Ballomar
Ballomar led the invasion that brought Germanic armies over the Alps for the first time and put a Roman emperor on the Danube for the rest of his life. He was king of the Marcomanni, a Suebic people settled in Bohemia, and he appears in the sources twice - once as the head of an embassy of eleven tribes seeking Roman mediation, and once as the commander of the war that followed when mediation failed. The pressure behind it was general. Peoples were moving south and west along the whole Danube frontier, and the plague brought back from the Parthian war in 165 had emptied the garrisons at the moment the pressure arrived. In about 170 the Marcomanni and Quadi broke through, crossed the Julian Alps, destroyed a Roman force at Carnuntum, sacked Opitergium and besieged Aquileia in Italy itself - which had not happened for nearly three centuries. Marcus Aurelius sold palace furnishings by auction to pay for the response rather than raise taxes, enrolled gladiators and brigands, and spent most of his remaining years in camp on the frontier. He wrote the Meditations there. The Romans pushed the invaders back over several campaigns and were preparing to annex the territory when Marcus died in 180 and Commodus made peace instead. Nothing is recorded of how or when he died, and the column raised in Rome to commemorate the war shows the fighting in detail and does not name him anywhere. That is the ordinary condition of the people Rome fought on this frontier: they exist in the record for exactly as long as they are a problem, and the two mentions he gets are both about what he did to the empire rather than anything about him.
- Nationality: Marcomanni
- Roles: head_of_state, military
