Marcomannic Wars: Germanic Tribes Breach the Danube
Germanic and Sarmatian peoples crossed the Danube in force from 166, and Marcus Aurelius spent most of the rest of his life on that frontier. The empire was already reeling. Troops returning from a Parthian war brought an epidemic — the Antonine Plague, probably smallpox, which killed something between five and ten per cent of the population over fifteen years and hollowed out the army it passed through. The invaders came at the moment the garrisons were weakest, and they were themselves under pressure from movements further north. The Marcomanni and Quadi broke through Noricum and Pannonia, reached Italy, and besieged Aquileia — the first hostile army in Italy in two and a half centuries. Another group reached Athens. Marcus went north with his co-emperor Lucius Verus and stayed. He sold palace furnishings and imperial jewels at auction rather than raise taxes, enlisted gladiators, slaves and bandits, and recruited Germans to fight Germans. The wars ran in two long phases to 180 with a revolt in the east interrupting them. He wrote the Meditations in the field, in Greek, addressed to nobody — the private notebooks of a man reminding himself to be patient, that offence is a matter of opinion, and that everyone he was fighting would shortly be dead along with him. He died at Vindobona or Sirmium in 180, and his son Commodus made peace and went home. The frontier held for another century, and Rome never annexed the territory beyond it. He is the last of the emperors Gibbon called the five good ones, and the succession he arranged is what ended the run.
- Year: 166 CE
- Category: Military
