On the other hand, the Dacians of Transylvania were in some respects the most advanced people faced by Rome across her European frontiers. In just six centuries after penetrating the Carpathian passes, this Sarmatian tribe had adopted agriculture, built stonewalled citadels, learned the rudiments of writing and created a war machine which would shatter Roman complacency on the Danube. Nothing says more about the speed of change during the late Iron Age, when the nearer barbarians were being swept into the stream of history, than the divergence between these two cousin nations after a relatively short time in different surroundings.
In the light of Rome’s varying success against advanced and backward peoples, it is no surprise that her showing would be better against the settled than the nomadic tribes. The Dacians had set aside their horses and put their trust in mountains, which did little to deter an army born beneath the Appennines. Trajan would end the Dacian Wars in time-honoured fashion by striking at the enemy’s capital. By contrast the Sarmatians who still wandered the steppe had no capital, no commitment to territory, no villages to defend and no crops to be commandeered. Furthermore, Rome’s cavalry, her weakest arm, could neither catch nor match these horsemen on their native prairie and did not try. By choosing to stand on the Danube, Rome was able to exclude the grasslands of south-eastern Europe which, like forest, desert and salt water, were elements in which her success rate was modest. Though it pleased her authors to assert that the gods had granted Rome the right to world dominion, in practice she would settle for what her army could handle, her tax collectors organize and her economy exploit. The consuls had been wary of saddling themselves with intractable regions and the caesars followed suit, save in rare cases where precious metals beckoned or strategic arguments prevailed.
How did Roman and barbarian see one another? Archaeology tells us little of opinions and we are obliged to look elsewhere: to written sources and monumental art. This will of course be a one-sided view, in which the barbarian survives by proxy. Most accounts were sensationalized. Few reflected the normal in barbarian life. No society was studied systematically or in detail. First-hand observation was rare. We have no direct knowledge of a barbarian language until the late 4th-century translation of the New Testament into Gothic. The very term ‘barbarian’ covered such divergent ways of life and levels of development that it is almost without scientific value.
The nature and sparseness of written comment on the outside peoples suggests public knowledge of them was limited and vague. This is understandable. The barbarian lands were four to six weeks’ journey from the empire’s centre, beyond frontier barriers and across zones which were pre-eminently military. Information was scarce and sometimes censored. The frontier’s fences were supplemented by an invisible fence between the exterior provinces, governed on behalf of the emperor, and the interior provinces, administered by the senate. The effect was to sedate the inner provincials, especially the Italians, and cocoon them from the asperities of the outside world. When, in the coup d’état of AD 193, Septimius Severus marched on the capital, it is clear from Dio’s description that the Romans had never met frontier soldiers and were astonished by what they saw: ‘He flooded the city with men of many regiments: wild to look at, terrifyingly noisy, coarse and boorish of speech.’15 These were trained troops from the Danube’s Roman bank. How the citizens would have reacted to barbarians, from the further bank, is less easy to imagine.
It was of course from the inner provinces that Roman readership largely came. As with other forms of literature, it may be assumed that factual works were read aloud in private or public recital. Audiences were predominantly metropolitan and subject-matter was tailored to suit their tastes. Literary tradition was not only Rome-centred. It was also inward-looking: drawing upon past authors, classical mythology and history to produce a sometimes elaborate skein of allusion and near-quotation. Ovid is a prime example. Even in exile his verse is stitched with erudite, internal threads. The impression is of a self-contained, self-centred literature, more concerned with its own cultural legacy than with extending experience in a geographical sense.
It is hardly, therefore, surprising that comment on the external peoples is less abundant than might be expected from an active century of Latin letters or that, where it occurs, it deals less with the European outsider than with Rome’s eastern relationships. Hallowed by the exploits of Alexander and Pompey, the East was the prestigious theatre, where Roman statesmanship had achieved memorable results. By contrast the tribal tangle of the northern lands made less rewarding reading and merited less careful attention. Clichés appear to have dominated the Roman view and authors to have reinforced them. Germans and Gauls were mistaken for each other. The ‘noble savage’ was a literary commonplace and his nobility exaggerated to scold Roman decadence. Contradicting this were beliefs that the barbarian lived on a low moral plane, with the satisfaction of bestial instincts as his stereotyped goal;16 and that he throve upon thievery and deceit.17 Choice between these noble or ignoble conventions appears to have varied with the effect sought by the individual writer.
The scowling barbarian, with long locks and matted beard, is a stock figure on triumphal monuments and soldiers’ gravestones. It was usual to make him brave and brawny so that skill in defeating him would seem greater. His wildness was considered a result of remoteness.18 He was thought to be more dangerous where the climate was harsher.19 A common view was that those from regions colder than Italy were plucky but rash and those from warmer climates clever but cowardly. Only Romans, on whom divine providence had bestowed earth’s fairest portion, combined courage, intelligence and farsightedness in ample measure.
So much for perceptions of the barbarian. What of relations with him? The last century and a half had seen Rome in mortal combat with her northern neighbours. The sieges and slaughters in Spain and Gaul under the late republic, and the revenge expeditions across the Rhine with which Augustus’ reign culminated, were as brackets, enclosing some of the bitterest campaigns in ancient history. A Greek quip, relayed by Cicero, might best describe the Roman view: oderint dum metuant20 (no matter that they hate us, as long as they fear us). The Republican and Augustan periods had been characterized by fluid warfare and ad hoc borders, whose very nature implied a warning to outside troublemakers that they could be engulfed by the next Roman advance. Then times began to change: the army digging in on the long rivers and fixity replacing mobility. Tiberius’ rejection of foreign adventures, followed, a generation later, by Vespasian’s upgrading of the earth-and-timber frontier fortifications to stone, were broad hints to the barbarians of an intention to advance no further. Calm descended over most of the borderlands, the shadow of conquest began to lift and chieftainly fear of dethronement to recede. What might replace these deterrents as a curb to barbarian insolence?
It is not feasible that Rome could switch from expansionism to the custodial role without corresponding adjustments in diplomacy. In fact, following the end of the German War in AD 16, foreign policy turns from its Republican and Augustan norms, with their overtones of world dominion and manifest destiny, toward a peaceable pragmatism. More precisely, the diplomacy of the Principate now enters its characteristic phase, in which grand assumptions are allowed quietly to lapse in favour of normalized, cross-frontier relations (though the option of tactical advance on the odd front is kept open). Thus, while retribution is retained as a warning to outsiders and the occasional pursuit of glory remains as a sop to the Romans, in practice the main play is toward détente. Doubtless diplomatic missions were henceforward to be seen rowing across the Rhine or Danube and the bruised barbarian was sweetened by Romans bearing gifts.
For their part the provincials must buy protection, not merely footing the bill for the frontier’s upkeep but also carrying the cost of wooing the wild nations. So begins the principle of taxing Romans to pay barbarians which, though it starts modestly, will reach ruinous dimensions during the late empire. Naturally Rome’s subsidies had strings attached and she
still had ample power to pull them. Furthermore, much of the money would be won back by Roman businessmen. The point, however, is that by admitting commercial traffic, supplying recruits, keeping the peace, accepting arbitration and a degree of supervision (as well as through the direct payment of bribes and stipends) Rome’s nearer neighbours were allowing something of the empire’s wealth and order to be spread beyond its borders, creating a penumbra between the classical and Iron Age worlds. This was progress of a sort. Though backed by scant sympathy or trust, though insufficient to alter history’s eventual outcome, the Roman change from chastisement to inducement paved the way for a tolerable relationship between the empire and its northern neighbours for a century and a half to come. It was, unfortunately, no more than an official détente. It did not mean that the Barbaricum would be a safe place for Roman civilians, or that the stage was set for wider understanding. Diplomatic improvement helped make the borderlands more stable; but as the frontier hardened and gaps were plugged, its presence would ensure the estrangement of ordinary people on either side.
In opposition to the Ciceronian quotation is the elder Pliny’s description of Italy as ‘a land chosen by divine consent [ … ] to unify widespread empires [ … and] to educate mankind’.21 Written in the AD 60s or 70s, its relaxed, even altruistic tone suggests a more confident view of external affairs. Even so it cannot be interpreted as a comment on foreign policy. Unification of ‘widespread empires’ clearly refers to Rome’s Hellenistic and Punic takeovers, on which her Asian and African power rested. Pliny is speaking not of barbarians but of the conquered nations, for which the imposition of Roman taxation and law necessitated a swift induction into the imperial scheme. Rather than altruism, this was realistic dealing: the offer, to each new province, of protection and a variety of civilized benefits in return for disarmament, good behaviour and payment of taxes. By contrast there is no evidence of a comparable effort to uplift the outside peoples or to spread enlightenment beyond the imperial limits, at any rate until Christian missionaries began to overstep the frontiers in the late 4th century. Indeed Romans applauded barbarian ignorance, seeing it as an impediment to intertribal unity and an obstacle to military improvement. Mediterranean vices were another matter. Caesar had been emphatic that these softened Rome’s enemies and assisted her cause. So, on the one hand, luxuries would continue to be peddled by Roman merchants. On the other, the south’s more thoughtful lessons served only to hasten unwelcome advances in the north, like stone-rampart construction and confederational politics. It was in the Roman interest to ‘educate mankind’ as far as the last tax-paying subject, but no further.
At an everyday level, one may guess that, for those who had dealings with the outside lands, the dominant sentiment was contempt. Officials in the frontier provinces can hardly have seen the barbarian other than as a petitioner for economic aid. Trans-border contacts must largely have meant paydays. The sense of being surrounded by the paid-to-be-peaceful was a permanent obstacle to Rome’s acceptance of the barbarians as equals, ensuring that cross-frontier relationships would seldom be based on mutual respect. Inevitably Roman assumptions of superiority would be reinforced, perpetuating the view that the only world which counted was the empire, its citizenship the greatest privilege to which ordinary men and women could aspire. By contrast the Barbaricum represented a civilizational void. Such at any rate seems to have been the official, the ruling-class, the ‘Roman’ view, projected in patriotic literature and government-sponsored sculpture. It was not necessarily held by ordinary provincials; for we must remember that many of Rome’s subjects were themselves erstwhile barbarians. None the less, the only time most Romans saw a barbarian was as a captive or a slave. His humbled image provided the perfect foil for imperial propaganda and there was no better tonic for the army’s self-esteem than the cowed and bewildered savage, whose misfortune was to be born outside the imperial boundaries.
Roman law governed conduct on the empire’s soil, though only citizens enjoyed its full protection. Romans were not required to harbour scruple regarding things done beyond their borders, especially during punitive actions. Promises between Romans and barbarians were not necessarily binding. There were instances of perfidy and massacre on both sides. The army, instrument of retribution, even invoked an appropriate deity, Mars Ultor (Mars the Avenger). Terror was an instrument of policy and treachery a tool of diplomacy. Quintilius Varus’ view of the Germans as so wild and backward ‘that they have nothing in common with us but voice and limbs’,22 carries the inference that they were, in their untutored state, unworthy of humane treatment. Though extreme, it is a credible Roman opinion.
It should, however, be added that genocide was virtually unknown. Disasters resembling the European impact on Polynesia, Africa and America, the extinction or decimation of Tasmanian, Carib and other nations, seldom scarred the ancient world. Except for the Jews, whose monotheism ill-fitted them to a pagan order, religions were seen as compatible and policy as oecumenical. Annexation did not mean the substitution of one form of land use for another or the displacement of one race by another. In short, this was not comparable to the all-out collision of steam age with stone age, but a more moderate encounter between different aspects of the same age. One may also recall Rome’s cosmopolitanism and cultural flexibility. Conquest had drawn together a mixed bag of customs, languages and beliefs; and by and large she let them flourish. There was no compulsory Romanization. The early empire had no missionaries and was free from proselytism or fanaticism. Power lacked the sanctimonious dimension of its 19th-century exercise. Expansion brought booty and taxes, but it was not fuelled by moral or ideological objectives.
Without a barbarian literature, outside opinions of Rome can only be guessed. Of all witnesses perhaps the Jewish historian Josephus is nearest to neutrality. Though a protégé of the emperor Vespasian and reporting a supposed speech by the pro-Roman Herod Agrippa II, Josephus does not hesitate to equate Rome’s outward march with megalomania: ‘The world itself is not big enough for them; the Euphrates not far enough east, the Danube north, the Sahara south, nor Cadiz far enough west to satisfy them; but still they must soldier on, across ocean, even as far as mysterious Britain.’23
It was inevitable that barbarians should stress Roman greed. All were familiar with rapacity at local level; tribe robbing tribe, as was their way. But here was a plot to take over the world. ‘Raptores orbis!’ (‘globe grabbers’) shouts a British leader. The phrase may be an invention of Tacitus, but the sentiment is plausible. ‘They pilfer and slaughter and call it empire,’ he continues. ‘They make a void and call it peace.’24
Another British leader survived capture to ask a question of imperialism, famous for its irony: ‘Caratacus, a barbarian ruler, was seized and brought to Rome, but later pardoned by Claudius. Finding himself free to wander the streets of the city and taking in its size and splendour, he asked: “You who have so much; why do you covet our poor huts?”’25
The battle speech of Queen Boudicca offers an answer of a sort when she says of the legions: ‘They cannot do without bread, wine and oil; and if just one of these should fail, so will they.’26 It is doubtful whether Boudicca really said this; even whether it was true. Nevertheless, the comment reminds us that Roman imperialism was concerned not with huts but with fields. In the last resort it was agricultural. That the land and its produce were the root of taxation must have loomed large in strategic thinking. The core provinces were those which produced all three of these staples and in practice the high command showed no interest in acquisitions which could not grow at least one of them; except for a few mountain chains whose control was unavoidable.
Of the four Episodes, two will take us up to and over the Danube, one beyond the Rhine and one across the Channel. In each case, as the narrative crosses water it enters the Iron Age and its dramas are played out in the final decades of prehistory. It is an era whose violence is heightened by the approach of Rome and the splintering of tribes into pro and anti-Roma
n factions. That these events are known is through odd circumstance and freakish coincidence. A poet blotted his copybook, an emperor’s niece married a lawyer, a writer married a general’s daughter, an artist took his sketchbook across the Carpathians; and one is left with four snapshots into barbarian south-eastern, central and northern Europe, before Rome’s faltering expansion drew the blinds for ever.
EPISODE 1
The Poet
THOUGH OVID’S GREATEST WORK, THE Metamorphoses, concerns miraculous changes to its central characters, few of those transformations match the singularity of the real one, which befell the poet himself: from fame and acclaim in Rome to obscurity and despair on the edge of the classical world.
A statue of P. Ovidius Naso, known to posterity as Ovid, stands in the Piatsa Ovidiu in the town of Constantsa, principal seaport of Romania, on the north coast of the Black Sea, 200 miles east of the Bosphorus. This medium-sized, industrial city is capital of Dobruja, the province of Romania which is held in the crook of the Danube as the great river makes its final turn toward the delta. The delta begins only ninety miles further along the coast and beyond its marshy triangle is the former Soviet frontier. The name Constantsa comes from Constantiana, sister of Constantine the Great, after whom the city was renamed. Originally it was Tomis,1 a Greek colony founded in the 7th century BC. This was the place of Ovid’s exile to which, in AD 8, he was abruptly ordered, with no reason given, without trial or opportunity for self-defence. Here he passed the December of his days, composed his last poems; and here, after a banishment of nine years, he died. These final works, known as the Poems of Exile, are the most direct vision we have of the classical margins during the early years of the Roman empire. To appreciate this fully we must know something of Ovid’s character and career. But first one must understand the place.
Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge Page 4