Lost Legion Rediscovered

The Mystery of the Theban Legion

Donald O'Reilly

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526779908
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

In AD383, according to Bishop Eucherius of Lyon, flooding caused part of the bank of the River Rhone to collapse, revealing a massed grave of thousands of bodies. Eucherius identified these as a legion recruited for the Roman army from the Christians of the Theban district in Egypt, whom he claimed had been massacred nearly a century previously (near the modern village of St Maurice-en-Valais in southwestern Switzerland) for refusing to obey orders they considered immoral. This incident, asserted by Eucherius as matter of fact, is unrecorded elsewhere. Even the existence of this Theban legion is unclear.

Chapter 1

Eavesdropping Yields a Clue

When there are too many coincidences, that aint no coincidence.

Yogi Berra

History too often is the propaganda of icons of power. How can we ever know the thoughts of ordinary people, the unsung stuff of human nature, lives long forgotten? One way is to read their personal letters.

The first clue that the Theban Legion was a reality emerged in scanning translations of papyri in Greek, unearthed in Egypt by village boys hired by an archaeologist to scour an ancient rubbish dump.1 His primary motive at the time was to keep them from mischief at his archaeological diggings. These papyri were found at Oxyrynchus, once the Roman headquarters of Egypt’s Thebaid district. They were direct sampling of everyday concerns to be placed against the official version of things by censored Roman historians. To read them was to eavesdrop across centuries.

Bills of payment to a mouse-catcher, a reward offered for a runaway slave, shopping lists, loans usually at 12 to 15 per cent interest, marriage contracts threatening loss of the dowry if the bride is mistreated – the papyri weave the tapestry of existence on the Roman Nile.

Questions to a fortune teller ask, ‘Am I being poisoned?’ ‘Will I get a furlough?’ ‘Should I agree to the contract?’ ‘Will I be sold?’ ‘Am I to become a beggar?’

A husband writes to his absent wife that he mourns for her ‘weeping by night and lamenting by day’. Spouses usually addressed one another as ‘my master’ or ‘mistress’, ‘lord’ or ‘lady’, or more typically, ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. Along the Nile, to keep land legally in the family it was not unusual for men to marry their sisters. A wife urges her voyaging husband to return, pleading that a neighbour ‘has made a prostitute of me’. A husband on a trip instructs his pregnant wife to abandon her expected infant if a girl. ‘How can I forget thee?’ he adds.

Another revelation is the apprentice papers for a boy whose mother is not yet of legal adult age. A schoolboy’s note tells his father that he has an excellent teacher who has stopped instructing him because he is unpaid. There is no doubt who suggested the letter. Wills dividing slaves among heirs are commonplace. Almost all slaves in Egypt were household servants.

A young woman visiting Syria says that her mother has died on the journey. ‘I am an orphan alone in a strange land.’ She begs her kin to come to her. Presumably, as a woman she feared to return alone.

Greek was the international language of the East, where it was used routinely by the Roman army. The papyri were usually dictated to a scribe who wrote for a fee.

The importance of the army in Egypt is manifest in the papyri. A civilian intercedes with an officer to be lenient to a soldier who has been AWOL, promising not to intercede again. There are many complaints to officers against their men. The moonlit shearing of sheep to sell the wool, unpaid pub bills and loitering outside the women’s public baths are parts of the picture. That the writers expect justice and do not fear to put their names to charges on paper posits that justice was possible.

Only a military court could judge a Roman soldier.2 In the more than sixty army posts in Egypt, isolation and efficiency gave army officers the status of civilian judges. The army at least had discipline and a clear chain of command. Civil officials too often were like one whom a papyrus letter warns of making the rounds and likely to drink the village dry.

The Roman emperor owned virtually all land in Egypt. The land was rented at reasonable rates as innumerable small farms, in sharp contrast to the plantations leased in huge sections elsewhere in the Empire. Many soldiers in Egypt rented farms by deduction from their pay. They shared peasant interests and attitudes, and had a loyalty to those dependent upon them, unlike soldiers in some provinces – a thuggish race apart, dreaded more than the barbarians. While the majority of the population were Copts, speaking the language of the pharaohs before them, Greeks dominated the economy. The Greeks had conquered all the Middle East five centuries earlier, but their practice of infanticide (especially of females), a practice Egyptian morality rejected, undermined their numbers and political rule.3

Forbidden to travel to any other province, the city and seaport of Alexandria legally a separate province, frustrated by hard labour, poverty, monotony and often incestuous village relationships, and smouldering under oppressions against which they were powerless, the Copts could erupt in terrible violence. Exiled to Egypt, the satirist Juvenal related that on one occasion two villages warred in a feud provoked by the killing of a sacred crocodile, a patron deity. A man was supposedly murdered and cannibalized as a result.4

The Greeks, in order to unify the region, had invented a new deity, Serapis, the father of the gods, a belief tending towards monotheism.5 Local temples with their tax and rental revenues were incorporated into the governmental cult. The creed of Serapis was deliberately kept free of myth or doctrine, like that of Jupiter-Highest-and-Best. The temples provided schooling and other social services at a moderate cost. An official religion emphasizing harmony with the state, the worship of Serapis was, nevertheless, genuinely popular, unlike the imperial cult of the Roman gods.

Christianity was expanding rapidly. Serapis tended to be viewed as identical with God the Father. The oldest known fragment of a gospel is Rylands Papyrus 457, dating from about the year 130, found in the Fayoum, west of the Nile delta. By the late third century there were seventy-two communities with bishops in Egypt. The word Copt presently refers to Egypt’s Christian minority.

The troops in Egypt were in ancestry from the rest of the Empire, although intermarriage with Copts was usual. One legion, II Traiana, guarded the Nile.6 The unnumbered Legio Julia Alexandriana was stationed in Alexandria. The other half of the garrisons comprised auxiliary cohorts or cavalry in five hundred or one thousand men complements. In Bar Kochba’s revolt, a legion of Greco- Copts, the III Deotariana, had been annihilated. Egyptian troops sent to Armenia in 195 had mutinied.7 Thereafter, few soldiers from Egypt served anywhere beyond the Nile Valley.

The Empire was faced with a dwindling pool of army recruits. The population was falling, with the class of free citizens dwindling even more rapidly, and fewer willing to volunteer. Slaves, criminals, gladiators, welfarerecipients and serfs were ineligible, considered incapable of good discipline.

Egyptians under Roman rule paid exorbitant taxes, chiefly in grains for export. Farm hands could be temporarily drafted to work on state land. The citizens of towns were exempt from many of these duties, but required to take turns as tax collectors. Collateral for the collection assessment was their confiscated property.8 As the ruling class dwindled, the burden upon it crushingly increased,9 motivating many to flee their districts.10

An edict of Caracalla (r. 211–217) in response11 had expanded the number of citizens12 obliged to do liturgy by granting citizenship to the Greek peregrini, 13 legally resident aliens, dominating most towns.

The overwhelming majority of the populace, the Copts, remained dediticii,14 legally prisoners of war, bound to the land with few rights. Most were illiterate and spoke only Coptic.

The papyri reveal widespread abandonment of farms and villages. Plague, revolts and desertion reduced numbers. Reduction of land tax assessments did not keep pace with the lowered crop yields that resulted from neglect of the irrigation system. Emperor Probus, in reaction, put the army to work dredging badly silted irrigation canals.15

The dwindling population of the Thebaid had incurred invasion by its barbarian neighbours, the Blemmyes, the bronzed ancestors of the Beja and Somali.16 Aided by disaffected townspeople, they overran much of the upper Nile Valley until Probus’ forces restored Roman rule.17

Worsening the Thebaid’s vulnerability, its southern frontier south of Syene had been virtually abandoned for a generation. Archaeology reveals its forts to be unoccupied in the period.18 Encroaching cliffs narrowed the arable lands of the region, which yielded little in taxation.

It was recognized that only a transformation in policy could prevent further invasions. The Nobatae, a negro people that in earlier ages were called Medjay, from Kharga Oasis, some 150 miles due west of Thebes, were invited to resettle in the region.19 Medjay, originally, was the name of a tribe, but having provided soldiers, police and guards for the pharaohs for long ages, the word came to mean ‘a soldier’. The Kharga depression extended for a hundred miles, its water table creating many habitable areas. Paid subsidies by Rome, the Nobatae were neither dediticii nor citizens. Presumably, they were gentili, tribes friendly to Rome that were brought into the Empire and as recruits promoted to peregrini, a status according with facts to be noted later in the Theban Legion’s story.

Young Nobatae and people from other oases west of the Nile Valley provided a new source of manpower for the depleted army. They proved to be reliable allies for almost a century. Their non-Roman tribal origins explains the black African predominance in the tradition of the Legion. Only citizens were allowed in the legions.20 Peregrini, however, could join the grain fleet, Legio Julia Alexandrina.21 The Theban Legion was perhaps intended not as an infantry, but a fleet marine unit.

The present research into the Theban Legion began in browsing through the Oxyrynchus papyri. Perusing the papyri, one in particular caught attention. It was dated about the time the Theban Legion, if it existed, must have left Egypt. It was a receipt penned by a scribe at Panopolis (Akhmim) for bread delivered to the army as shipping-out rations. The requisition dates 13 January 282 and the receipt, dated 21 May 284, states: ‘…delivered at Panopolis in obedience to the order of his excellency … to the mobilized soldiers and sailors thirty-eight thousand four hundred and ninety-six modii of bread, total 38,496.’22 Sixty modii, approximately thirty bushels, was the yearly Roman grain ration for a soldier.23 For a person relying on no other food, a pound and a half of grain a day is ample ration. A Roman soldier’s daily ration was some 3,000 calories.

This, therefore, was an order for some 240,000 daily rations. Bread and hard biscuit, usually of barley, was only disbursed to soldiers going overseas or actively campaigning. The receipt was for enough rations for some 6,000 men, to last a month or more.

Egyptians paid their taxes not in the tetradrachms of the Ale...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Eavesdropping Yields a Clue
• Chapter 2 What is in a Nickname?
• Chapter 3 The New Testament Tradition
• Chapter 4 Civilization’s Collapse and Recovery
• Chapter 5 An Error of War
• Chapter 6 Law, Order and Compassion
• Chapter 7 The Church as New Creation
• Chapter 8 Find Oneself in Jerusalem
• Chapter 9 From an Imperial Perspective
• Chapter 10 A Dream for Betterment
• Chapter 11 Recall and Recruitment
• Chapter 12 Shipping Out
• Chapter 13 All Roads Lead to Rome
• Chapter 14 In the Eye of the Storm
• Chapter 15 Destination the Saxon Shore
• Chapter 16 Contenders for the Crown
• Chapter 17 Race Across the Alps
• Chapter 18 Martyrdom in the Mountain Valley
• Chapter 19 Against the Bagaudae
• Chapter 20 The Sea King
• Chapter 21 Cure Worse than the Illness
• Chapter 22 Agony in Egypt
• Chapter 23 The Great Persecution
• Chapter 24 Politician and Mystic
• Chapter 25 Battle of the Milvian Bridge
• Chapter 26 Epitaph for Acaunus
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Notes
• Select Bibliography