The Irony of Valerian’s Captive: AR Antoninianus Celebrating “Victory over Parthia”

In the year 257, Valerian I struck a rare silver Antoninianus depicting the Roman deity Victory looming over a seated Parthian captive. Three years later, in 260, Valerian would make history as the only Roman Emperor to himself be taken captive. It was by Shapur I, Sasanian King in Persia, whose empire had succeeded the Parthian. (The coins pictured are from my “Barbarians, Captives, and Enemies” Collection.)

Once one has learned about the fate of the Roman Emperor Valerian (253 – 260 CE), the ironic similarity is unmistakable between his Vict(oria) Part(hica) Antoninianus and the Triumph of Shapur I over Valerian, the famous bas-relief monument to the Sasanian King at the necropolis Naqsh-I Rustam (in modern-day Iran). While the coin depicts a Parthian captive in a posture of vanquished submission before the Roman Victory, the vast rock sculpture depicts Valerian himself kneeling in defeated surrender before Shapur, the King of the Persian Empire that had succeeded Parthia for Eastern dominance. (See the detail of Valerian here.)

As noted in Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (1926), the monument’s purposeful “appropriation of Roman compositional patterns and motifs in a relief celebrating the Sasanian defeat of the Romans adds another ironic level of meaning to the political message in stone.”

Valerian was Roman Emperor in the Roman East, while his son Gallienus ruled the West, during their joint reign from 253 to 260. The East had been a problem for Rome for centuries, since the days of the Republic. Parthia had crushed the Roman armies at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE, putting an end to Rome’s Eastward ambitions. Famously, Marcus Licinius Crassus, the obscenely wealthy and powerful member of the Triumirvirate with Pompey and Caesar, was captured, humiliated, and killed (the rumored brutality of which would foreshadow Valerian’s fate).

Parthia and various neighbors in Persia and Western Asia remained a constant challenge to Roman power in the East. At least since the time of Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius, Roman coins had featured imagery, legends and imperial titles that sought to assure the Roman population of their control of the east. For the most part, Roman victories over the centuries were short-lived and the best that could be hoped for was to contain the threat – both the foreign military threat, and the domestic political threat caused by the sense of fear and weakness at the borders.

Responding to this climate, the coinage of Valerian made heavy use of Eastern themes, assuring the Roman public of his control over the frontier. Legends on others of his Antoniniani read ORIENS AVG, RESTITVT ORIENTIS, and VICT PART. As Stevenson (1889: p. 687) writes, such coins “were struck in anticipation of Valerian’s success against the Persians.” What successes he did achieve – importantly, recovering Antioch in Syria – were spectacularly reversed in 260.

After a string of victories since 257 or 258, Valerian had pursued the Persians eastward into Mesopotamia. His march finally ended at the Battle of Edessa [wiki]. The defeat must have been crushing to the Roman psyche, which still held tightly to trauma at Carrhae [wiki] more than three centuries earlier (not to be confused with the earlier-yet disastrous Battle of Cannae [wiki]).

Once again, a great Roman army was crushed by the Eastern menace. Once again, a great Roman man and military leader was taken captive by an Eastern King. This time, the injury was surely greater: The Emperor himself was taken.

One popular version of Valerian’s fate includes shocking acts of torture and execution, including flaying alive (reminiscent of molten gold being poured down Crassus’ throat by the Parthians, a story that also remains unproven). Though the ancients, including the Persians, were certainly capable of such brutality toward captives and enemies, Valerian’s fate was probably less violent, but orders of magnitude more humiliating and drawn out. More likely he was kept as a prisoner and slave for his remaining three or four years, a living trophy of sorts for Shapur.

In the end, Valerian’s most famous achievement may have been the one that, for many, first signaled the forthcoming decline of Rome: Being captured by a foreign enemy.

While suffering years of humiliation in captivity under Shapur, one wonders if Valerian ever thought back on the design of this coin, which sought to publicly humiliate his Eastern neighbors, casting them as humbled, defeated figures beneath Rome’s Victory? Did Shapur himself consider Valerian’s coinage when appropriating Roman imagery for his monument at Naqsh-I Rustam? Did Valerian survive long enough to see the great sculpture depicting himself kneeling in submission before Shapur, immortalizing his humiliation and his Empire’s, at that feet of the Persian Empire?