Centurion

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The ruins of Palmyra still stand in the eastern desert of Syria and are well worth a visit. Much of what remains provides evidence of the main developments of the city across the centuries since its founding. The high water mark of Palmyra's history comes some two hundred years after this tale when the warrior queen, Zenobia, briefly threatened to overrun the eastern half of the Roman Empire. That is an epic tale in itself (and one I might well turn to at a later date!). I have taken a few liberties with the layout of the city as it would have been in the mid-first century. A vast temple was built over where the citadel of this book would have been, and I have largely followed the lines of the later walls.

The kingdom of Palmyra occupied a critical position between two powerful empires who were separated by desert. Rome and Parthia had long been engaged in a protracted cold war that had, on occasion, flared up into open warfare. Rarely had these conflicts been resolved in Rome's favour. General Crassus, at the head of a mighty army, had been annihilated at Carrhae in the first century BC, and Mark Antony failed in a disastrous campaign a few years before he was crushed by his political rival Octavian (the future Augustus).

Ultimately Palmyra was annexed and brought into the Roman province of Syria around the time this novel is set.

The typical means by which this was achieved was through a treaty conferring client kingdom status on the small kingdoms that surrounded the Roman Empire. In exchange for Roman protection, the autonomy of the kings who signed these treaties was gradually eroded until their lands were absorbed into the Empire.

The key difficulty faced by Roman armies was the highly mobile nature of the Parthian army, which was made up of mounted missile troops and a small force of heavy shock cavalry. The Romans had great difficulty in finding a way to pin the enemy down long enough for the legions to close on them. An early case of asymmetrical warfare, one might argue.The only way to force the Parthians into a full-on battle would have been to choose a confined ground over which the armies must clash. The trick of it would be to lure the Parthians in, since they would be very wary of closing with the Romans unless the prospect of victory was imminent. In other words, something very much along the lines of the plan conceived by the acting prefect of the Second Illyrian.