A LESSON FROM ROMAN HISTORY: AN EARLIER EMPIRE’S WAR ON IRAQ
By Gary Leupp

CounterPunch, CA
Oct 4 2005

The Roman emperor Trajan reigned from 98 to 117 and brought the empire
to its maximum extent. He is generally considered to be one of the
“good emperors” who ruled from 96 to 180, and indeed his administration
was marked by relative tolerance (towards Christians, for example)
and efficiency. Among his mistakes, however, was an attack on the
Parthian Empire beginning in 115 or 116. He personally led his troops
into Mesopotamia (what we now call Iraq) capturing the capital of
Ctesiphon on the Tigris near modern Baghdad. He reached the Persian
Gulf and in Edward Gibbon’s words, “enjoyed the honour of being the
first, as he was the last, of the Roman generals, who ever navigated
that remote sea.” A man of boundless ambition, he dreamed of sailing
from there to far-off India.

Iraq was Persian (Iranian) territory then. We call its people “Arabs”
today because they speak the Arabic language, just as we call Moroccans
and Egyptians and Syrians “Arabs” for the same reason. But the original
Arabs inhabited the Arabian Peninsula and what today is the kingdom
of Jordan. Trajan had annexed the later (then called Arabia Petraea)
about 106, bringing a large Arab population into the empire for
the first time. Meanwhile he drew other Semites into the fold. By
conquering Mesopotamia, with a population of perhaps a million Jews,
he brought almost all the world’s Jews under Roman rule. (See Norman
F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, 1994).) (We
tend to assume that the Jews were all concentrated in Judea, but there
were according to Philo one million Jews in Alexandria, Egypt in the
early first century, while Josephus writing later in the same century
wrote that the Syrian cities of Antioch and Damascus had huge Jewish
populations. At the time there were at least 10,000, and perhaps as
many as 40,000 Jews in Rome itself.)

These Middle East conquests did not turn out well for Trajan. The
Mesopotamians rose up in rebellion; a nephew of the king (who had fled
beyond the Zagros Mountains) organized Parthian resistance, attacking
Roman garrisons. According to F. A. Lepper (Trajan’s Parthian War,
1948) “traders and middlemen of all kinds” opposed the invasion. Local
Jews who had been comfortable under Parthian rule constituted a key
component of the uprising. Meanwhile Jews in Roman Judea, having
revolted in 66-70, were again rebelling in what historians call the
Kitos War (115-17).

Elsewhere too Semitic monotheism attached itself to political
upheaval. In Cyrene (in what is now Libya) Jews revolted under the
leadership of a self-styled messiah, Lukuas, in 115. His forces
destroyed the Roman temples and government buildings in Cyrene,
slaughtering Greeks and Romans, and advanced on Alexandria where
they destroyed more pagan temples and the tomb of Pompey. Jews on the
island of Cyprus rebelled as well, under one Artemion. (New Testament
readers will recall reference to Jews in these far-flung locales:
Simone of Cyrene who carries Jesus’ cross, and Paul’s traveling
companion Barnabas, a Jew of Cyprus.)

Religious-based terrorism became the order of the day, if we’re to
believe the third century Greek historian Dio Cassius, who records
(no doubt with some exaggeration) that Jewish rebels killed 220,000
in Cyrene and 240,000 on Cyprus. Rome, having invaded Mesopotamia, was
unable to contain the fighting to that one front. The war exacerbated
simmering anti-Roman resentments, fanned religious fanaticism and
intolerance, and produced terror as far away as Northern Africa. But
with great effort Trajan’s forces suppressed the several Jewish
revolts, although some fighting continued about a year after the
emperor’s death. (As a result of this episode, according to Dio,
Jews were expelled from Cyprus entirely.)

Trajan had not gone in to the war intending to provoke rebellions or
terrorism. His ostensible reason was to punish Parthia for political
interference in the kingdom of Armenia, which Rome considered part
of its sphere of influence. But Dio Cassius called this a “pretext”
and declared that Trajan simply wanted “to win renown.” Julian Bennett
in his recent biography of Trajan agrees with this assessment (Trajan,
Optimus Princeps: A Life and Times, 1997).

In 117 the proud emperor wisely elected to withdraw from Mesopotamia,
and died in retreat in Cilicia. His adopted son and successor,
Hadrian, returned Mesopotamia to Parthia the following year. “Thus
it was,” wrote Dio, “that the Romans, in conquering Armenia, most
of Mesopotamia, and the Parthians, had undergone severe hardships
and dangers for naught.” But as historian B. W. Henderson put it,
“it was very wise to abandon what could not be kept.” Mesopotamia
resumed its former status as a prosperous part of Persia. The citizens
of Rome didn’t suffer from the loss of a couple of briefly-held
eastern provinces, or the revival of Parthian power up until that
empire’s fall over a century later. Nor did it suffer when Hadrian,
on the island of Britain at the other end of the empire, elected to
build his famous barrier between Rome and “barbarian” Celtic tribes.

Hadrian’s Wall, marking the boundary of Roman Britain, denoted the
realistic recognition of the limits of imperial power.

* * *

Ibn Khaldun, that fine fourteenth century North African Arab Muslim
scholar, one of the greatest historical thinkers of all time,
cautioned against judging “by comparison and by analogy.” Many, he
observed, “draw analogies between the events of the past and those
that take place around them, judging the past by what they know of
the present. Yet the difference between the two periods may be great,
thus leading to gross error.”

Point well taken. I draw no analogies here. The current empire is
mired in Iraq, drawn there by an emperor using a pretext to win
renown, producing by his invasion widespread outrage conditioned by
religious fanaticism. The empire’s troops face what the Romans faced in
Mesopotamia—in Gibbon’s words, the legionnaires were “fainting with
heat and thirst, could neither hope for victory if they preserved their
ranks, nor break their ranks without exposing themselves to the most
immanent danger. In this situation they were gradually encompassed
by the encompassing numbers, harassed by the rapid evolutions, and
destroyed by the arrows of the barbarian cavalry. ”

Yes, there are parallels. But if America is comparable to Rome,
George Bush is surely no Trajan, and to draw an analogy between the
two would indeed produce gross error.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct
Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants,
Shophands and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors:
The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is
also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars
on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.