secession was less a rebellion than a pragmatic response to imperial failure. In 269 he was murdered by his own soldiers after he forbade them to sack a city — a fittingly grim end for a ruler of the age.