As a recent commentator perceptively points out, “Architecture is prominent in Symmachus’ laudatio. He devotes more time to it that he does to military forces.”443
Military service was not part of the realm of experience of a Late Roman senator, and the safety of the empire and the defense of civilized society against the barbarian menace were entirely the responsibility of the emperor and his officers. As his correspondence shows, 8ymmachus was well acquainted with the staged violence of gladiatorial games,444 but had no direct experience of the battlefield. War was something Late Roman senators read about in epic poems and works of history, but had no direct experience of.
From symmachus’ own body of writings, it emerges that the closest he ever came to experiencing military life was during the year at court when he accompanied Valentinian on campaign. At the beginning of the second panegyric Symmachus proudly emphasized the fact that he had been a direct witness of the events he narrated: “1 am no less in awe,” he proclaims, “of what 1 found out” (that is, what he narrated in the first panegyric), “but I cherish what I experienced!”445
The prospect of accompanying the emperor on campaign must have been exciting, and in a letter to Ausonius, whom he had met during his stay at court, Symmachus nostalgically recalled the good old days when he “followed the standards” of the emperor into hostile territory.446 But the reality of the campaign was perhaps less adventurous than Symmachus had anticipated. Interestingly, the only actual fighting against the barbarians described in his panegyric documents Valentinian’s clemency rather than his military valor. According to the vision expressed by Symmachus in the second laudatio, the exercise of clementia had a civilizing effect on the barbarians, and, by sparing them, Valentinian changed their customs (Or 2.12). The barbarians were thus incorporated into the Roman Empire, and their way of life was destined to disappear in a region where the Roman presence was so overwhelming. Clemency is presented as an act of conquest in disguise, because conquest was the traditional way with which Romans dealt with unruly neighbors,447 and toward the end of the speech Symmachus could envisage the triumphal extension of the empire and creation of a province of Alamannia (Or 2.31).448
But the actual fight against the Alamanni that Symmachus witnessed and described in the panegyric seems to have amounted to little more than a skirmish in which clearly superior Roman forces easily put to flight a disoriented group of barbarians. Fighting was apparently minimal, and Valentinian’s soldiers behaved in the most exemplary way with the civilian population, which was given the chance to escape. According to Symmachus, “No Roman soldier destroyed their hay-roofed hovels by setting them on fire, no one in the hours before dawn dragged out their uncivilized mothers still asleep in their little beds and raped them. They had hardly sweated out their hangover during the day, and their bedrooms had hardly grown cold, that they mingled their flight with your pardon,” that is, Valentinian allowed them to flee.
The battle itself did not even take place, since the barbarians, clearly overwhelmed, took flight, and the Roman army preferred not to pursue them. As John Matthews has argued,449 the surreal scene of the Alamanni fleeing and the Romans watching strongly suggests that, if Valentinian did not actually stage the battle, he carefully picked his enemy to impress a man like Symmachus, who would certainly be well acquainted with the staged violence of gladiatorial games, but had no previous experience of the battlefield.
The unthreatening character of the enemy is emphasized by a lengthy simile: the barbarians are compared to “gazelles swiftly fleeing in the arena” and “stags hunted out from their hidings,” but the Roman soldiers prefer to sit back and enjoy watching them flee, rather than actively pursuing and killing them. The simile has clear epic overtones, and one need only remember Aeneid 4, where Dido is compared to a wounded doe fleeing a shepherd-turned-hunter (Aen. 4.69-73). But the scene depicted in the simile is also reminiscent of a venatio, a familiar spectacle for Symmachus. Elaborate material settings were often given to the hunts, and trees and shrubs were temporarily planted in the arena to make the spectacle more similar to a real hunt.450
As mentioned above, Symmachus did not have prior military experience; his knowledge of war was based exclusively on epic and works of history, and his readings are well documented in his correspondence. Very informative in this respect are a couple of letters, addressed to Protadius and Valerianus respectively. When Protadius expressed an interest in the history of Gaul in a letter addressed to him (Ep. 4.18.5), Symmachus promptly replied by sending him a comprehensive reading list including Caesar’s, Livy’s, and Pliny the Elder’s works. Symmachus’ knowledge of and interest in Livy’s history in particular is further illustrated by the letter to his friend Valerianus, in which he apologized for the delay in sending an edition of Livy, which was being edited (Ep. 9.13).
The strangeness of the “battle-scene” he described in the panegyric was not lost on Symmachus, although he used it to illustrate the remarkable clementia of the emperor toward the Alamanni. After all, the burning of cities or villages, and the capture (and rape) of women, was precisely what was expected in war. that is what symmachus had read in Caesar’s account of the Gallic War, where Caesar with admirable brevity described how he and his army set on fire buildings and villages and captured a great number of men and cattle.451 Virgil too offered a very different depiction of war characterized by brutal and unrestrained violence. The description of the fall of Troy in Aeneid 2 is paradigmatic in this respect, and its structure bears a close resemblance to Symmachus’ account. Both Virgil and Symmachus focus on three key elements: the fire, the rape of women, and the circumstances under which Trojans and Alamanni were attacked. First, Troy’s palaces were destroyed by fire, whereas the Romans refrained from setting fire to the hovels of the Alamanni. second, the priestess Cassandra was brutally raped, whereas Roman soldiers abstained from touching the women of the Alamanni. Third, the population of Troy was taken by surprise while “asleep and drunk” after a day of feasting, whereas the Alamanni had had the opportunity to sleep off their hangovers before the Romans attacked them.452
Valentinian invited Symmachus, as representative of the Roman Senate, to a military campaign against the Alamanni. He offered the Roman senator a tour of his impressive fortifications along the Rhine. The actual fighting that the senatorial envoy witnessed was kept to a minimum: the Emperor wanted to avoid unnecessary danger, but was willing to put on a show for the benefit of his guest. Symmachus went along with it and praised enthusiastically Valentinian’s defensive strategy and his wise use of clemency.
But, for all his inexperience of real war, Symmachus seems to have been more aware of what was going on than one might suspect at first. After all, Valentinian’s fortune in his fight against the barbarians had been uneven at best. In 369 Roman troops sent by the emperor to set up a fortress in Alamannic territory were destroyed in a surprise attack by the Alamanni (Amm. 28.2.5-10).453 The only survivor, the notarius Syagrius, possibly a correspondent or a family member of one of Symmachus’ correspondents, was dismissed by Valentinian in a “typical” outburst of anger. If Symmachus was at court when this happened, he might have been present at Syagrius’ “dismissal.” One may wonder whether his appeal to Valentinian “not to regret having spared a terrified enemy” may not refer to a recent defeat experienced by the Roman troops. In any case, the news might have been enough to make Symmachus wonder about the fighting he had witnessed.
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