Aurelian and Probus

This is a narrative military history of the emperors Lucius Domitius Aurelianus ('Aurelian', reigned 270-275) and Marcus Aurelius Probus (276-282) which also includes the other reigns between the years 268 and 285. It shows how these two remarkable emperors were chiefly responsible for the Empire surviving and emerging largely intact from a period of intense crisis. It was Aurelian who first united the breakaway regions, including Zenobia's Palmyra, and it was Probus who then secured his achievements. The reigns of Aurelian and Probus have been subjected to many studies, but none of these have approached the extant material purely from the point of view of military analysis. Most importantly, the previous historians have not exploited the analytical opportunities provided by the military treatises that describe the strategy and tactics of the period Roman army. It is thanks to this new methodology that Ilkka Syvaenne has been able to reconstruct the military campaigns of these two soldier emperors and their other contemporaries in far greater detail than has been possible before. AUTHOR: Dr Ilkka Syvaenne gained his doctorate in history in 2004 from Tampere University in his native Finland. He was vice chairman of the Finnish Society for Byzantine Studies from 2007 to 2016. In 2016 he was nominated as an Affiliated Professor of the University of Haifa. His previous books include the first three volumes (of seven planned) of The Military History of Late Rome; Caracalla, A Military Biography (2017); and The Reign of Emperor Gallienus 2019 all by Pen & Sword.