ExecutedToday.com

Sixteen hundred years ago today, the general whose talents were the last bulwark against barbarian conquest of the Western Roman Empire submitted for the sake of civil peace to execution at the hands of a callow boy-emperor.

The half-Vandal patrician Stilicho comes to the notice of posterity late in the reign of Theodosius the Great, the last Roman to rule both Eastern and Western Empires. At Theodosius’s death in 395, his two sons ascended the separate thrones.

Honorius, a 10-year-old child, took the purple in the west and somehow held it for 28 lackluster years that saw Rome’s long erosion finally set the realm on the slide into collapse.*

An apt commander, Stilicho had held Visigoth king Alaric at bay in two invasions of Italy (the crucial Battle of Pollentia stanched the first).

Stilicho and his wife Serena, with their child: two were executed, one was murdered.

Distrusted because of his part-barbarian parentage — and hated by the still-significant pagan community for burning the Sibylline Books — Stilicho’s service never made him popular. Because Alaric had escaped his battlefield defeats, it was whispered that Stilicho had connived with him … and Stilicho’s alliance of his legions with Alaric against other barbarians in Illyrium and Burgundy only heightened the suspicions.

We have little reliable basis to judge the possible truth of these accusations; the fundamental fact was that Rome no longer exercised its accustomed hegemony, and its principals needed to balance interests, cut deals and allocate scarce resources in ways that would have been unthinkable a century or two before.** The army itself was mostly barbarian; Alaric himself had once been a Roman officer.

In the story as related by Zosimus — a later Byzantine historian, a pagan famously abusive towards Christians and elsewhere critical of Stilicho, here softening his stance as he turns to savage his executioners — a wormtongued advisor got the ear of the still-youthful emperor and turned him against the general who was holding back the cataclysm.

Stilicho … was not conscious of any ill intention either against the emperor or the soldiers, [but] Olympius, a native of the vicinity of the Euxine sea, and an officer of rank in the court-guards, concealed under the disguise of the Christian religion the most atrocious designs in his heart. Being accustomed, because of his affected modesty and gentle demeanor, to converse frequently with the emperor, he used many bitter expressions against Stilicho, and stated that he was desirous to proceed into the east, from no other motive than to acquire an opportunity of … placing the empire in the hands of his own son, Eucherius. … Olympius, accustoming himself to visit the sick soldiers, which was the master-piece of his hypocrisy, dispersed among them, likewise, similar insinuations. … they were excited almost to madness … then dispersing themselves about the city, killed as many of the magistrates as they could lay hands on, tearing them out of the houses into which they had fled, and plundered all the town. … The tumult continued till late in the night, and the emperor fearing lest any violence should be committed against his own person also, for which reason he withdrew. … There likewise perished so great a number of promiscuous persons as is beyond all computation.

When intelligence of this reached Stilicho, who was then at Bononia, he was extremely disturbed by it. Summoning, therefore, all the commanders of his confederate Barbarians, who were with him, he proposed a consultation relative to what measures it would be most prudent to adopt. It was agreed with common consent, that if the emperor were killed, which was yet doubtful, all the confederated Barbarians should join together, and fall at once on the Roman soldiers, and by that means afford a warning to all others to use greater moderation and submissiveness. But if the emperor were safe, although the magistrates were cut off, the authors of the tumult were to be brought to condign punishment. Such was the result of the consultation held by Stilicho with his Barbarians. When they knew that no indignity had been offered to the person of the emperor, Stilicho resolved to proceed no further in punishing or correcting the soldiers, but to return to Ravenna. For he reflected both on the number of the soldiers, and that the emperor was not steadfastly his friend. Nor did he think it either honourable or safe to incite Barbarians against the Roman army.

It came to a bad end, Stilicho nobly refusing the prospect of his allies upholding his cause by arms:

Stilicho being therefore filled with anxiety concerning these circumstances, the Barbarians who were with him were very desirous of putting in force their former resolutions, and therefore endeavoured to dissuade him from the measures which he afterwards thought proper to be adopted. But being unable to prevail with him, they all determined to remain in some place until they should be better apprized of the emperor’s sentiments towards Stilicho, … In the meantime Olympius, who was now become master of the emperor’s inclination, sent the imperial mandate to the soldiers at Ravenna, ordering them immediately to apprehend Stilicho, and to detain him in prison without fetters. When Stilicho heard this, he took refuge in a Christian church that was near, while it was night. His Barbarians and his other familiars, who, with his servants, were all armed, upon seeing this expected what would ensue. When day appeared, the soldiers, entering the church, swore before the bishop that they were commanded by the emperor not to kill Stilicho, but to keep him in custody. Being brought out of the church, and in the custody of the soldiers, other letters were delivered by the person who brought the first, in which the punishment of death was denounced against Stilicho, for his crimes against the commonwealth. Thus, while Eucherius, his son, fled towards Rome, Stilicho was led to execution. The Barbarians who attended him, with his servants and other friends and relations, of whom there was a vast number, preparing and resolving to rescue him from the stroke, Stilicho deterred them from the attempt by all imaginable menaces, and calmly submitted his neck to the sword. He was the most moderate and just of all the men who possessed great authority in his time. … he never conferred military rank for money, or coverted the stipend of the soldiers to his own use. … In order that no studious person, or astrologers, may be ignorant of the time of his death, I shall relate that it happened in the consulship of Bassus and Philippus, during which the emperor Arcadius submitted to fate, on the twenty-second day of August.

This date is the end of the line for Stilicho, but hardly the end of the troubles that laid him low. A spasm of mob violence against barbarians on the peninsula ensued; the executed general’s son was among those murdered. Teutons, many of them Roman soldiers, in turn flocked to the banner of Alaric, who promptly swarmed into the enfeebled Italian lands and for the first time in 800 years sacked Rome.

Romans knew just who to blame: Stilicho’s widow, who was herself executed at the order of the Senate. In Gibbon’s relating:

The first emotions of the nobles, and of the people, were those of surprise and indignation, that a vile Barbarian should dare to insult the capital of the world: but their arrogance was soon humbled by misfortune; and their unmanly rage, instead of being directed against an enemy in arms, was meanly exercised on a defenceless and innocent victim. Perhaps in the person of Serena, the Romans might have respected the niece of Theodosius, the aunt, nay, even the adoptive mother, of the reigning emperor: but they abhorred the widow of Stilicho; and they listened with credulous passion to the tale of calumny, which accused her of maintaining a secret and criminal correspondence with the Gothic invader. Actuated, or overawed, by the same popular frenzy, the senate, without requiring any evidence of his guilt, pronounced the sentence of her death. Serena was ignominiously strangled; and the infatuated multitude were astonished to find, that this cruel act of injustice did not immediately produce the retreat of the Barbarians, and the deliverance of the city. That unfortunate city gradually experienced the distress of scarcity, and at length the horrid calamities of famine.

Alaric made out quite a lot better.

* Such, at least, is the conventional assessment of Honorius. For a take friendlier to the emperor (and less so to Stilicho), see here.

** Stilicho, incidentally, called home the second-last legion of Roman troops from Britain for use closer to home, and the island’s remaining Roman presence was cut off by barbarian incursions into Gaul during his lifetime … setting that island on its independent way (into, if you like, the Arthurian age); Honorius would later answer a plea for help from those lands with a note to the effect of, “good luck on your own.”

On this date in 472, one of the last “twilight emperors” of the western Roman Empire — and the last of any conspicuous ability — was beheaded by his rebellious general Ricimer.

Here in Rome’s dying days, the dangerous, centuries-old game for the purple was played with the twist of political triangulation with barbarian kings who had set up permanent shop within the old empire’s borders.

Maybe it was his closet paganism, or his Greek patrician breeding, or the way he slung his toga — whatever it was, Anthemius didn’t have the knack for winning them over.

Born and reared in Constantinople, Anthemius was being groomed for succession in the relatively less treacherous eastern empire when his royal patron (and father-in-law) suddenly got gangrene and died.

The Alan commander who held military power in the east wasn’t into Anthemius, so he got the Al Gore treatment and Leo I got the laurels. Interestingly, although barbarian tribes were establishing themselves as the power behind the throne — and this was even more true in the west — they were not yet prepared to assert the imperial majesty in their own names. That last feeble cultural bulwark, however, would not hold out much longer.

Leo “rewarded” Anthemius for taking it all in stride by appointing him emperor of the perilous west. (He also rewarded the kingmaking barbarian chieftain by having him murdered. “Leo the Butcher,” he’s called.)

That pissed off legendary Vandal king Genseric (or Gaiseric, or Geiseric), who had sacked Rome in 455 and settled into a long career lucratively plundering the Mediterranean. And with good reason: Leo’s idea was for the two emperors jump Genseric.

Now, before this time Leo had already appointed and sent Anthemius as emperor of the west, a man of the senate of great wealth and high birth, in order that he might assist him in the Vandalic war. And yet Gaiseric kept asking and earnestly entreating that the imperial power be given to Olybrius, who was married to Placidia, the daughter of Valentinian, and on account of his relationship well-disposed toward him, and when he failed in this he was still more angry and kept plundering the whole land of the emperor. (Procopius)

That war was a debacle and left Genseric merrily raiding Italy, but Anthemius’ real problem was domestic: his new realm had its own Germanic commander who also preferred to pick his own emperors, and he took an instant dislike to the foreign ponce. Anthemius and Ricimer managed a brief detente, during which the new guy tried to take Gaul back from the Visigoths (no dice), but the two fell to fighting in 472. After a brief siege, Ricimer overran Rome and set up in Anthemius’ place that Genseric-favored Olybrius (who would last all of 39 days).

Anthemius took refuge in one of Rome’s churches — either St. Peter’s or Santa Maria in Trastevere — where he was betrayed, and beheaded by (naturally) Ricimer’s Burgundian nephew.

On an uncertain date in the spring of 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great had his onetime co-emperor — and now prisoner — Licinius executed for a purportedly treasonable plot.

In the system of tetrarchy whereby the Roman world was divided in two, each half governed by an Augustus with a lieutenant Caesar, Constantine and Licinius had established themselves as masters of the west and the east, respectively.

History, which records Constantine as the vessel of Christianity’s political triumph, recommends religious faction as the cause of the strife between them: the two had jointly promulgated the Edict of Milan establishing religious toleration, but their realms had become poles of the two hostile religions — rising Christendom gathering under Constantine’s banner; the pagan world it would supplant dominant under Licinius. The latter is said to have reneged his toleration, though not necessarily to the extent of a full persecution.

Whether we can accept religious policy as a cause sufficient to throw the Roman world into civil war, or suspect more prosaic rivalries over land and power, the two were at one another’s throats before long. Conflicts, invariably won by Constantine, and truces stabilizing an increasingly one-sided balance of power, punctuated the fraying relationship during the decade before Licinius’ decisive defeat.

Upon his deposition, Licinius was allowed to live, courtesy of the offices of his wife, Constantine’s half-sister — legacy of bygone imperial marital politics — but his confinement in Thessalonica didn’t last long.

Fifth-century Greek historian Socrates Scholasticus describes the former emperor’s allegedly treasonable end:

Accordingly he having taken him alive, treated him with the utmost humanity, and would by no means put him to death, but ordered him to take up his abode and live in tranquillity at Thessalonica. He having, however, remained quiet a short time, managed afterwards to collect some barbarian mercenaries and made an effort to repair his late disaster by a fresh appeal to arms. The emperor being made acquainted with his proceedings, directed that he should be slain, which was carried into effect. Constantine thus became possessed of the sole dominion, and was accordingly proclaimed sovereign Autocrat.

Writing much later, Gibbon had a more skeptical interpretation of this convenient execution:

[Licinius'] confinement was soon terminated by death, and it is doubtful whether a tumult of the soldiers, or a decree of the senate, was suggested as the motive for his execution. According to the rules of tyranny, he was accused of forming a conspiracy, and of holding a treasonable correspondence with the barbarians; but as he was never convicted, either by his own conduct or by any legal evidence, we may perhaps be allowed, from his weakness, to presume his innocence. The memory of Licinius was branded with infamy, his statues were thrown down, and by a hasty edict, of such mischievous tendency that it was almost immediately corrected, all his laws, and all the judicial proceedings of his reign, were at once abolished. By this victory of Constantine, the Roman world was again united under the authority of one emperor, thirty-seven years after Diocletian had divided his power and provinces with his associate Maximian.

It was upon Licinius’ tomb that Constantine built that legacy so fundamental to the western world down to the present day. That same pregnant year of 325, he would summon the Council of Nicea, establishing Christian orthodoxy in a pact with temporal power; soon after, he built up Constantinople, to which he then relocated his court and transferred to the future Byzantine Empire such brio as still persisted in the listing hulk of Rome.

(Thanks to Jeff at BrainMortgage for the guest post -ed.)

There are many accounts of Christian martyrs in the annals of Christianity, but none quite like that of Perpetua, thrown to the beasts and put to the sword on March 7, 203, in Carthage.

There is no doing justice to the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity in a brief essay such as this; the fifteen minutes or so it takes to read the original document, which includes the earliest writing we have from a Christian woman (Perpetua herself), will be well spent.

In short, the twenty-two-year-old Perpetua, her slave girl Felicity, their friend Saturninus (whose first-person account is included in the Passion), and two of their companions were arrested for converting to Christianity, Septimius Severus having forbidden conversion on pain of death. As you might suspect, the document recounts their being browbeaten and intimidated, until eventually they are killed in public, as a matter of sport.

But this isn’t what’s really interesting about the story.

Women are common as saints and martyrs, and they often must resist or convert a pagan man, typically a husband. While Perpetua’s husband is peculiarly absent from her story, her pagan father appears repeatedly, pleading with her, begging her for his sake to renounce her Christianity and save her own life. Her retellings of these episodes are striking for the very human sympathy she has for her father, despite, or perhaps in part because of, the spare prose in which she relates it. She insists on maintaining her faith, but grieves for her father’s suffering, and not only when he is beaten before her eyes by the Roman governor.

Children also figure prominently in the Passion. Perpetua nurses her newborn son while in prison. At one point during prayer, she has a vision of her seven-year-old brother, who had previously died a horrible death, and is assured in a second vision that her fervent prayers for him had brought him peace. Felicitas worries that she will not be able to die with Perpetua and the others due to rules against executing pregnant women. Thankfully, the group’s prayers are answered and Felicity gives birth a mere three days before they are to be killed.

The most famous aspect of Perpetua’s account is a dream in which she climbs a ladder, arriving at a garden where a man in shepherd’s clothing, milking sheep, gives her some of the curd he has from the milk. The questions it presents are interesting but also perhaps at once too obvious and too thorny to enter into here.

More interesting for us, perhaps, is the description of the martyr’s death, which (like the account of her comforting her dead brother) does have some controversial elements. Suicide is not martyrdom, and while martyrs will submit to death (like Christ), there is a line (sometimes a blurry one) that divides willingness from desire. It is a key trick of any martyr to be able to persuade us that God could have saved her had God chosen to do so (and this persuasion often involves the failure of initial attempts to kill the martyr), but that God chooses to give the persecutor “victory” of a sort even as God grants greater victory to the martyr. Similarly, the martyr must be willing to die, even happy to die, and at the same time convey that this is only for special people at special times, because God created human beings to live their lives.

Consider the following from the account of Perpetua’s death, when the soldier comes to deliver the coup de grace:

But Perpetua, that she might have some taste of pain, was pierced between the bones and shrieked out; and when the swordsman’s hand wandered still (for he was a novice), herself set it upon her own neck. Perchance so great a woman could not else have been slain (being feared of the unclean spirit) had she not herself so willed it.

This cannot of course be precisely true, or she should have lived. But we are also supposed to understand that it is only through some concession to the weakness of the persecutor that the persecuted is finally slain. In this respect, the editor of the Passion might be said to do his subject a disservice, as she has rendered herself so much more “great a woman” than he (most likely a he) with his martyrologist’s tropes. He has, however, done her and us a tremendous service in preserving and handing down her story as she herself wrote it.

Part of the Themed Set: The Written Word.

(Every February 14, Abe Bonowitz at the U.S.-based Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty sends out this history of St. Valentine as a death penalty victim. Thanks to Abe for allowing us to republish it here.)

Lupercalia: A “Feverish” Festival

We may owe our observance of Valentine’s Day to the Roman celebration of Lupercalia, a festival of eroticism that honored Juno Februata, the goddess of “feverish” (febris) love. Annually, on the ides of February, love notes or “billets” would be drawn to partner men and women for feasting and sexual game playing.

From Sinful to Saintly?

Early Christians, clearly a dour bunch, frowned on these lascivious goings-on. In an attempt to curb the erotic festivities, the Christian clergy encouraged celebrants to substitute the names of saints. Then, for the next twelve months, participants were to emulate the ideals represented by the particular saint they’d chosen. Not too surprisingly, this prudish version of Lupercalia proved unpopular, and died a quick death.

Easier to Do: Substitute Romance for Eroticism

But the early Christians were anything but quitters, so it was on to Plan B: modulate the overtly sexual nature of Lupercalia by turning this “feast of the flesh” into a “ritual for romance!” This time, the Church selected a single saint to do battle with the pagan goddess Juno — St. Valentine (Valentinus). And since Valentinus had been martyred on February 14, the Church could also preempt the annual celebration of Lupercalia. The only fly in the ointment was Valentinus himself: he was a chaste man, unschooled in the art of love.

Putting the Right “Spin” on St. Valentine

To make the chaste St. Valentine more appealing to lovers, the Church may have “embellished” his life story a little bit. Since it happened so long ago, records no longer exist. But even if it didn’t happen this way, it certainly makes for a better story …

Really?

According to one legend, Valentinus ignored an imperial decree that forbade all marriages and betrothals. Caught in the act, Valentinus was imprisoned and sentenced to death for secretly conducting several wedding ceremonies. While imprisoned, the future Saint cured a girl (the jailer’s daughter) of her blindness. The poor girl fell madly in love with Valentinus, but could not save him.

On the eve of his execution, Valentinus managed to slip a parting message to the girl. The note, of course, was signed “From your Valentine.”

Another version:

In Rome in C.E. 270, Valentine enraged the emperor Claudius II,* who had issued an edict forbidding marriage. Claudius felt that married men made poor soldiers, because they would not want to leave their families for battle. The empire needed soldiers, so Claudius abolished marriage.

Valentine, bishop of Interamna, invited young couples to come to him in secret, where he joined them in the sacrament of matrimony. Claudius learned of this “friend of lovers,” and had the bishop brought to the palace. The emperor, impressed with the young priest’s dignity and conviction, attempted to convert him to the roman gods, to save him from certain execution. Valentine refused to renounce Christianity and boldly attempted to convert the emperor.

History also claims that while Valentine was in prison awaiting his fate, he fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius. Through his faith he miraculously restored her sight. He then signed a farewell message to her “From Your Valentine,” a phrase that would live long after its author.

Valentine was clubbed to death, then beheaded, on February 14 around 270 C.E. during a Christian persecution. In a way, it could be said he died for love and it may be for this that his feast day, named in 496 C.E. by Pope Gelasius, has become associated with romance.

Here’s an official Catholic version.

* Unfairly accused?

(Thanks to Jeff at BrainMortgage for the guest post -ed.)

Martyrdom — dying for the sake of one’s religious beliefs — has been one of the defining aspects of Christian self-understanding since at least about 100 CE, when the Book of Revelation was composed. Only a few systematic persecutions of Christians can be even minimally documented, but the idea that Christians suffer and even die for their faith — at the hands of the Jewish establishment, or the Roman authorities, or, today, secular humanists — is absolutely central to Christian identity for many Christians.

One of these ancient periods of persecution for which there is some historical evidence is in the late third and early fourth centuries, around the time of the Emperor Diocletian. On this day in 287, according to tradition, Diocletian martyred Saint Sebastian, at the time an officer in the Praetorian Guard.

The story goes that Sebastian’s Christianity was unknown to the Emperor until Sebastian balked at his job of executing Christians who refused to offer a libation to the emperor (a god, according to the emperor cult of the time). Indeed, Sebastian went so far as to encourage two Christians martyrs in their faith, and to convert several others. Upon hearing of all this, Diocletian ordered Sebastian tied to a tree and shot to death with a firing squad of the ancient sort: bows and arrows.

This, then, is how Sebastian is best known and most commonly represented: as a beautiful youth tied to a tree or a pillar and pierced with arrows.

Like the martyr Saint Catherine, however, whose iconic imagery is also a form of execution* survived by the saint, Sebastian was riddled with arrows and left for dead but did not die. He was rescued by St. Irene, who nursed him back to health. He lived until he heckled the Emperor sometime later, at which point Diocletian had him beaten and, making certain he was dead, threw him into a privy.

The truth is that we know next to nothing of the historical Sebastian. The Catholic Encyclopedia has a very short article that says mainly that. But this has not diminished his importance or cultural prominence, and he has quite the account in the Golden Legend.

Sebastian walks in a solid tradition of military martyrs, including St. George and St. Martin of Tours, and is like George a patron saint of soldiers. Interestingly, while George was also martyred, George is typically represented in strength, slaying a dragon, while Sebastian is represented (again, like Catherine) at an ostensibly powerless moment that is simultaneously his nadir as a human and his pinnacle as a saint.

The image has fascinated artists (and writers) for millennia, including most especially Renaissance Italian artists and early modern artists from all over Europe. Botticelli painted Sebastian twice, but perhaps the single most famous painting is that of Andrea Mantegna, who painted the saint three times. The fame of these paintings may be due in part to the way in which they typify the conception of the saint and his representation as a complex icon of fantastic vulnerability and strength, suffering and fortitude, and with striking homoerotic potential (perhaps having to do with the complex relationship between pain and pleasure), which is more fully realized in, for example, Botticelli’s earlier work or in Guido Reni’s painting.

More recently, St. Sebastian has a cameo in the video for REM’s “Losing My Religion,” which seems to be very much about the hazards of being young and gay in a heteronormative culture.

There is no more or less reason to think that Sebastian himself was gay than to think that he was in the Praetorian Guard, from Gallia Narbonensis, or even, really, that he was martyred. But he has been an important icon in what we might call gay culture since at least the Italian Renaissance, and it’s not clear that it matters whether he was gay any more than it matters whether or not he even existed.

* The breaking wheel, which is said to have shattered at her touch.

On this date in 43 B.C.E., the 63-year-old Roman statesman Cicero, fleeing the proscription of the Second Triumvirate, was caught and decapitated near his villa south of Rome.

Arrogant, eloquent and opportunistic, Cicero was a polarizing figure in his forty years in the public eye. He was a Senator from an upstart family who espoused the conservative Republican cause, and a master rhetorician. Twenty years earlier, he had received the honorific Pater Patriae for steering the Roman Republic through the Catiline conspiracy.

But not Cicero nor any other Roman had healed the social rot in which Catiline’s plot sank roots. The Republic continued to weaken even as Cicero poured out the volumes of rhetoric and philosophy for which later generations would celebrate him.

Ironically, Cicero survived the resumption of civil war in 49 B.C.E. despite backing the losing faction; it was the (momentary) peace between Marc Antony and Octavian that doomed him: to consolidate power, the dictators proscribed numerous political rivals. Cicero, a bitter nemesis of the assassinated populist Julius Caesar and his heir apparent Antony, was among them.

Plutarch described the scene:

[H]is assassins came to the villa, Herennius a centurion, and Popillius a tribune, who had once been prosecuted for parricide and defended by Cicero; and they had helpers … Herennius hastened on the run through the walks, and Cicero, perceiving him, ordered the servants to set the litter down where they were. Then he himself, clasping his chin with his left hand, as was his wont, looked steadfastly at his slayers, his head all squalid and unkempt, and his face wasted with anxiety, so that most of those that stood by covered their faces while Herennius was slaying him. For he stretched his neck forth from the litter and was slain, being then in his sixty-fourth year. Herennius cut off his head, by Antony’s command, and his hands — the hands with which he wrote the Philippics.

It would be too glib to say that the Republic died with him, for Cicero himself recognized that Caesar’s war had already fatally compromised it. When Antony and Octavian at length returned to arms to settle their accounts with one another, nothing but the pantomime would remain.

After a bloody century, Rome had her peace at last.

[T]he first example, prototype, and original of tyranny has been discovered by us in the history of our own Roman State, religiously founded by Romulus … We have observed Tarquin, not by the usurpation of any new power, but by the unjust abuse of the power which he already possessed, overturn the whole system of our monarchical constitution.
-Cicero, “On The Commonwealth”

Part of the Themed Set: The Fall of the Roman Republic.

On an unknown date late in 41 B.C.E., Cleopatra’s younger sister and rival Arsinoe was put to death in Asia Minor as the famous queen cemented her fatal alliance with Mark Antony.

Like Cleopatra herself, Arsinoe lived her short life in the internecine maelstrom of Ptolemaic politics under the sway of a Roman Empire itself immersed in civil strife. Violent death was something of an occupational hazard.

Nevertheless, had some flash of prescient irony visited her when Antony’s legionaries unsheathed their blades, she might well have wondered at the small happenstances of fate that left her a nigh-forgotten footnote in her sister’s story, rather than the other way around.

Three siblings had grasped at the Egyptian throne during the Alexandrian War, and whether it was charm or cold calculation won Caesar’s backing for Cleopatra, Arsinoe and her brother Ptolemy XIII still pressed the Roman garrison of Alexandria with a vastly superior force in a battle that was said to have set the Library of Alexandria aflame.

Timely Roman reinforcements decided the matter, and Arsinoe was marched in chains at Caesar’s sumptuous quadruple Triumph of 46 B.C.E. — though she was spared the execution that typically concluded such an ignominy and instead packed off to a temple on the coast of modern-day Turkey.*

In Margaret George’s historical novel The Memoirs of Cleopatra, the danger of maintaining an enemy who has styled herself Queen is neatly summarized in a conversation between Caesar and Cleopatra set after the Triumph:

“I have spared Arsinoe.” [said Caesar]

My [Cleopatra's] first feeling was a rush of relief. My second was worry. Arsinoe the proud would not retire quietly.

“Where is she to go?”

“She has requested sanctuary at the great Temple of Diana in Ephesus,” he said. “And I will grant it, if you agree.”

Ephesus! Too close to Egypt! Better send her to Britain! Yet … I would gamble, and be merciful. Perhaps I was not enough of a Ptolemy after all. Arsinoe would not have granted it.

“Yes, I will allow it.”

That very perception of her potential danger hung over Arsinoe like the sword of Damocles.

The sword fell — figuratively and literally — five years later after Cleopatra seduced Mark Antony at Tarsus in the autumn of 41. Her terms for Egypt’s alliance supposedly including elimination of this lingering rival — though if Arsinoe had made common cause with Caesar’s Republican assassins, Antony may well have had his own reasons to dispatch the young woman.

Arsinoe’s death helped seal a pact that was itself destined for a bloody end. Distracted by his foreign paramour, Antony steadily lost political ground to his adversary Octavian. In another decade’s time, open war broke out again.

The Egyptian fleet would gather at Ephesus, not far from Arsinoe’s final resting place, bound for the catastrophic Battle of Actium whose outcome added Cleopatra’s and Antony’s blood to the soil from which sprung the long reign of Octavian — soon to be styled Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome.

* A Temple of Artemis — either in Miletus (as Appian has it), or the wonder of the world in Ephesus (as Josephus has it). She met her death at the temple — whichever it was — dragged to its steps and put to the sword. Ephesus seems to be the more generally accepted locale, and an octagonal tomb there has been speculatively identified as Arsinoe’s.

Part of the Themed Set: The Fall of the Roman Republic.

On this date in 63 B.C.E., Publius Cornelius Lentulus was executed by strangulation in Rome’s Tullianum for conspiring to overthrow the Roman Republic.

He was one of the key figures in the Catiline conspiracy, a political intrigue set against a ruinous social crisis that pushed the country to the precipice of civil war.

Roman had fought Roman intermittently over much of the preceding 70 years in episodes underpinned by a class conflict pitting wealthy landowners (politically represented by the Senate) against the growing populations of plantation slaves who tilled their fields and urban plebeians displaced from independent farming on the other. Debt was choking the Roman economy.

Catiline, an ambitious politician from a fading patrician family, had sought the consulship on a populist platform of debt forgiveness; failing to win the office through legal channels, he maneuvered to take it by force. The affair is known mostly through the testimony of its enemies, so it is difficult to gauge the true mixture of opportunism and conviction that informed the conspirators.

A cliffhanger sequence of moves and countermoves against the consul Cicero ensued, highlighted most spectacularly by one of Cicero’s famous orations driving every Senator to seat himself away from Catiline — who nevertheless rose passionately in his own defense.

Catiline left Rome to raise an army in the countryside, leaving Lentulus (himself a former consul) to manage the intrigue within Rome.

Lentulus made the least of the moment, dilating when he could have acted and exposing the plot by dint of a ham-handed attempt to involve visiting Gauls with grievances of their own.

The arrested conspirators’ fate was debated in the Senate this very morning. The young Gaius Julius Caesar, then conducting an affair with Cicero’s Cato’s [correction] sister, stood against (illegal) summary execution, but the victories he would enjoy over Cicero yet lay some years into the future; fearing an attempted rescue, the Senate’s grim sentence was carried out immediately. Cicero personally escorted Lentulus to his death.

Lentulus’ failure likewise doomed Catiline, whose army shrunk from desertions before its commander hurled it into martyrdom with a stirring speech that recalled in passing “how severe a penalty the inactivity and cowardice of Lentulus has brought upon himself and us.”

Part of the Themed Set: The Fall of the Roman Republic.

This date annually is the feast of iconic — perhaps mythological — Christian martyr Saint Catherine, said to have been put to death in the 4th century for her faith.

St. Catherine in a 700-year-old stained glass at St. Mary’s Church of Deerhurst. Image courtesy of the Sacred Destinations Travel Guide.

One of the most popular Catholic saints, St. Catherine was reputed to have been a beautiful young maiden of Alexandria — so wise as to convert every pagan scholar sent to dispute her, so devoted as to be mystically betrothed to Christ.

Catherine was condemned by one of the last pagan rulers of Rome to torture on a breaking wheel, which shattered when it touched her — so she was simply beheaded.

Despite this inauspicious debut, the breaking wheel was Catherine’s iconic attribute, by which her frequent appearances in devotional art can be recognized.

This gruesome instrument of torture was also known as the “Catherine wheel” in medieval Europe, from which English derives the deceptively winsome-sounding name of a firework.

The saint became the patron of those condemned to this horrific death as well as a diverse swath of the wider society: wheelwrights, mechanics, and other laborers who worked with wheels for apparent reasons; teachers, philosophers and scribes for her learning; girls, virgins and young maids for her purity. Single women seeking husbands still offer her supplication:

St. Catherine, St. Catherine, O lend me thine aid
And grant that I never may die an old maid.
A husband, St. Catherine.
A handsome one, St. Catherine.
A rich one, St. Catherine.
A nice one, St. Catherine.
And soon, St. Catherine.

Catholic recountings of the saint’s legend can be read here and here. More St. Catherine’s Day customs are enumerated here.