Decius
Decius, full name Gaius or Gaius Messius Quintus Trajan Decius (Latin: Gaius Messius Quintus Traianus Decius; Budalia, 201 - Abrito, July 1, 251), was a Roman emperor who ruled between 249 and 251. A distinguished politician during the reign of Philip the Arab, Decius was proclaimed emperor by his troops after putting down a rebellion in Moesia. In 249, he defeated and killed Philip near Verona and was later recognized as emperor by the Senate. During his reign, he attempted to strengthen the Roman state and its religion, which led to the Decian persecution, in which several prominent Christians, including Pope Fabian, were executed. In the last year of his reign, Decius was co-ruler with his son Herenius Etruscan until they both died in the battle of Abritus, becoming the first Roman emperor to die in combat against the barbarians.
His accession to the throne
Decio was born in Budalia, today Martinci, Serbia near Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica), in Lower Pannonia. He was one of the first of a long line of emperors from the Danube province of Illyria. Unlike his immediate imperial predecessors, such as Philip the Arab or Maximinus, Decius was a distinguished senator who had served as consul in 232. He had been governor of Hispania Tarragona between 235 and 238 and was urban prefect of Rome during the beginning of the reign of Emperor Philip the Arab (Marcus Julius Filipo).
Around 245 Trajan Decius was appointed commander of the legions in the Danube area by the then Emperor Philip I. In 248 or 249 the emperor ordered him to put down the revolt of Pacatianus and his troops in Moesia and Pannonia. The soldiers were angry because of the peace treaty signed between Philip and the Sassanids. Decius fulfilled his mission. But Philip I was an unloved emperor and the legions, after the campaign, insisted on replacing him, proclaiming Trajan Decius emperor, although Decius still maintained that he was loyal to Philip.
Decio as Emperor
After his proclamation, Decius set out for Rome. In the summer of 249 he met Philip's army near Verona, Italy, and a battle took place between the former emperor and the new one, the former being defeated and killed. The Senate recognized Decius as emperor, giving him the attribute Traianus, a reference to the emperor Trajan. The Byzantine historian Zosimus wrote the scene thus:
Decio was then invested in purple and forced to assume [the hard tasks of] the government, despite its reluctance and bad win.
His wife, Herenia Etruscila, was accepted as Augusta.
Political and monumental initiatives
Decio's political program focused on restoring the strength of the state, both by opposing external threats militarily and restoring public piety with a program of renewal of the state religion. He considered that the Empire was going through serious problems of corruption and decadence. A part of the blame was sought in the loss of the old values and in the abandonment of the old cults. Therefore, he ordered to resume the cult and ancestral offerings throughout the territory.
Either as a concession to the Senate, or perhaps with the idea of improving public morality, Decius tried to revive the position of censor, so he urged the Senate to nominate his own candidate, who was the future Emperor Valerian. But he, well aware of the dangers and difficulties inherent in the position at that time, refused the position. The invasion of the Goths and the death of Decius annulled the reform.
During his reign, he proceeded to construct several buildings in Rome "including the Dacian Baths or Baths of Decius on the Aventine" which were completed in 252 and still survived into the 2nd century XVI; Decius also acted to repair the Colosseum, which had been damaged by lightning.
Persecution of Christians
The intention of reinforcing traditional cults led to a confrontation between Decius and the Christians. Some Christians were civilly opposed to the restoration of the old values, but most of these, looking at the imperial government with suspicion, preferred only to stay away. However, they were harshly persecuted, since they wanted to force them to perform acts of worship of the Roman civil religion, which implied worship of the figure of the emperor. In January 250 Decius issued an edict for the suppression of Christianity. The edict itself was quite clear:
All the inhabitants of the empire are required to make sacrifices to the magistrates of their community "for the security of the empire" on a certain day (the date would vary in every place and the order might have been that the sacrifice had to be consumed within a specific period after the community received the edict). When you make the sacrifice you can get a certificate (libellus) documenting the fact that they have fulfilled the order.
While Decius himself may have intended the edict as a way to reaffirm his conservative view of the Pax Romana and to reassure the citizens of Rome that the Empire was still secure, despite this it ignited a "terrible crisis of authority when various [Christian] bishops and their flocks reacted to it in various ways". Action was first taken by requiring bishops and church officials to make a sacrifice for the emperor, a matter of one oath of alliance that Christians considered offensive. Certificates were issued in favor of those who satisfied pagan inspectors during the persecution of Christians under Decius. Forty-six such certificates had been published, all dated to the year 250, four of them from Oxyrhynchus. Christian followers who refused to offer a pagan sacrifice for the emperor and the welfare of the empire by a certain date risked torture and death. the execution.
A number of prominent Christians actually refused to make sacrifices and were murdered in the process, including the Bishop of Rome himself, Fabian, in 250 and "anti-Christian sentiments led to the hunting down of the faithful in Carthage and Alexandria". In reality, however, by the end of the second year of Decius's reign, "the ferocity of the [anti-Christian] persecution had abated, and the preceding tradition of toleration had begun to reassert itself." The Christian Church however never forgot the reign of Decius who was nicknamed "that fierce tyrant".
Antonine Plague
At this time, there was a second outbreak of the Antonine plague, which at its peak in 251 to 266 claimed the lives of 5,000 people a day in Rome. They refer to this outbreak as the "plague of Cyprian" (the bishop of Carthage), where both the plague and the persecution of Christians were especially severe. Cyprian's biographer Pontius gave a vivid account of the demoralizing effects of the plague, and Cyprian moralized about the event in his composition De mortalitate.
In Carthage the «Decian persecution» was triggered by the arrival of the plague using Christians as scapegoats, leading to the death of many Christians, including members of the presbytery and the "pope" of Carthage, the metropolitan bishop Tascius Cecilius Cyprian in the year 256. Decius's edict was renewed under Valerius in 253 and rejected under his son Gallienus in 260-1.
Military actions and death
Barbarian raids on the Empire were becoming more daring and frequent while the Empire had to face a serious economic crisis in the time of Decius. In his brief reign, Trajan Decius had to carry out important war operations against the Goths, who crossed the Danube to plunder the territories of Mesia and Thrace. This is the first major occasion on which the Goths, who would later play a decisive role, appear in historical documentation. Not many details of the campaign are known, and to what extent Trajan Decius and his eldest son Herenius Etruscus were personally involved. wrapped.
The Goths under King Cniva were surprised at the siege of Nicopolis on the banks of the Danube. As the Roman army approached, the Goths breached the Balkan mountains but then turned back and surprised the Romans near Beroë (modern Stara Zagora), looting their camp and dispersing the troops. It was the first time that a Roman emperor fled in sight of the barbarians.
The Goths then attacked Philippopolis (modern Plovdiv), which fell into their hands. They treated the city with the utmost cruelty. The governor of Thrace, Priscus, brother of the previous emperor Philip, proclaimed himself emperor under Gothic protection in opposition to Decius, but Priscus's defiance proved irrelevant when he was assassinated shortly thereafter.
Exhausted by the siege of Philippopolis which had depleted both the resources and numbers of the Goths, they offered to leave the city without captives or loot in order to achieve a free retreat.[citation needed] However, he said that he had managed to close the encirclement and hoped to cut off their withdrawal, he refused to negotiate this possibility. The final confrontation, in which the Goths fought with the courage of desperation, under the command of Cniva, took place in the second week of June 251 on boggy ground in the Ludogorie, a region in north-eastern Bulgaria that meets the plateau from Dobruja and the Danubian plain to the north, near the small settlement of Abrito or Forum Terebronii (modern Razgrad): see Battle of Abrito. Jordanes narrates that the son of Decius, Herenius Etrusco was killed by an arrow at the beginning of the battle, and to encourage his soldiers Decius exclaimed «Let no one cry; the death of a soldier is not a great loss for the republic. Despite this, Decius's army became bogged down in the swamps and was annihilated in this battle, while Decius himself was killed on the battlefield. As the historian Aurelio Víctor recounts:
Them Decii (this is Deceit), while persecuting the barbarians on the other side of the Danube, he died for treason in Abrito after reigning two years.... Many say that the son soon fell into battle while leading an attack too boldly; that the father had, however, strongly stated that the loss of a soldier seemed too insignificant to him to worry. And so he went on with the war and died alike while he fought hard.
According to a later literary tradition, Decius was betrayed by his successor Trebonianus Gallus, who was involved in a secret alliance with the Goths but this cannot be sustained and was in all probability a later invention as Gallus felt compelled to adopt the Decius's youngest son, Gaius Valens Hostilianus, as joint emperor even though the latter was too young to rule in his own right. It is also unlikely that the scattered Roman legions would proclaim emperor a traitor who was responsible for the loss of so many Decius soldiers. among their ranks. Decius was the first Roman emperor to be killed in battle against an enemy army. His body was never found.
Family
Married at least before the year 230 to Herenia Cupresenia Etruscila, whose place of birth is unknown, although it is presumed that she had a noble family and some relationship with Etruria. She was declared Augusta shortly after Decius came to the throne; He had held the title of Mater castrorum since the middle of 250, and that of Mater Augustorum since the beginning of the year 251. He died in mid-July of that same year, shortly after his husband and eldest son, and almost at the same time as the youngest. The couple's two sons were:
- Herenio Etrusco, born in Pannonia h. 220/230, who became a coagusto of his father.
- Valente Hostiliano, born shortly after 230 in Sirmium in the Ilyric. It was recognized by the Senate, adopted and co-appointed by Treboniano Galo, according to the historian Zósimo to avoid a civil war, but died in Rome, at the beginning of a famous epidemic, before July 15, 251.
Although the emperor and his eldest son were initially declared divi, by July the entire imperial family had been subject to damnatio memoriae.