"It’s Raining Pseudohistory: Marcus Aurelius and the Quadi" Topic

"History is not only a work in progress, it is continuously redacted. Scholars write and rewrite, reinterpreting scraps of information in their current idiom, and inevitably accusing predecessors of the venal sin of bad historiography. Napoleon wasn't actually that short for his time. A land war in Asia is a bad idea, unless of course, you're a Mongol. Nero didn't fiddle while Rome burned since it would be another 1000 years before the fiddle was invented. The essential point is not that "history is written by the victors", rather that history is written. For many years, we ascribed great authority to the written word, a theology which is becoming increasingly attenuated in the Information Age, where anybody can establish a rest-stop on the information superhighway, and someone out there somewhere can be found to agree with pretty much anything. Historians tend to be a conservative lot, mostly because they realize that the same damn things keep happening over and over again, with minor variations in the principal actors, geographical locations, and justifications, and the trick is trying to figure out what might actually have happened by recognizing the filters through which various contemporary authorities and later scholars were viewing events. This is why historians get all hot and bothered when a "lost work" appears – not because it may contain essential truths heretofore hidden, but because it adds an additional ideological and perceptive layer. Another pair of eyes, so to speak. When an overworked scribe bothered to write something down in the dark ages before you could buy reams of paper at Office Depot, you can be fairly confident that they felt it was significant, and equally sure that they would do their darndest to ensure that it reflected their particular philosophical perspective. Consider the instance of magical rainmaking that helped Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.) defeat the Quadi. Everyone agreed that a fortuitous storm helped Marcus Aurelius snatch victory from the jaws of certain defeat. Opinions vary widely on which divine critter intervened.

Marcus Aurelius was the 16th emperor of the Roman Empire and something of an eminently reasonable philosopher-king. He had the misfortune to ascend the imperial throne when Rome was starting to have serious problems with barbarians on the northern shore of the Danube (the northeastern border of the Roman Empire), culminating in the Marcomannic Wars that would eventually lead to the fall of the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th Centuries A.D. Basically, the Germanic tribes were getting uppity. Through strategic alliances, punitive expeditions, and selective peace treaties, Rome had been able to temporarily stave off the unwashed hordes, but the weakness of Rome's northern European borders had been exposed. They may have been barbarians, but they weren't no dummies. Somewhere around 170 A.D., an alliance of the Germanic Quadi and Macromanni tribes, recognizing that Rome was not in its prime, crossed the Danube, overwhelmed a Roman army, and laid siege to towns in northern Italy. Now, the Legions were perfectly happy to scrap with you out past the frontiers of the Roman Empire, but they took barbarian forays into the motherland rather seriously. Starting in 172 A.D., Marcus Aurelius sent a major force to stomp on the Macromanni, and although he had earlier signed a peace treaty with the Quadi, because they were aiding Macromanni refugees, he decided a little Quadi ass-kicking was also in order. Don't mess with a philosopher-king. He'll administer a beat down and then convincingly explain why you deserved it. Of course, military operations are often subject to the whims of logistics (beans, bullets, and bandages), and the Roman Legions tasked with wiping out the Quadi and salting the earth marched straight into a particularly nasty drought that seriously hampered their typical effectiveness…"
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Amicalement
Armand

With about a zillion gods out there it takes a while to invoke just the right one. Seems that the Emperor's friendly Egyptian priest only took four days.

There are many stories of weather helping one side. But, of course, we only tell the stories where it worked.

Agree my friend.

Amicalement
Armand