The Roman Emperor Carved Into a Persian Cliff

In the whole thousand-year history of Rome, dozens of emperors died violently — stabbed, poisoned, killed in battle, torn apart by their own guards. But only one suffered a fate the Romans considered worse than any death: to be taken alive by a foreign enemy. His name was Valerian, and his humiliation became the single most shameful episode in Roman imperial history.

THE HORROR — the capture: Valerian became emperor in 253 AD, during the “Crisis of the Third Century” — a chaotic period when the Roman Empire was nearly torn apart by invasions, plagues, and civil war. In the east, Rome’s great rival, the resurgent Persian Empire under its brilliant and ambitious king Shapur I, was on the attack, sacking Roman cities.

Valerian, though elderly, marched east to deal with the threat personally. In 260 AD, he met Shapur’s army near the city of Edessa, in what is now southeastern Turkey. It was a disaster. A plague had already ravaged his troops, weakening the army before the battle even began. The Romans were crushed and besieged, and Valerian was forced to try to negotiate.

He went to a parley with Shapur to discuss terms — and it was a trap. Whether through treachery or simple force, Shapur seized the Roman emperor and his entire senior staff and took them prisoner.

It was unthinkable. A living Roman emperor, the embodiment of Roman power and majesty, in the hands of a foreign king. The news detonated across the empire, from Britain to the Euphrates. Rome had never known such a humiliation. It was, and remains, the only time in Roman history that an emperor was captured alive by an enemy in war.

THE HORROR — the footstool: And then, according to the Roman accounts, Shapur set about making Valerian the ultimate trophy of his victory.

The most famous story, told by the Roman writer Lactantius, is one of history’s most vivid images of degradation. The King of Kings of Persia, it is said, used the captured Roman emperor as a living piece of furniture — a human footstool. Whenever Shapur wished to mount his horse, he would have Valerian brought and forced down onto his hands and knees, and the Persian king would place his boot on the old emperor’s bent back and step up onto his horse, grinding the majesty of Rome into the dust, over and over, for the amusement of his court.

For a proud Roman, there was no deeper degradation imaginable — the master of the world reduced to a stool for a foreign king’s boot. And Valerian, in this telling, endured it not for days but for years, growing old and broken in captivity, a prisoner used to prop up his conqueror’s glory.

THE HORROR — the trophy: The accounts of how it ended are even darker. Lactantius records that when Valerian, worn down by years of this treatment, finally died, Shapur was not finished with him. The dead emperor was flayed — his skin stripped from his body — and then that skin was dyed a deep, vivid red, stuffed with straw to hold a human shape, and hung up in a Persian temple as a permanent trophy of the day a king of Persia captured an emperor of Rome. Roman envoys who came in later years were reportedly shown the stuffed skin of their former emperor, so they would never forget.

THE MODERN RELIC The relic of Valerian’s fall is one of the most extraordinary monuments of the ancient world, and it still stands, carved into a cliff in Iran.

At a place called Naqsh-e Rostam, near the ruins of Persepolis, Shapur I had his triumph carved directly into a towering rock face — a colossal relief, meters high, that has survived seventeen centuries of weather. It shows Shapur I, mounted and magnificent on his warhorse, King of Kings — and before him, a Roman emperor, small and submissive, kneeling or held captive at the king’s hand, begging. It’s Shapur’s boast, cut into stone to last forever: I captured the emperor of Rome.

You can go and stand before it today. It’s one of the most famous rock reliefs on earth, at a site that also holds the tombs of the ancient Persian kings including Darius the Great. And there, carved into the cliff, an emperor of Rome still kneels before a king of Persia — the stone record of the day Rome was brought lower than it had ever been, and the old man who became a footstool for a king.

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