CHAPTER VI.

Arabia, Egypt and Greece.

Between the settlement of Gaul and Spain and the beginning of what may be called the German period of Augustus' life comes the reorganisation of the Eastern provinces. Of course there was overlapping, and the Armenian problem in particular was with Augustus to the very end of his life; but the years between 24 and 13 B.C. saw both Augustus himself and Agrippa in the East, and for that period the foreign policy of Rome was above all its Eastern policy. For those years at least the thoughts of the Romans were fixed rather on the Nile, and still more the Euphrates, than the Rhine.

Even while Augustus was still in Spain the East had forced itself upon his thoughts and cares. The first Indian embassy of his reign sought him at Tarraco; so did an envoy claiming help for the earthquake-shattered Tralles in Asia Minor; and it was from Tarraco that he ordered the annexation of Galatia and Lycaonia. The fact is that the reorganisation of the East, which had been taken in hand by Augustus after Actium, was far from finished, and, in particular, some definite decision as to the way in which Parthia was to be dealt with could no longer be postponed. Death had surprised Cæsar in the midst of

[1. Not necessarily in Tarraco. Augustus' liberality to Tralles is also mentioned by Strabo, p. 579, but the only mention of the place where the embassy from the afflicted city petitioned Augustus for aid, seems to be in an epigram of Agathias, 2, 17, who speaks of Chaeremon coming to the Cantabrian land, and even if this is more than a vague reference to Spain, it is certainly not an allusion to Tarraco.]

gigantic and hardly sane plans for Parthian conquest. If Plutarch is to be trusted, his scheme was to reduce Parthia with the sixteen legions he had detailed for that campaign, and then to return to Gaul and Italy by way of the Caucasus, Southern Russia, and Germany, conquering the Germans on the way. Nothing had been done to carry out that scheme during the twenty years and more since Cæsar's death, but neither had peace been made with Parthia, and, strictly speaking, the two Empires were at war. That was one problem, and perhaps the largest, offered by the East, but there were innumerable others, and Augustus was bound to go eastwards himself or to send Agrippa at the earliest opportunity. Agrippa did go there, as has been shown, in the year B.C. 23, and, according to Josephus, discharged a ten-year mission. Josephus' phrase is true in the sense that Agrippa did not finally come back till B.C. 13, but the mission was by no means continuous. From 21 to 17 B.C. he was in Italy, Gaul and Spain (where he finished the Cantabrian war), and during two years of that time Augustus was in the East instead of him. They relieved each other almost like soldiers on guard, and in the absence of Augustus, Agrippa was, for that particular time and that particular part of the world, as good as Emperor. Agrippa was not the mere legate of Augustus, but appointed legates himself in Syria. He appears to have held that proconsular power which was the very kernel of the Imperial authority; he interfered at pleasure, not merely in Imperial but even in Senatorial provinces like Asia and Cyrene; and he was in fact a temporary vice-Emperor for the Roman world east of the Adriatic.

2

1. Supra, p. 163.

2. “Τοῦ πέραν Ιονίου διάδοχος καίσαρι ” is the phrase of Josephus Antiq. xv. 10. "Sub specie ministeriorum principalium" is that of Velleius, ii. 93.

The Eastern period which opens with the beginning of Agrippa's mission in B.C. 23, was one of organisation, not of conquest, and thenceforth Augustus showed himself the enemy of new annexations or far-reaching enterprises of any kind. But it had not always been so with him. His annexation of Egypt after Actium was a very serious piece of business, carried out with uncompromising decision, and even so recently as B.C. 25 a Roman expedition had been dispatched from Egypt to Arabia, and had almost reached the southern coast of the peninsula. That sensational venture was well calculated to appeal to the imagination of stay-at-home Romans, and, lest it should not suffice, it was almost immediately followed by an expedition up the Nile valley into Ethiopia.

There was a great demand at Rome for military prestige in connection with the new Imperial system-for the interest and excitement, possibly even for the prize-money, of successful war. The most popular thing that Augustus could have done would have been a great attack on Parthia. Augustus, however, was not thus to be led away, and preferred to satisfy the demand at less risk and cost. The Indian embassies, with their implied recognition of Augustus as King of Kings, came at the opportune moment, and the poets were quick to make the most of them. “India," said Propertius, "bows her neck beneath thy triumph"; and Virgil hailed the day when "Augustus Cæsar" would extend his empire over the Garamantes and the Indians. In the same strain Propertius told Augustus that unconquered Arabia trembled before him, and that hyperbole was indeed more nearly realised than were the

2

[1. The Ethiopians, however, were clearly the aggressors in the war, which does not seem to have been brought on for political ends by Augustus, cf. Strabo p. 820, and page 191 infra.]

2. Propert. iii. 1, 16. Et domus intactae te tremit Arabiae.

others. An attack upon Arabia suited Augustus very well. The Romans, who were bad geographers, regarded the country as a fertile Eldorado, full of spices and frankincense and of the money which the West had sent in payment for those treasures. Horace's

Icci, beatis nunc Arabum invides
Gazis

accurately represents one of the chief motives of the expedition, while the country was at the same time remote and mysterious enough to make the expedition attractive to the Roman quidnuncs. Augustus' personal motive was partly that of Iccius-the Treasury was none too full-while he also probably cherished the hope of adding to the commercial importance of his beloved Egypt by converting the Indian trade, whose half-way house and emporium had hitherto been in southern Arabia, into a direct trade between the Bombay coast and Alexandria by way of Myos Hormos and the Nile. An expedition conducted from Egypt as the Arabian expedition was bound to be, had moreover the advantage, from Augustus' point of view, that its commander was naturally and necessarily a man of merely equestrian rank, and that therefore his success could give no ground for jealousy or alarm, while his failure in what was after all a merely minor campaign would be a very different matter from the failure of a Parthian campaign conducted by Augustus himself, at the head of some sixteen legions.2

1. Compare p. 70 for the exclusion of senators from Egypt.

2. Cæsar had meant to attack Parthia with an army of that size, taking six legions with him from Italy, and adding the three then stationed in Bithynia-Pontus, the three Syrian, and the four Egyptian legions.

Ælius Gallus, the governor of Egypt at the time the Arabian expedition was decided upon, took with him to Arabia one of the legions that formed the garrison of Egypt, with of course its complement of auxiliaries, and with the further reinforcement of 500 men sent by Herod of Judea and 1,000 supplied by the King of the Nabataeans (Petra), whose prime minister, one Syllaeus, accompanied the expedition. He started from Arsinoe (Suez) and landed at Leuke Kome (probably Haura) on the Arabian coast, his goal being the land of the incense-bearing Sabeans," in other words, the south-western corner of Yemen. 'My army," writes Augustus, "penetrated into Arabia as far as the land of the Sabeans and the town called Mariba," and he may be excused for laying a certain emphasis upon the exploit, as Mariba was the southernmost point ever reached by a Roman army at any period of Roman history. It seems strange that Gallus did not start from a point much further south, say, Myos Hormos (Kosseir) or Berenice, and land at a point on the Arabian coast far nearer Mariba. He would thus have avoided the terrible land march along the inhospitable coast of west Arabia, which nearly destroyed his army. But everything is strange in this extraordinary expedition, which to moderns familiar with Soudan expeditions and all that they imply must appear one of the most foolhardy and even senseless enterprises ever undertaken. The explanation is that the ancients had far less facilities than we have for learning something of new countries. Armies had to do the work of exploration which in our time is

1. This has been doubted without reason. Dio, liii. 29 expressly asserts

it, while Pliny, N.H. vi. 160, says that he was ex equestri ordine which was what all governors of Egypt had to be.