Best Defense

Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Those who cannot remember the past, part 2

Back to Michael Grant’s The Army of the Caesars (here’s part 1). In AD 114, the Emperor Trajan, weary of Rome’s long confrontation with the Parthian Empire, which had its capital at Ctesiphon, just south of today’s Baghdad, decided to solve the problem once and for all. He soon captured that capital and marched south ...

Back to Michael Grant’s The Army of the Caesars (here's part 1). In AD 114, the Emperor Trajan, weary of Rome's long confrontation with the Parthian Empire, which had its capital at Ctesiphon, just south of today's Baghdad, decided to solve the problem once and for all. He soon captured that capital and marched south to the Persian Gulf. But things started to fall apart in AD 116, when southern Mesopotamia rebelled against the occupation. You see where I'm going here?

Back to Michael Grant’s The Army of the Caesars (here’s part 1). In AD 114, the Emperor Trajan, weary of Rome’s long confrontation with the Parthian Empire, which had its capital at Ctesiphon, just south of today’s Baghdad, decided to solve the problem once and for all. He soon captured that capital and marched south to the Persian Gulf. But things started to fall apart in AD 116, when southern Mesopotamia rebelled against the occupation. You see where I’m going here?

Trajan "succeeded in setting up a puppet Parthian monarch in the palace at Ctesiphon, but it was a very temporary measure," Grant concludes. "His huge-scale eastern warfare has included many alleged triumphs, but they were almost entirely illusory. The campaigns had imposed a very severe strain on the resources of the empire, and had disastrously failed to produce any compensating results. The Roman army, for all its wonderful qualities and harmonious relations with its Imperator, [AKA Emp. Trajan] was not adapted to the great aggressions and expansions he had longed for."

Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, immediately abandoned the Parthian territories, which made him deeply unpopular with Roman conservatives. In AD 118 this resulted in a confrontation that ultimately led Hadrian to execute four leading ex-consuls whom he accused of plotting to assassinate him.

Still, Hadrian did better than Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor who didn’t make it alive out of present-day Iraq. But that’s a story for another day.

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com. Twitter: @tomricks1

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