This is an AAR which will follow several scattered units and their commanders as they are slowly drawn into the Persian invasion launched by the Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus around 366 AD.
The mod is Imperium Julianorum v3 found here
I will be playing H/H and will adhere to the following rules:
I will never autoresolve.
I will be playing 4 tpy.
I will only re-play if and when the result fatally compromises the AAR and then only for no more than 3 attempts. The third attempt will always stand for the will of the gods.
I will play character traits as best I can given the overall strategic aims.
As everyone knows (!), Julians' attempt to invade the Sassanian lands ended in tragedy but now this mods allows another attempt and hopefully will see a reborn pagan Roman Empire emerge instead!
The background to the enduring conflicts between Rome and Persia may be read here as this will give you, my esteemed reader, some grounding into why two ancient superpowers remained locked in conflict for so long.
But first, let us meet an author who's work we remain indebted to:
The End Of The Line
By
Prof. Edward Charlton
Introduced by Escher and Holbein
Over the last twenty years or so, the rise of the social history of war has now become firmly entrenched in historical and archaeological circles. Ground-breaking works such as Carlton’s Going To The Wars and Marshall’s seminal Men Against Fire have allowed a whole host of other works to entrench themselves in academic circles to the extent now that it is almost impossible to conceive of studying war without taking into account the experiences of the men on the ground. In a field where such voices remain recorded long after the conflict is over, it is relatively easy to amass and study the diaries and reports from these soldiers and low ranking officers and place them against the strategical views of the politicians and generals who dictated the war and the battles. However, in more distant eras such voices are at best provisional or at worst absent and much of the research is therefore circumstantial or imagined. Prof. Charlton’s work however, while painstaking and lengthy, goes some way to redress this issue and it is with pleasure that we here cite in full his ground-breaking study on the impact of battle on the soldiers and officers of the later Roman army – in this case, troops from the Eastern provinces during the Sassanian Wars under the reign of Flavius Claudius Julianus.
His paper – introduced last year at the Vienna Dominate Conference 2008 – rightly caused a stir and has now seen a swell of social historians brave distant waters to unearth and record the ‘little voices’ of war in the Roman period. Prof. Charlton spent the better part of twenty years in Iraq, Iran and the Kurdish highlands, often in very dangerous circumstances, involved in archaeological digs and also archival work at the Antioch UNESCO Site, once the administrative capital of the diocese of the Oriens. Charlton had amassed some forty five documents and inscriptions (many previously unseen) relating to army units deployed in and around the East during the years 366 AD onwards, when the fighting was most bitter. These range from papyrus fragments, epistles, inscriptions to faded-out graffiti. What emerged was a startlingly detailed account of some of the units stationed in the East of the Roman Empire and their fate in the face of the Sassanian Wars of Shapur, the Shahanshah of the Persian Empire. The stir such a paper caused is justly famous and it is with some pride that we publish now for the first time his paper in full.
Introduction
Corbulo, Praefectus, drills his men like a lazy Aegyptian eunuch.
I still remember over twenty years ago stumbling over that graffito in rough vulgar Latin. It was inscribed on a pottery shard unearthed from Dig No 17a at the Antioch UNESCO site back in a hazy Summer. It was one of a number of pottery shards which had been recycled as writing surfaces and probably circulated among the low-level tenements which serviced off-duty soldiers and adventurers in this decadent and volatile region of the Roman Empire. The terse humour captivated me and without realising propelled me on a life-long quest to track and record these ‘little voices’ which History in its grand epic often ignores. And so I fell away from Tacitus and Ammianus and Procopius and took up residence with a hundred other names all minor and insignificant and found in their rough humour and laconic comments another Rome, a darker and less civilised Rome, which paradoxically seemed much closer to our own world now with its cynical mores and lax moral attitudes. These were real men (and women – yes, the reader may be surprised to read later) who did not act out the fine passions of Homer or Virgil; or embody the upright ethics of Cicero or Marcus Aurelius – but instead lived a rough-and-tumbled world where everyday concerns revolved around pay, equipment, loved ones, relatives and the petty laws of discipline and taxes. These were names which bore Syrian, Persian, Greek, Coptic and Saracen antecedents and where Latin remained an imposed language, steeped in officialdom and legalese.
To say, I was drawn into this world would be an understatement. Little did I realise, as I embarked on that research project twenty years ago, just how many stories were to emerge in this underbelly of Roman history but in time I came to know these names better than some of my own colleagues here in the University of Glasgow.
And as for Corbulo, that lazy officer, whose graffito started me off so many years ago, I will only say now that had those words been the only testament to his remote character then History herself would have bowed her head in shame . . .