Master and God

13

In Sarmizegetusa the balance of power shifted.

In where?

Sarmizegetusa Regia, the royal citadel of the Dacians, lay four thousand feet up in the Carpathian Mountains, the hub of a string of powerful fortresses from which Dacia would wage war upon the Romans and their emperors for the next thirty years. The very fact that the name of their citadel was a tongue-twisting hexasyllable indicated the Dacians’ attitude to the outside world. They were a warrior people. They did not give a toss.

Sarmizegetusa had a military purpose but was also a political and religious centre of greater sophistication than enemies might suppose. Its people, who mined for gold, silver, iron and salt, had long been wealthy and had a very high standard of living. On a daunting approach road, which climbed steeply through leaf-littered woods where exquisitely cold mountain streams rattled over pebbles, no milestones signed the citadel. Sarmizegetusa was too long to carve on a stone. If you had a right to go there, you would know where it was. If not, then keep out.

The heartland of Dacia was a remote area that would one day be called Transylvania, almost entirely surrounded by the crescent of the forbidding Carpathians. This heart-stirring enclave was a mix of striking crags, rolling meadows, delightful forests, fast rivers and scenic plains. There were alluring volcanic lakes, wild bogs and mysterious caves. Wildlife teemed in bounding abundance, with every kind of creature from bears, boars, lynxes and wolves, various deer and chamois. Fish filled the brooks, lakes and rivers. Fabulous butterflies roamed over hay meadows. Wild flowers crowded everywhere. Eagles slowly soared above. Nobody gave a second thought to the odd vampire bat.

A few forbidding routes led in from the exterior over high, well-guarded mountain passes. It was hostile terrain, especially in winter, when all strategists agreed that approaches should be tackled only in dire necessity, or for a very dubious advantage of surprise. A winter invasion would certainly be a surprise — because it would be madness.

In the interior were impregnable hilltop fortresses, plus an old royal city and others no one else had ever heard of, of which the capital was the most magnificent. Any Dacian might well believe that all roads led to Sarmizegetusa. Though not snappy in any language, it had a certain portentous quality, whereas ‘all roads lead to Rome’ can sound by comparison like a line in a comedy musical.

At Sarmizegetusa, the four-sided fortress crowning the hill was guarded by massive masonry, enormous blocks that were known as Dacian Walls, with monumental gates. As a military building it was equal to any Greek acropolis, on a scale with the Cyclopian Walls of ancient Mycenae, though a Dacian engineer would claim they had better setting-out and better-dressed masonry. Dacian Walls were tremendous structures, with a double skin of stonework that was bonded with timbers and a hard-packed earth and rubble core. Outside the fortress, civilian areas occupied a hundred or so great man-made terraces to east and west. Their buildings were sophisticated, often polygonal or circular, created with great precision. There were domestic compounds, workshops, stores and warehouses. Water was pumped through a sophisticated system, with ceramic pipes feeding the homes of the well-born. The citadel had all the accoutrements of a thriving population who benefited from a rich economy.

The ancient Dacian language was spoken all over central Europe, used commercially and politically by many other tribes. Dacians were masters of ethics, philosophy and science, including physics and astronomy; they toyed with Egyptian divination; they had contact with Greeks. With their spirits lifted by their beautiful country — and boosted by their enormous wealth — the Dacians were famously religious. At Sarmizegetusa they had created a sanctuary where a great sun disc showed their mastery of their own solar calendar while a combined stone- and wood-henge allowed them to honour the winter solstice, winters there being bone-hard. Long, dark nights of yearning for the sun’s renewal gave them, like all northern people, morose tendencies.

They lived at the crossroads of central Europe. Their choice, therefore, was either to be downtrodden by everyone who passed through, or fight them. They took the latter course. Dacians had no reputation for diffidence.

From the Roman point of view, Dacia had been quiescent for a hundred years after a king called Burebista was quashed by the Emperor Augustus. For the Dacians, Burebista was never quashed and would remain a mythical ideal. He was killed off by jealous aristocrats of his own nation, a local difficulty which was a mere kink in history. For them, it had no bearing on Dacia’s potential as a world power.

One of King Burebista’s measures, it was said, was to uproot Dacian vineyards and persuade his warriors to stop drinking the robust red wines of their homeland. These wines may provide a clue to why Dacian pre-eminence had been slow in coming. And why, after the vines were replanted, Dacian fortunes slumped again for a long time.

Under King Burebista, Dacian territorial influence had extended to its widest, from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, and from the Balkans to Bohemia, always with Transylvania as its political core. Burebista had consolidated the Dacian tribes including the influential Getae, or Goths, who had made their mark in the past and would do so again. However, he made the mistake of siding with Pompey against Julius Caesar. This alienated not just Caesar but his gut-wrenchingly ambitious young successor, Augustus, who invaded Dacia intent on diminishing its status. Before he arrived, however, Burebista was killed. The coalition disintegrated into ineffective warring factions. For a century afterwards, Dacians held a truce with Rome, which meant they took any money Rome offered and in return were thoroughly unreliable allies.

Assassinating their leader was an error, yet one from which it was possible to learn. In the opinion of the Dacian who would become known as Decebalus, quiescence to Rome had endured long enough. This man began establishing himself around the time of the Roman Flavians. There was absolutely no question that he was persuasive and intelligent. Like many heroes he must have been aware of his own potential from an early age, taking up the burden of becoming great, always a lonely destiny but much better than no destiny at all.

He was a commanding figure. Thickset and jowly, he wore traditional Dacian costume which, unlike Mediterranean dress, was designed for warmth: full-length woollen trousers gathered in at the ankle, a long, long-sleeved tunic, a short cloak with fringed or furred edges, caught on one shoulder with a massive brooch. His romping curls were topped with a cap, its long peak turned over to provide an extra insulating air pocket. Unlike the Emperor Domitian, Decebalus had no problem with middle-aged baldness and also boasted a rampant curly beard. Totemic carvings of him, hewn from bedrock on Dacian approach roads, showed a heavily pugnacious face.

The Romans were so indifferent to anyone they called a barbarian, they were unclear whether this man’s name was Duras, or Diurpaneus, or whether the original Diurpaneus was the same person as the later Decebalus, or was a king who abdicated his leadership to Decebalus because he was the better warrior. Diurpaneus/Decebalus did not care what the Romans called him; he knew who he was.

He knew a lot about Rome too. He listened; he talked to those passing through; he observed. He knew as much about what the Romans were doing on the Rhine and the Danube as they did, more than most citizens of their empire, whose ill-informed commentators saw him as a shadowy forest-dweller, whose nation existed solely to be overrun by Rome.

He nursed another dream. Other than the fact ‘Roman Empire’ was easier to enunciate, there was no reason why Europe should be rich pickings for fish-eating, olive-oily, beardless, bare-legged southerners, most of whom could not ride a horse. As he planned to combine the Dacians into one force (no easy task) it seemed feasible that under decent leadership (his, for instance), a ‘Sarmizegetusan Empire’ should arise instead, of equal significance to anything Roman, though admittedly a tad trickier to say.

For over ten years, Diurpaneus had watched the strategic adjustments on what the Romans thought was their frontier. They held the west, temporarily perhaps, but in central Europe the geography was dominated by two enormous rivers. The Rhine ran north-south through Germany. Its eastern forests were sparsely populated and comparatively peaceful. The Danube, an even longer watercourse, started north of the Alps, not twenty miles from the Rhine in Raetia, which left a narrow corridor through which migrating peoples could emerge on a millennial east-to-west cycle without getting their feet wet. The Danube ran east across Raetia and Noricum, before it plunged almost directly south into the heart of Pannonia, increasing in power, then heading east again across the top of Moesia until its many branches poured their waters through a mesh of channels into the Black Sea. For Rome, that was the end of the world. A place to exile poets. A fate far worse than death.

It was generally accepted that the Romans must accept these rivers as natural limits. Beyond, lay enormous tracts of territory with no other patrollable boundaries, lands which would be impossible to conquer, or if conquered impossible to hold, with no viable reason to do so. The Danube was for much of its length difficult to cross, so except when it froze — which was regular and historically known to be dangerous — this frontier could be controlled.

Along the Rhine and Danube the Romans had established themselves, abutting nose to nose the fractious tribes who lived beyond. Diurpaneus was aware that first Vespasian and now his son Domitian saw the position as dangerous. Whether the barbarian tribes were in search of new territory themselves, whether they were being pushed in the rear by other land-hungry peoples from deeper in Europe, or whether they just came for a fight because that was what they liked, the Romans needed to strengthen their frontier. Vespasian, Domitian and their eventual successors followed a consistent policy of tightening their grip. Domitian’s crushing of the Chatti, therefore, was much more significant than it seemed to his critics in Rome, who accused him of over-ambition and wanting a fake triumph. Dacia took it seriously.

First, the Chatti were a major military power. As warriors, they claimed respect. They were powerful and daunting. Males were trained to kill, and were expected to do so before they counted as full members of their tribe. Their strongholds were stone-built and almost impossible to access. Even the Romans said that where other tribes merely fought battles, the Chatti waged war. They elected officers and even obeyed them. On campaign, they carried tools as well as weapons and made proper camps at night, just like the Romans. Every day they planned their strategy and worked out a timetable, a system which to other tribes seemed unnecessarily organised. It worked. Domitian’s campaign against them had been hard-fought and bitter; the tussle was still ongoing in the forests of unconquered Germany even two years after his official triumph.

The fact that Domitian had named himself ‘Germanicus’ after he dealt with the Chatti showed he understood the crucial importance of his victory. By annexing their territory, he had cut off an awkward acute angle in the enormous Roman frontier, reducing by many miles the length that needed guarding. He had penned the belligerent Chatti into their strongholds, safeguarding trade routes — including the Baltic amber route — with his new frontier. There, he was constructing a regular series of wooden watchtowers that guarded a military road. Rumours rippled around that an earthwork or at least a palisade was being planned for the whole length. The new frontier would be Domitian’s enduring legacy, enabling Roman oversight of the German tribes for the next two centuries.

Logically, as Diurpaneus recognised, Domitian must be coming for Dacia. Although he had not yet changed the number of legions, which remained as they had been since Nero’s day, those in Moesia which lay immediately opposite Dacia were being beefed up by units drawn from his British and German auxiliaries. So far, there were two legions in Pannonia, one in Dalmatia and three in Moesia, which was not much for such an extended frontier, but both Vespasian and Domitian had steadily reinforced the river defences. They had quietly built new forts. They had established extra bases for the Pannonian and Moesian fleets which patrolled the Lower Danube.

As Diurpaneus of the Dacians weighed up the fine tuning opposite, he knew that Domitian’s arrival on the Danube must be only a matter of time. He was a comparatively young emperor, son and brother of famous generals, who wanted to make his own name. Diurpaneus could sit and wait for it to happen — or he could strike first.

He struck — and he struck hard.

There had been a long history of hit-and-run raids across the river, but this was different. Newly bonded under Diurpaneus, the Dacians came snarling across near Novae. It was an ancient Thracian settlement at an important strategic position in Moesia, dominating a road junction on the south bank and controlling one of the easier Danube crossings. Although the soldiers in the line of Roman forts had been staring north for years in anticipation of exactly this, they were taken completely by surprise. Scads of Dacians attacked and overran the province. They laid waste the riverbank. Penetrating far to the south, they destroyed towns and fortifications. There was great loss of life. A wide area collapsed in chaos. Then the Dacians did not simply plunder and retreat; despite the inevitability of Roman reprisals, they dug in and stayed.

The Dacian weapon of choice was a long sword with its end curved like a harvest sickle, which the Romans called a falx. Opposing strategists claimed it was cumbersome, and useless against shields, but Dacian warriors knew how to handle it. At close quarters it served efficiently for disembowelling. It was very sharp and could be used in other ways. When Diurpaneus and his rampaging Dacians captured the Roman governor, Oppius Sabinus, he was killed by decapitation.

It took a month for the news to reach Rome.