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The Reign of Emperor Gallienus: The Apogee of Roman Cavalry Hardcover – June 12, 2019

by Dr. Ilkka Syvänne (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 57 ratings
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This is the only fully illustrated military life of the Emperor Publius Licinius Egnatius Gallienus (253-268). Considered the most blatantly military man of all of the soldier emperors of the third century, Gallienus is the emperor in Harry Sidebottom’s best-selling Warrior of Rome novels.

Gallienus faced more simultaneous usurpations and foreign invasions than any other emperor, but somehow he managed to survive. Dr. Ilkka Syvanne explains how this was possible. It was largely thanks to the untiring efforts of Gallienus that the Roman Empire survived for another 1,200 years. Gallienus was a notorious libertarian, womanizer, and cross-dresser, but he was also a fearless warrior, duellist and general all at the same time. This monograph explains why he was loved by the soldiers,yet so intensely hated by some officers that they killed him in a conspiracy.

The year 2018 is the 1,800th anniversary of Gallienus’ date of birth and the 1,750th anniversary of his date of death. The Reign of Gallienus celebrates the life and times of this great man.
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  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Pen and Sword Military
  4. Publication date
    June 12, 2019
  5. Dimensions
    6.4 x 0.9 x 9.3 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1526745216
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1526745217
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr. Ilkka Syvänne gained his doctorate in history in 2004 from the University of Tampere in his native Finland. Since then he has written extensively about ancient and medieval warfare and his publications include: 'The Age of Hippotoxotai, Art of War in Roman Military Revival and Disaster 491-636' (Tampere UP 2004), 'The Reign of Gallienus' (Pen & Sword, 2019), the multivolume 'Military History of Late Rome' published by Pen & Sword and the critically acclaimed Caracalla. He is the co-author with Professor Katarzyna Maksymiuk of the 'Military History of Third Century Iran' (Siedlce UP, 2018) and the 'Military History of Fifth Century Iran' (Siedlce UP, 2019). He was Vice Chairman of the Finnish Society for Byzantine Studies from 2007 until 2016. He has been an Affiliated Professor of the University of Haifa since 2016. He lives in Kangasala, Finland.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pen and Sword Military (June 12, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1526745216
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1526745217
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.5 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 0.9 x 9.3 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 57 ratings

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
57 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

a k mathew
5.0 out of 5 stars Good contribution
Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2019
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A long neglected aspect of Roman history. We need more books that cover topics like this
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Doug Welch
3.0 out of 5 stars The Man who oversaw the Nadir of Empire
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2019
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The life of the Roman Emperor Gallienus and his father, Valerian, is incredibly dramatic, so much so that it is surprising that there has been no novel or movie made about it. The greatest reason explaining that is that the sources on that historic period are mostly fragmentary and frequently contradictory. There are only two modern English language monographs about Gallienus, both very academic and full of hedging. Dr. Ilkke Syvanne has recently written several controversial books on the Roman Third Century Crisis and subsequent resurgence and this volume falls squarely into the lowest point of the Crisis.
In Classics today, an easy way to make a name for one's self might be to write a biography rehabilitating an historic figure whose reputation has been reviled by the ancient sources. I got the feeling that Dr. Syvanne was working this angle while reading his biography of Caracalla while he claimed that Emperor was some kind of military genius. That said, I would prefer Syvanne's cavalier guesswork over the equivocation of Lukas De Blois or Richard Bray. However, this book would have benefitted had Syvanne done us the honor of positing a timeline, however questionable as to the events of the reign of Gallienus. So many terrible things happened during the reign of Gallienus that is seems impossible to sort out just what happened when (and sometimes where). Gallienus reached the Imperial throne the moment his father was captured by the Persian Emperor Shapor. From there things seem to slide to oblivion. There is a horrendus plague and the attempts to usurp the throne begin almost immediately. Rome's other huge category of enemies, the Germanics get in on the act fairly early on as well- the Marcomans, Allemans and assorted past enemies revert to their opportunistic raids but newer Germanic confederations now get in on the acts, ones whose names went on to become synonymous with the Fall of Rome: the Goths and Franks. The reader gets the impression that with just one break lasting about a year and a half, Gallienus was constantly in motion galloping from one front to the next fighting internal and external enemies ceaselessly. Syvanne goes some distance in attempting to also track the generals who are future emperors at this time as well as those who would become usurpers. It is widely known that there were not Thirty Tyrants who attempted to take the Purple, but there are more than a dozen and Galienus' reign saw not one but two breakaway empires vying to become sustainable political entities during this period of widespread chaos.
This book is far from perfect and I still have my misgivings about trusting Syvanne's hypotheses, but so far it is the best attempt to piece together the history of this very dark and confused period of Roman history. This book would go well with John F. White's Aurelian Restorer of the World, Pearce's recent bio of Maximinus Thrax and Anthony Birley's Septimius Severus: African Emperor should a curious reader be interested in knowing the course of Rome's Crisis of the Third Century.
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Dustin Cooper
2.0 out of 5 stars Odd use of sources, sometimes sloppy, but could be worse
Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2021
The first thing that struck me was how self righteous the author got about how he trusted ancient sources and historians who didn't were doing it wrong.  While I'm fully aware there's always some level of debate about how much you should trust written sources, I don't usually see this sort of weird arrogance attached to one's position in a published work, particularly when one is defending, of all sources, the Historia Augusta.

Short version of the issues with that source: internally, it claims to be written by 6 different authors during the reigns of Diocletian (284-305) and Constantine I (306-337), and it covers most of the emperors of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD along with userpers and children of emperors.  But scholars noticed that there are allusions to the politics of the 390s, that all the authors had the same sorts of linguistic quirks, that there's an unusually high number of historical figures and sources that are mentioned nowhere outside of this text, and that there's a lot of anachronism.  Most modern scholars will tell you that it was probably written by one person in the late 4th century, and that while some of the early major lives seem to be based on a largely reliable source (if not largely copied verbatim), this author added in strange and fantastical elements to those better lives, and when their good sources ran out, largely made things up to fill in the gaps.  The section on Gallienus is not considered one of those more accurate biographies.

And while I can see someone writing about this period using that source despite this, as there really aren't many good sources covering parts of the 3rd century, I feel like one really has to use caution and warn readers about the problems.  Instead, he defends it and says that "the most recent research based on computer analysis has demonstrated that this [the hypothesis that the HA has only one author instead of the claimed 6] is not necessarily so."  Of course the first thing I did was to find the most recent study I could on this matter, and it took me only minutes to find "THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE HISTORIA AUGUSTA: TWO NEW COMPUTATIONAL STUDIES," which concludes with

"One way to interpret these conclusions is that a single author incorporated an earlier source for the lives of the emperors, making very few changes in the lives of senior emperors through to Didius Iulianus, while adding the lives of junior emperors with material partially of his own composition. After Didius, his collection shows increasing evidence of his own hand at work until after the lacuna, where the lives seem to be primarily of his own composition. This theory neatly accords with Syme's conclusions about the collection, and gives strong indication that there is no necessary disjunction between the conclusions arising from computational studies and traditional literary and historical analysis."

This study was published in late 2016, and the book was published in 2019.  Syvanne clearly had not actually checked the newest studies by the time the book was published.  It's possible that this introduction was written years earlier, but in that case it's at the very least a failure on the part of the editor.  And when you arrogantly make big controversial claims, and say that the most recent studies support you, being wrong in a way the reader can verify in minutes is a really bad look.  And rather than even cite the studies he thinks support him, which seems like the obvious thing to do, Syvanne instead cites a discussion from the introduction of Paul Pearson's biography of Maximinus Thrax.  And while that biography was before the most recent study, all he really does is cite a study from 1998 that upon checking, he seemed to have misread a bit (saying that the study found 6 distinct writing styles when it just said that it looked like there was more than one author, which was compatible with the 6 author hypothesis).  I feel like even if he hadn't made the first error, Syvanne should have taken this as something worth actually trying to build some evidence for instead of basically handwaved and passed off to someone else.

And that's not the only source he treats oddly.  He tries to reconstruct battles based on a military manual called The Strategikon.  And while for certain periods, that's a really useful source, that period is usually thought to begin during the reign of its possible author, Marice Tiberius, sometime around 582-602, as it was thought to be written to explain and standardize his reforms.  And Syvanne doesn't do much to address that issue beyond stating that the Stretegikon says that a couple of the cavalry tactics were used by Trajan Decius (reigned 249-251, shortly before Gallienus' reign).  And when discussing dating later in the book, he uses the website Wildwinds to date a coin to 266.  Wildwinds is a site by and for ancient coin collectors that takes images of coins from online auctions and collectors and gives a description and attribution, both of which I believe are normally taken from said auctions.  Not only are there actual academic texts one can check on coin dating, but Wildwinds provides a catalog number for all applicable coins for the academic text Roman Imperial Coinage.  But even with the site literally telling him an academic source to read up more about the dating and order of Gallienus' coins, he seemingly didn't bother reading it and just assumed that some guy on the internet got it from somewhere.  While it was a fairly minor piece of evidence, I still have to say that it was such a bizarre and stunning instance of laziness than I had to stop and reread the sentence to make sure he actually did that.

Still, this isn't useless. Syvanne is very clear about which sources he uses for what information, and he doesn't have the level of blind faith in the HA that it initially looked like he might, even if he trusts it in some odd places. And he doesn't pretend his reconstructions are proven historical fact. As long as you know a bit about the sources he's using and why to take them with a grain of salt, you might still get something out of this. This just could have been much better.
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Cliente Kindle
5.0 out of 5 stars Sem comentários
Reviewed in Brazil on January 20, 2023
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Gostei muito do conteúdo
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Juan Frutos
3.0 out of 5 stars Galieno emperador héroe e incomprendido
Reviewed in Spain on March 2, 2024
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Obra algo corta aunque entendible dada la escasez de fuentes.

Emperador clave para comprender el ascenso de los emperadores iliricos procedentes del ejército.
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Cliente Kindle
5.0 out of 5 stars Interrssante
Reviewed in Italy on November 5, 2023
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Gallieno, spesso trascurato e maltrattato dalle fonti "ufficiali", un grande imperatore (innovatore) che ha preparato il terreno per Aureliano.
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V. K. Manglaveras
5.0 out of 5 stars The emperor who survived 15 years in the throne of rome during 3rd century crisis
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 4, 2019
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this book is the first for this important 3rd century emperor.
at last we get info about his life and reforms.
emperor gallienus was the longest reign emperor in the 3rd century crisis as he managed to stay no less than 15 whole years on the throne (253-268) with first seven years as joint ruler with his father valerian (253-260)
gallienus was the a great warrior loved by his soldiers and hated by some of his officers who eventually murdered him in 268 as they did at that time in most of the 3rd century crisis anyway to all the roman emperors.
gallienus managed to stay alive for so long so if u wanna know the reasons read this book.
in his time the roman empire was split to three parts and reached it's nadir.
gallienu's father was captured by the Persians. postumus in gaul and spain separated himself from rome and created the gallic empire.
in the east palmyra created in practice an independent eastern empire although at first it was loyal to rome under odenathus who ruled the east in the name of rome but after his death his wife zinobia rebelled and tried to rule the east under her own symbols.
all that disaster was averted in later years by the danubian emperors but gallienus managed to keep the empire strong as much as he could winning battles against barbarians and usurpers until he was murdered in 268.
he was the one also to make daring reforms. from now on no roman senators allowed to command the army.
the Italian aristocracy was finished militairily and that was to have effects in the future of the empire.
all in all a great book in which u get also to read the reigns of Decius and gallus plus that of Claudius II who became emperor after gallienus……(Decius and gallus ruled before gallienus)

now we wait books about the reigns of Gordian III and phipip the arab. the only important emperors of this century without a great book in English to tell their complete history.

if u are roman empire fan who is interested in the 3rd century crisis......BUY THIS BOOK.
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IPA
5.0 out of 5 stars The best biography of overlooked emperor
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 28, 2020
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The biography provides a narrative analysis of the emperor whose reign marked the nadir of the third crisis. The author argues that there is a need to reassess the reign of Gallienus in a more positive light than any of the previous historians have - and this concerns even those historians who have sought to restore his tarnished reputation. The author argues that Gallienus recreated the cavalry army lost by Decius and that it was thanks to the efforts of Gallienus that his successors were able to restore the Roman Empire back to its glory days. He also suggests that Gallienus may have created many of the later important legions that come visible only under the Tetrarchs.
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