The Battle of Salamis, 480 BC

23^rd September 480 BC was the date on which the Persians were defeated by the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis, which was the first great naval battle in history.

The Persians under Xerxes had swept all before them as they expanded their empire, and by 480 BC they were threatening the city states of mainland Greece. It seemed inevitable that the mighty hordes of the Persians would have no problem when it came to the citizen armies of Greece, especially as the latter found it extremely difficult to act in unison.

In August of that year Xerxes defeated the Spartans at Thermopylae and then moved on towards Athens. The Athenian general Themistocles had ordered the city to be evacuated apart from the Acropolis, which was consequently overrun by the Persians.

The Greek generals then squabbled over what to do next, with some wanting to fall back to Corinth and others, particularly Themistocles, wanting to take on the Persian navy. Themistocles eventually got his way, but the bickering went on.

He then took an even bigger gamble and sent a slave to Xerxes with a message to say that Themistocles had changed sides and would help the Persians. The Greeks were ready to run away, according to the message, and all Xerxes had to do was attack now and he would have a massive victory.

Xerxes fell for the ruse, especially as he knew from his own spies that at least part of what he had heard was true – the Greeks were certainly arguing among themselves. However, as the Persian fleet bore down on them, the Greeks now had no option but to stand and fight.

Themistocles also showed his cleverness by luring the Persians into a trap. The strait between the port of Piraeus and the island of Salamis was too narrow for the huge Persian galleys to manoeuvre, but the smaller and lighter Greek vessels were much better suited to the conditions. Themistocles also knew that there was a time of day when the swell in the strait was one that the cumbersome Persian galleys would find even more difficult to deal with than the Greeks, and he launched his counter-attack at this time.

The Greeks were able to get close to the Persian ships and shear off their oars, before turning away and getting into position to ram the disabled galleys.

After seven hours of fighting the Persians had lost 300 of their ships, to only 40 for the Greeks. Xerxes was watching from the land and commented, as one of his ships had a rare victory against a Greek trireme, “My men have become women, my women have become men”. This was because the victorious Persian galley was commanded by Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus.

Xerxes returned to Persia, leaving his army behind. The following year this was defeated at the Battle of Plataea and the Persian threat to mainland Europe was averted for a further century and a half.

© John Welford

Diocletian's persecution of the Christians

23^rd February 303 was the day on which Diocletian, Emperor of Rome, declared the beginning of one of the worst episodes of persecution of the growing sect known as Christians.

Diocletian governed a vast empire that stretched across much of northern Europe, including southern Britain, and right round the Mediterranean Sea. In order to maintain the stability of the Empire, which incorporated many different nationalities, it was essential for all its subjects to recognise the supremacy of its central figure, namely the Emperor.

Diocletian took this necessity to the extreme of declaring himself to be a living god who must therefore be worshipped. This was something of a Roman tradition, so he was not doing anything new. However, what he could not tolerate was the existence within his empire of people who did not accept this state of affairs. If they worshipped a different god they were not part of a united empire and were therefore likely to cause disruption to the overall “pax Romana” (Roman peace).

Diocletian’s persecution was therefore based on political rather than religious motives. It did not help that the Christians were also given to arguing among themselves, which was therefore a potent cause of public disorder. Christians were also in the habit of condemning the lax morals of non-Christians, which caused much resentment. By suppressing Christians of all persuasions, Diocletian therefore hoped to remove a source of potential conflict.

The first order given was to destroy all Christian churches throughout the Empire. This led to resistance from Christians, and governors of Roman provinces countered this opposition with increasing degrees of severity. Although Diocletian had not originally envisaged the wholesale slaughter of Christians, this became inevitable when other forms of suppression proved ineffective.

Later edicts proposed harsher punishments for refusal to worship the Emperor, and local governors became highly imaginative in their methods of torturing and executing Christians. Many saints in the Christian calendar were victims of the Diocletian persecution, being done to death in particularly horrific ways.

Horrible though it was, the period of persecution did not last long. Diocletian retired from office in the year 305 and within a few years the emperor was Constantine, who famously became a Christian himself as did nearly all his successors.

© John Welford

Jean-François Champollion and the Rosetta Stone

Jean-François Champollion, one of the fathers of modern archaeology, was born on 23^rd December 1790. Among his many claims to fame was that he unlocked the mystery of the Rosetta Stone and was thus able to offer a key to the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

As well as being an archaeologist with a particular interest in ancient Egypt, Champollion was also a brilliant linguist, particularly in ancient languages. He was therefore well placed to decipher the Rosetta Stone.

The stone in question had been unearthed by the troops of Napoleon Bonaparte when they invaded Egypt in 1799. The slab of black basalt was unearthed at the town of Rosetta in the Nile delta and was found to bear an inscription in three distinct writing systems, namely Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphic and Demotic, which is a non-hieroglyphic form of the Egyptian language.

The stone was captured by the British when Napoleon was expelled from Egypt in 1801. It was sent to the British Museum in London where it has been ever since. However, transcriptions were made of the texts and it was these that Champollion was able to study in Paris in 1809.

It soon became obvious to him that the text was simply three ways of saying the same thing, namely giving an account of the deeds of Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes. It was therefore possible to date the stone to 196 BC. With his knowledge of Greek it was relatively straightforward for Champollion to decipher the other texts although it did take him 13 years to finish the task. With this problem solved, the inscriptions that adorned ancient buildings throughout Egypt could now be understood.

© John Welford

Commodus, a disastrous Emperor of Rome

22^nd October 180 AD was the day on which Emperor Commodus entered Rome to begin his 12-year reign, one which Rome was all too happy to forget when it ended.

Commodus, aged 18, became emperor on the death of his father, Marcus Aurelius, when the two were on campaign on the Danube river, 700 miles from Rome. Marcus Aurelius had been one of the wisest emperors that Rome ever produced, and he was the last in a line of “good” emperors that stretched back to Trajan who had become emperor more than 80 years previously.

Commodus began his reign cautiously enough, but he then got a taste for luxury and the high life, and he might also have suffered from some sort of mental illness that transformed him into a brutal maniac.

After about five years he had given himself over totally to pleasure and was quite content to let the affairs of the Empire be handled by others. He organised massive celebrations and orgies, sparing no expense. When the money started to run out he simply took it from other people, by having wealthy senators executed on trumped-up charges and seizing their estates.

Megalomania took over, even to the extent of having Rome renamed “Colonia Commodiana” and the months of the year changed to the names of the titles he had awarded himself. Even the people of Rome were required to add the name Commodianus to their own.

He then started to fancy himself as a gladiator, appearing in the Colosseum in the guise of Hercules. Naturally enough he won all his contests, although he did not kill his opponents, preferring to vent his bloodlust on the many animals that appeared in the arena. However, on one occasion he vented his fury on a gladiator who killed a lion with more skill than Commodus could muster – the unfortunate gladiator was executed for daring to be better than the emperor.

Eventually, Commodus’s excesses became too much to bear and he was assassinated in a plot that involved his own favourite concubine. Once he was dead Rome swiftly returned to normal with all the statues of Commodus being torn down and his name removed from all state documents. As far as the people and senate of Rome were concerned, Commodus had never existed.

© John Welford

The Year of the Four Emperors: 69 AD

On 20^th December 69 AD the Roman Empire ended a period of chaos and gained a new emperor who would bring a measure of much-needed stability and ensure its survival.

The year 69 is known as the Year of the Four Emperors, three of whom met violent deaths. After Nero was overthrown in June 68 various factions of the army put forward their own candidates for Emperor, and it was these conflicting claims that created the chaos.

First up was Galba, an elderly provincial governor who was Nero’s chosen successor. However, he proved to be incapable of command and managed to alienate key elements of the army. He was overthrown and murdered by troops loyal to Otho, a former friend of Nero, who then took over as emperor.

The army in Germany had declared that their preferred candidate was Vitellius, whose troops proceeded to march on Rome while Otho desperately tried to mount a defence. When his men were defeated by those of Vitellius (who had stayed behind in Germany until the issue was decided), Otho committed suicide having reigned for only three months.

Soon after Vitellius arrived in Rome in June 69, another army advanced from the east. This was composed of troops loyal to a general named Vespasian, who had been fighting in Judea and Syria. The army in Egypt declared Vespasian emperor on 1^st July, and this inspired troops closer to Rome to follow suit.

The supporters of Vespasian fought those of Vitellius on the same battlefield that had seen the defeat of Otho by Vitellius’s army only a few months before. This time Vitellius was not so lucky, and when the victorious army of Vespasian reached Rome (on 20^th December) they murdered Vitellius and threw his body into the River Tiber.

Meanwhile Vespasian was still in Judea trying to sort out the Jewish Revolt that would end the following year with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. He left his son Titus to finish the job while he set off for Rome, which he reached a year after he had originally been declared emperor by his troops.

Vespasian had a long and distinguished military record, his exploits including the defeat of Celtic tribes in southern Britain during the invasion instituted by Claudius in 43 AD. As emperor he proved to be the right man for the job, despite being over 60 when he took office. He ruled firmly but justly and was respected and revered by the people of Rome.

One lasting result of Vespasian’s reign was his decision to tear down Nero’s pleasure palace and build an amphitheatre in place of the artificial lake that Nero had constructed. Although it was completed after Vespasian’s death in June 79, much of the building survives to this day and is one of Rome’s chief tourist attractions under the name of The Colosseum.

© John Welford

The death of Domitian, 96 AD

On the 18^th of September 96 AD the Roman Emperor Domitian was assassinated in a plot orchestrated by his wife.

The jury is still out on Domitian, and whether it will ever return to give its verdict is another matter. Some historians reckon that he was among the cruellest and most bloodthirsty of the emperors, while others maintain that he has had a bad press over the centuries and was not as evil as previously believed.

Domitian was the son of an emperor (Vespasian) and the brother of another (Titus), both of whom generally get the “thumbs up” when their reigns are weighed up in terms of good versus bad. Domitian was kept well away from the business of government during their reigns, and when he got the job for himself he did rather let things go to his head, insisting on being addressed as “master and god”, for example.

There seems little doubt that life during Domitian’s reign was a chancy business if you were a senator or in any way close to the seat of power, and a number of summary executions did take place of individuals who caused offence to the emperor. However, much of the evidence comes from the pen of one man, namely the historian Suetonius, who seems to have taken a distinct dislike to Domitian.

Domitian’s main problem was that he wanted to rule as an absolute monarch, whereas Vespasian and Titus had involved the Senate in their decision-making, and there were elements of the old Roman Republic in the way they went about things. Having been sidelined by the new emperor, the senatorial class was never going to regard him favourably, and neither was Suetonius.

Whatever the facts of Domitian’s reign, those relating to its end seem undisputed. Enough people went in fear of their lives to make assassination a real possibility. One of these people was Domitian’s wife, Domitia Longina, and another was Stephanus, the steward of the emperor’s niece Domitilla. Stephanus had been accused of embezzlement, so had good reason to be fearful. The two hatched their plot together with members of Domitian’s personal staff.

Stephanus pretended to have hurt his arm, which he wrapped with a bandage. Domitian therefore had no suspicion that anything was amiss as Stephanus went about his business for several days in this state, although he was actually carrying a dagger inside the bandage.

On the morning of 18^th September Stephanus approached Domitian with a scroll that he wanted to show the emperor. Once Domitian was distracted, Stephanus whipped out the dagger and stabbed Domitian in the leg, which was probably not where he intended the first blow to fall. Domitian fought to defend himself and the two men rolled around on the floor until other members of the plot could land their dagger blows, which were better aimed.

The number of Roman emperors who died peacefully in their beds was not a large one. Domitian was one of many who came to a violent end.

© John Welford

The Battle of Zama, 202 BC

The battle of Zama was fought on 15^th October 202 BC. It was the battle that finally decided which power would be master of the Mediterranean region – Rome or Carthage.

The battle that decided Rome’s dominance over Carthage

Carthage, a powerful city-state in North Africa, had been a thorn in the side of Rome for many years, particularly under the generalship of Hannibal who had inflicted a heavy defeat on Rome at Cannae in 216 BC. However, Rome simply refused to cave in. Hannibal’s main problem was that he did not have the right equipment for siege warfare - although he came within three miles of the walls of Rome at one point he could never hope to breach them.

What tipped the balance for Rome was the emergence of a general who was at least the equal of Hannibal. This was Publius Cornelius Scipio, a survivor of Cannae, who managed to recapture virtually all the land lost to Hannibal in Spain. In 204 BC, with Hannibal still in Italy, Scipio gathered a large army and set sail for Carthage.

After several Roman victories in North Africa, Hannibal was forced to return home. However, it was two years later that the issue was finally decided on the battlefield at Zama, five miles south of modern Tunis. Hannibal could muster 40,000 troops and 80 elephants as against Scipio’s 34,000 men, but the latter were better trained and included three times as many cavalry troops as the Carthaginians could put into the field.

The elephants were soon taken out of the account, being panicked by the blare of Roman trumpets, and the cavalry battle was decisively won by the Romans. The infantry of the two armies now faced each other, and the initial advantage went to the larger force of Hannibal’s army. However, the Roman cavalry, having chased off that of the Carthaginians, was then then able to attack the infantry from the rear, and this was the decisive move. More than 20,000 Carthaginians were killed during the battle.

Scipio was magnanimous in victory and allowed Hannibal to remain in Carthage, where he became his country’s ruler. However, the Roman Senate was later to demand that Hannibal should be punished and he was forced to flee into exile, where he eventually committed suicide.

Scipio became one of Rome’s greatest heroes and he was awarded the title Africanus. As a general, he never lost a battle during a 25-year long career.

© John Welford