2 - Before Constantine

Summary

When Apharban, envoy from the Persian king Narseh, came before the Caesar Galerius Maximianus to beg favourable terms for his defeated sovereign, his rhetoric met an angry rejoinder from the Caesar:

You observed the rule of victory towards Valerian in a fine way, you who deceived him through stratagems and took him, and did not release him until his extreme old age and dishonourable death. Then after his death, by some loathe-some art you preserved his skin and brought an immortal outrage to the mortal body.

Thus, at his moment of triumph, the Caesar referred back to one of the darkest episodes of recent imperial history. In ad 260, between Carrhae and Edessa, Narseh’s father, Shapur I, had decisively defeated a Roman army and captured the emperor Valerian (see Map 2). He recorded these deeds for posterity in both words and images at Naqsh-i Rustam and on the Ka^cba-i Zardušt near the ancient Achaemenid capital of Persepolis, preserving for us a vivid image of two Roman emperors, one kneeling (probably Philip the Arab, also defeated by Shapur) and the second (Valerian), uncrowned and held captive at the wrist by a gloriously mounted Persian king (Fig. 6). The equally decisive victory of Galerius over Narseh in 297 marked a dramatic reversal of fortune and can indeed stand as symbolic of how the rulers of the first Tetrarchy and their immediate predecessors had managed to regain firm military and political control over the empire.