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POLITICIANS AND PRETENDERS AS LATRONES
When pursued unremittingly by Roman forces, Lydius did not yet feel ready
for open battle and so, with his ‘band’ (stiphos), sought refuge in Cremna
in Pisidia. 121 With its lofty position and surrounding gorges the city offered
good protection from attack. The Roman troops who encircled Cremna made
hard going of taking the city. Lydius had carefully organised the supply of
foodstuffs and methodically reduced the number of its inhabitants. People
who were of no use in its defence were expelled. Though the besiegers
forced them all back, Lydius rid himself of them by having them thrown
into the ravine that surrounded Cremna. 122 A tunnel dug secretly underneath
the siege ring secured the provisioning of the besieged for a long time.
This was eventually betrayed to the besiegers. 123 Thereupon the situation
deteriorated; but Lydius remained unflustered. He let people perish by
directing food only to essential personnel such as the defenders on the walls,
and the women whom he had made available to them to satisfy their sexual
demands. 124
This is the first part of this legendary tale. Which goals Lydius ‘the
bandit’ pursued and to what class of latrones he should be assigned are difficult
to determine from the evidence we have. At first sight he looks like a
common bandit without political aims – at least, that is, so long as he was
left alone by the Roman security forces. He made himself ruler of Cremna
only under pressure from his pursuers: the city was at once his hostage and
his sanctuary. That he was able to take a city and organise its successful
defence gives an idea of the size of his ‘band’, which must have been something
like a proper army. All this contradicts the idea that Lydius was just
a run-of-the-mill bandit.
To be involved in a siege was an exceptional happening, in the course of
which Lydius showed himself an intelligent strategist by directing all his
decisions uncompromisingly, irrespective of all human suffering, towards
the single goal of survival. On the other hand, to judge from his heartless
destruction of non-combatants, his cynical use of women and the final outcome
of events, Lydius seems to have pursued a reign of out-and-out terror
in Cremna. Yet this could also be part of the myth designed to show that
the ‘Crisis’ provoked a return of the anarchy experienced under the late
Seleucids in parts of Asia Minor that were anyway difficult to police.
The fate of Lydius, the supposed bandit chief who, through the operation
of forces beyond his control, became a city tyrant, was sealed by a dispute
with one of his comrades-in-arms. This represents a further variant on the
theme of the invincible bandit, vulnerable only to treachery. In this case
the betrayer was a highly skilled weapon maker who had expertise in both
the production and deadly deployment of catapults. 125 (This very detail, it
should be noted, confirms that Lydius was no ordinary robber, but a local
man of power, in command of an army.) One day this expert missed a target,
and this led to a quarrel with Lydius who had him flogged and threatened
to kill him. 126 Zosimus says that the catapult man could have missed on
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