Rome's Reluctant Killer

Marcus Aurelius may not have sought war, but when it came he was more than ready. Shushma Malik reveals how a man of peace became one of Rome’s greatest warrior-emperors

-  Shushma Malik

It was the campaign season of AD 172, and one of Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s legions found itself staring into the face of disaster. After a series of hard-fought battles along the Roman empire’s north-eastern borders, the Roman soldiers found themselves holed up in enemy territory surrounded by a hostile group known as the Quadi. The legion put up a good fight but it had a problem: a chronic lack of water. The Quadi were confident that, if they kept the enemy enclosed, thirst would soon overcome them. And the Quadi’s confidence appeared to be justified.

The sun beat down unrelentingly. Water began to run out. “The Romans,” Cassius Dio tells us, “were in a terrible plight from fatigue, wounds, the heat of the sun, and thirst, and so could neither fight nor retreat.”

But then something remarkable happened: as if by some divine intervention, a storm broke over the beleaguered legion. Soon, so much rain was tumbling from the skies that the Roman soldiers were able to fill their shields and helmets with water and quench their horses’ thirst.

As for the Quadi, they were assailed by a barrage of hailstones, lightning and thunderbolts. Such was the assault from the heavens on their ranks that some of the Quadi abandoned their own side and went over to join the Romans. The threat to Marcus Aurelius’s trapped legion was averted.

But who or what was responsible for the “rain miracle”, as this dramatic episode in Marcus Aurelius’s 19-year reign as Roman emperor is now known? Cassius Dio says it can be accounted for by the invocations of Arnuphis, an Egyptian magician who had caused Mercury (the god of the air) to send rain to the legion’s aid. Other sources disagree. But whatever the veracity of Dio’s claim, the “rain miracle” offers us a fascinating window into the remarkable life of Marcus Aurelius.