Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 108: Heraclius (Part 8 - The Warrior Emperor) cover art

Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 108: Heraclius (Part 8 - The Warrior Emperor)

Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 108: Heraclius (Part 8 - The Warrior Emperor)

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Saturday, 12 December 627. Mist on the plain of Nineveh, coming up off the Tigris. For six weeks Heraclius has been running, or appearing to run. Baggage train sent to the front, no lines of communication, everything about him saying this man is going home. Behind him, coming on hard, is the last Persian field army still loyal to Khosrow, under Rahzadh, who has orders from the King of Kings to engage whatever the cost and not to wait for the three thousand elite guardsmen marching north to join him. In forty eight hours those orders will not matter, because Rahzadh will have the numbers. Heraclius does not have forty eight hours. He has this morning. And out of that mist, in battle array, come the Romans. This is the episode where twenty six years of war end. An emperor of Rome rides out in front of his own line and fights three men in single combat, on a plain the ancient world called Gaugamela, where Alexander broke a Persian empire nine hundred and fifty seven years before. A turmarch named Georgius marches a thousand men forty eight miles in a single winter night and takes four bridges without letting one messenger through. A Roman army celebrates Christmas nine hundred kilometres inside Persia, on land belonging to Khosrow's murdered Christian treasurer. And then the palace at Dastagird, standing open, with three hundred Roman standards stacked inside it. Every eagle Persia had taken since Julian died in the sand in 363. What follows is stranger than the battle. A king running from a man he once called his vile and insensate slave. A son who was passed over. A vault built to hold treasure, and what it was finally used for. And a letter from Ctesiphon addressed to the emperor of the Romans, and our brother. The war ends where it began, in the birthplace of the emperor whose murder started it. And when Heraclius finally comes home to Constantinople, after seven years away, there is no chariot, no red paint, no captive king or slaves dragged through the streets. What Rome needed was not a triumph. It was a THANKSGIVING.
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