latrones - Get a Free Blog

BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Alföldy, no unrest connected with Maternus. 155 A revolt confined to Upper
Germany can scarcely be seen as the expression of a protest movement across
Gaul and even beyond.
Meanwhile, archaeological finds have continued to stimulate discussion.
As early as 1956, S. Szádeczky-Kardoss, on the basis of coin hoards, pointed
to destruction at Juliobona, at the mouth of the Seine, previously dated to
the reign of Marcus Aurelius, as an indication of the Bellum Desertorum. 156 In
1982, G. Mangard published his reconstruction of the building inscription
of a temple in Bois l’Abbé (Eu, Haute-Normandie), probably constructed
during the Severan period. The dedicator, L. Cerialius Rectus, cites in the
enumeration of his municipal positions that of ‘officer in charge of controlling
banditry’ ( pra[efectus latro]cinio [arcendo]). 157 Contrary to what Mangard
proposes, this post has nothing in particular to do with Maternus. It describes
those local Gallic officials charged as a matter of course to act against
latrones. This has already been seen in Chapter 1. 158 Mangard further points
to a remarkable concentration of regional coin hoards dating to late in
Commodus’ reign. 159 Independent of this, on the basis of an accumulation
of archaeological evidence for serious damage in the territory of the Pictones
(south of the Loire mouth, modern Poitou), G. Ch. Picard was able to
identify a destruction horizon stratigraphically dated to the period spanning
Marcus Aurelius’ Marcommanic wars and the reign of Commodus. 160 Among
other sites, the civitas-capital, Limonum (Poitiers), had suffered harm so
severe as to be explicable only as the result of war. North of the mouth of
the Loire, and so north of Pictonian territory, comes Aremorica, which
then runs along the Channel coast to the mouth of the Seine, and includes
Juliobona. Into association with the destruction sites among the Pictones G.
Ch. Picard brings possible contemporary military activity action in Aremorica,
as evidenced by the funerary inscription of a certain L. Artorius Castus. 161
An officer who had proved himself in a number of postings, in his personal
account of his own achievements he made much of the fact that he had led
two British legions together with auxiliaries ‘against the Aremoricans’. 162
On the basis of chronological indicators in the history of the Roman army in
Britain, Castus’ command is dated after 181.
Given the close chronological and geographical proximity of the unrest in
Aremorica and Maternus’ rebellion, A.R. Birley had, indeed, before Picard,
already suggested a connection between the two. 163 Picard adopts this
approach, and links all locations designated as having thrown up evidence
typical of military activity – such as destruction, coin hoards and inscriptions
– to form a theatre of war in which a single integrated conflict might
have taken place: the revolt of Maternus.
In the current state of our knowledge we can, therefore, make out a
number of different centres of military unrest in Gaul and the Germanies of
the early 180s – in Upper Germany, and north-western and western Gaul. If
all the evidence is connected to Maternus, the geographical and chronological
130