Marcomannic Wars

So they say it opens up a unique time capsule for archeological research.

Why was this town abandoned? Why did they just walk away from this big settlement? Well, what was happening around 180 CE? That was the year Emperor Marcus Aurelius died and his son, Emperor Commodus, signed a peace treaty that ended the Marcomannic Wars, which is a series of conflict with Germanic tribes that had been ongoing.

Perhaps Commodus went in a different strategic direction along the Danube.

The researchers found artifacts including bronze casting tools, garment pins, all suggesting that some residents of the abandoned settlement relocated to Loriacum, which was somewhat nearby.

It was on the level of the Justinianic plague or the bubonic plague.

It killed maybe millions, and it opened the way for the Marcomannic Wars, which were scary for Romans because for the first time in several hundred years since the time of Marius, Germanic peoples had invaded Italy.

So these are kind of swept under the rug.

There was the Bar Kokhba revolt in Judea, which was worse than the war that Titus finished in 71 A.D., in terms of lives lost.

And so, the problem with that is that if anyone in that auxiliary cohort has an issue with a local population, They can carry out revenge, avenge old bad blood, and that's what we find happening in Marcus Aurelius' wars, is that these locally recruited auxiliary units go off and they massacre their ancestral enemies because they're in the home territory where they were recruited.

And so after Marcus Aurelius and the crisis of the Marcomannic Wars passes, you find that not happening again.

And so you find later auxiliary units not being employed in their recruited zone again, which kind of makes sense because that was never the plan early on.

When Marcus Aurelius does it, the things you could predict of happening badly happen.

We're told that they were driven east of the Elbe River in Germany during the Roman campaigns of the 1st century AD.

After that, we encounter them during Marcus Aurelius' Marcomannic Wars in the 2nd century, after which they disappear completely for about 300 years until the late 5th century.

A single textual source tells us that sometime after 487 CE, they arrived in the former territories of the Rugians along the Middle Danube.

These were unsettled times beyond the old frontier, as the breakup of Attila the Hun's short-lived empire left a power vacuum that would-be kings and warlords fought over for decades.

University of Innsbruck.

Why the settlement emptied out? Coins indicate that the settlement went out of use at about AD 180, near to the death of Marcus Aurelius and the conclusion of the Marcomannic Wars under Commodus.

The researchers speculate that the forces of Rome moved from Stein to Loriacum, present day ends.

According to Barbara Cain Rath, an archaeologist, there is no evidence of devastation but rather of a systematic withdrawal.

It's made out of enormous marble blocks, and the carvings spiral up almost two dozen times.

It's nearly 400 feet of ornate, intricate carvings depicting all of Marcus Aurelius's campaigns and victories in the Marcomannic Wars, which were waged against Germanic tribes hundreds and hundreds of miles from Rome.

When, when, when Marcus Aurelius said, "Life is warfare and a journey far from home," this is what he was talking about.

He earned this in sweat and blood, and so did the Roman armies.