Romans and Barbarians: Four Views form the Empire's Edge 1st Century AD

By Derek Williams

"A vivid picture of the clash between ancient civilization and prehistoric cultures." - Kirkus Reviews

From 27 B.C. to A.D. 117, the Roman dreams of boundless empire began to falter. The very size of their conquests made them hard to manage, and the caesars also had to accept the scale and intractability of the problems posed by the barbarians. The period covered by the book is one of great change and the opening of a new era. For the once mighty Romans this was a time when power was passing; for the barbarians it was the late Iron Age: a time of transition when internal stresses and fear of Roman aggression were creating dangerous shifts in the tribal equilibrium.

Derek Williams's Romans and Barbarians sees the clash of cultures from the standpoint of four individuals whose curious fate it was to venture or be sent beyond the outer watchtowers of the Roman empire. They bore witness from the grassy steppe of Europe's southeastern corner from across the grump Carpathians, towering beyond the Danube; from the fearsome German forest; and from beyond the Firth of Forth in the wilderness of northernmost Britain. Each portrait reveals different aspects of the Sarmatian, German, and Celtic peoples facing the empire's European frontiers.

Together these four viewpoints provide a rich portrait of the classical and Iron Age worlds, mutually uncomprehending yet strangely unable to do without each other. The outcome is a skein of violence, tragedy, misadventure, and courage, offering a preview of the cruel but creative forces from whose fusion modern Europe was eventually to emerge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: May 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781250083814

Derek Williams

Derek Williams, long a student of the Roman borderlands, was in due course drawn toward a parallel fascination with the Iron Age tribes that that Rome faced across her frontiers. Romans and Barbarians, his second book, is in many ways a sequel to The Reach of Rome, published in 1997. He lives in England.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Romans and Barbarians

THROUGH WAR, TRADE, EXILE OR accident, Romans parted the curtain between their world and that of the outside peoples and occasionally left accounts of what they saw and did. Best known are Caesar’s. This book moves forward to the century following, presenting four episodes from the early imperial period, which straddle Europe from the Black Sea to the Scottish Highlands, offering portraits of Rome’s Sarmatian, German and Celtic neighbours. Its setting is the empire’s northern margins and beyond, where Mediterranean certainties falter and history hesitates. Though supplemented by recent findings and modern thinking, these glimpses from the rim of the classical world retain the almost accidental quality of snapshots, afforded us not only by Rome’s wide expansion but also through the chance presence of individuals, who ventured or were sent beyond the imperial pale. The first two episodes are dated to the ninth year of our era, but their context harks back to 27 BC: the accession of Augustus and the empire’s commencement. The final episode ends at the beginning of Hadrian’s reign in AD 117 when, with his emphasis on neutrality, large-scale intervention in barbarian affairs diminishes.

Mindful of the distinction between prehistory and history, based on the absence or presence of a written record, one is double-tongued from the outset. On the Roman side one speaks historically, of men and women with names, of known events and established dates; on the barbarian side prehistorically, of uncertainty and anonymity, of peoples called after their burial practices and cultures known from their type-sites. This reflects a deep division in the study of antiquity. On the one hand classics students are heirs to a long and noble textual tradition. Those who live in Europe are surrounded by reminders of Rome. If they are Westerners their languages and customs are studded with reference points. Quite different are students of the barbarians, whose discipline is recent, whose text is the soil and, though some of their languages live on in ours, whose pursuit is often of faint traces. Yet, allowing for these discrepancies, it is odd that those who study the Rhine’s left or Roman bank should seemingly require a different terminology from those studying its right or barbarian bank. At university they would be members of different faculties, attending different lectures and sitting different exams. Such is the compartmentalism of classical and Iron Age learning which has blurred our understanding of the north-south interaction and fogged our view of the Roman empire’s edges.

There are of course bridges across the scholastic river. Most prominent are the writings of Roman historians and geographers, crucial contributors to knowledge of the barbarian side: crucial because archaeology’s findings seldom match the power of language to penetrate minds and motives. This does, however, present a snag. While the Roman empire bequeathed words by the hundred thousand, those outside its European borders left none. Nor have barbarian oral traditions survived from this time. So classical authors became the spokesmen for the barbarian by default; and it could rightly be said that they hijacked our way of seeing his world. In comparing Roman and barbarian one must therefore allow for the partiality of the written sources; and it may help to remember that the Romans themselves were by no means superhuman, that they were not invariably ahead of their time and that where a gap between them and the barbarians existed it was sometimes smaller than Romanists might have one believe. What, then, was the nature of the Roman imperial state?

The 20th century is a time of unprecedented growth in the complexity of officialdom, dominated by organizations of all kinds, mesmerized by experts and obsessed with theory. Modern conditioning ill prepares us for the crudity of imperial Rome: successful beyond all rivals yet backed by rudimentary bureaucracy, unsupported by political or economic thought, without parties to give voice to new aspirations or the flexibility to produce new institutions. In a constitutional sense this amounted to underpowered machinery carrying majestic coachwork; a mighty empire propelled by a governmental engine more fitted to driving a petty province, chauffeured by one man. It was without ministers or ministries; without home, foreign or colonial offices; without chiefs of staff, admiralty or war office; with an army lacking a professional officer corps, its command based on the principle of impermanence and its officials hamstrung by the limits placed on personal power. It is not surprising that, according to Dio,¹ Rome’s vital statistics could be contained in a notebook, carried perhaps on the emperor’s person.

The modern economist’s tendency to equate wealth with industry, and poverty with failure to industrialize, has no ancient counterpart. The Roman empire resembled the barbarian lands in being dominantly agricultural. Produce, rents and property accounted for at least 90 per cent of GNP. Farming was the basis of the state. Yet even here, though Rome did not lack the skills of husbandry, she was backward in applying invention to its processes. The Gauls had already devised a mechanical reaper: in effect a wooden comb mounted on wheels and drawn by animals. The corn stalks slid between the teeth and, reaching the end, the ears snapped off and fell into a tray. By contrast the Romans did not know the wheelbarrow. Farmers did not have the horse collar and oxen were used for heavy work. During the entire imperial period there were no major improvements in agronomy or farming technology. In the sense of yield in relation to work, Rome marked time. The problem was fiscal rather than nutritional. Because taxes on land payed for the empire’s defence, agriculture’s success or failure determined the size of the armed forces. These would continue to be modest in relation to Roman responsibilities. Without growth through productivity, wealth could only be augmented spatially; and avenues for easy conquest were now few.

Given the absence of inventiveness, Rome’s problems would not be solved – nor the barbarian decisively outclassed – by technical or commercial revolution. Industry was undercapitalized, its processes bucolic and its standing low. Here, as in agriculture, the existence of slavery removed the incentive to seek labour-saving processes. Considering that the empire was history’s biggest single market, with a unified currency, trading performance was poor. Manufacture, business and commerce would continue to account for no more than 10 per cent of wealth-creation. It would of course be wrong to exaggerate Rome’s limitations or to suggest that the barbarians were better off. The point is that neither in economic nor military terms was Rome likely to transform herself, to leave her neighbours standing, or so to dwarf the outside world that the barbarian danger would recede.

Neglect of industry, conservatism and lack of innovative thinking cast their shadow over learning; and it is little surprise that the twelve centuries of Rome produced no scientist to whom posterity is in serious debt.² Education was literary and hidebound. There were no universities. In mathematics the numerical system and absence of the zero impeded advance. There was no notion of theoretical chemistry. Physics was strong in the study of stable forms but weak in dynamics, equipping its students to understand structure but not mechanism. Despite prodigious feats in aqueduct, bridge and sewerage construction, many techniques were crude. Most lamentable was metallurgy. Rome’s soldiers used untempered weapons, and in annealing, alloying, forging and welding, German products would eventually outclass Roman.³ The quality of machinery was woeful. Gearing was wooden. Vitruvius described the machine as ‘a combination of timbers, lashed together’.⁴ Progress had been made in crane and mill design, but there were no other applications of water power, and steam remained theoretical. With Romans strong on practice and Greeks on theory, the empire which bound them together was curiously weak at giving Roman substance to Greek speculation.

At sea there was no compass, sextant or chronometer. Captains clung to coasts. Better ships were being built in Scandinavia. There was no mechanical clock and concepts of time were hazy. Daylight was divided into twelve, with the hour varying in length between winter and summer. Though Rome dominated the Mediterranean (and in due course the Black and Red Seas also), beyond Gibraltar the ‘outer ocean’ was a source of dread which she was slow to overcome, even in the instance of the English Channel. Other than the solitary advance by the Greek navigator Hippalus (1st century AD) in understanding the monsoonal winds and regularizing the India trade, disinterest in deep water meant there would be no such thing as Roman overseas discovery.⁵ Consequently she could never call a New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.

In war Rome had no secret weapon. She prevailed not through technical advantage but by discipline, pertinacity, organization and reputation. She was in some respects inferior to her eastern rival Parthia (Iran); even to the steppe nomads, for the West was first to produce neither saddle, stirrup, girth, horseshoe, nor the reinforced shortbow (for use on horseback). One may guess at a Chinese or central Asian origin for the saddle because riders of the Bactrian camel, mounted between humps, are especially stable. The idea of a saddle, with its front and rear pommels, could then be applied to the horse; and footrests, attached to or hanging from it, became a natural appendage. Saddles and stirrups, absent from Trajan’s Column, may be seen on Chinese pottery horses at least as early as 600 BC. Without a saddle to steady the rider, mounted archery is ineffectual. Without stirrups, the lancer is projected backwards at the shock of contact. Without shoes, the horse is lamed by hard surfaces, forcing the rider to use the soft verges and reducing the advantage of Rome’s famous road network. Cavalry was valued for scouting and pursuit but was slow to be applied as a weapon of attack and manoeuvre.

By contrast Roman excellence lay in infantry training and skills. To these could be added developments in torsion artillery, though throwing-weapons were only to prove decisive in sieges. The third Episode will show scorpio and ballista in action. Complementing military prowess was a talent for political cohesion (unknown to the barbarians and denied the bickering Greeks) plus an impressive record in the manipulation and co-option of other nations. Indeed this is how the juggernaut was made, for more manpower than was ever born in Central Italy would be required to create and serve imperial Rome. Nor must urban development and civil engineering achievement be forgotten, most memorably road building, as well as spectacular accomplishments in architecture and literature.

Accepting this, but recalling her institutional and technological backwardness, Rome’s deficits almost outweigh credits. None the less, in terms of reputation, these were the credits that counted. Her military and diplomatic talents produced the territorial, and her skills in words and stone the cultural results which deeply impressed later ages, perpetuating the image of a marble Rome in a muddy world and leading to emphasis on short periods of peak achievement at the expense of two millennia of Roman and Byzantine history as a whole. It is difficult to think of another civilization where so much attention has been given to so small a part of its span.

What are the conclusions of this profit-and-loss account? Is it feasible to see Rome merely as the culminating Iron Age power; or is there some factor which appears to distinguish her from the barbarians in kind, even to give her an exceptional place in the ascent of man? This is not a question which troubled the Romans. The answer was implied on every page of their history. The gods had a reason when they put Rome at Italy’s centre, Italy at the Mediterranean’s centre and the Mediterranean at the centre of the world. We, too, have seldom questioned Roman superiority over the outside nations, seeing it as a basic ingredient of the Western heritage. In what, then, might the Roman contribution be said to lie? Doubtless in the sphere of multinational dominion and superstate governance; in the accumulated experience arising from the breadth and variety of this management; plus the lessons learned from its responsibilities, such as co-ordination of parts and grasp of long-term goals. Added to this are contributions to civil order, internal stability and (surprisingly for a structure welded by war) to international peace. Finally there is Rome’s role as the conduit by which Greek thought and Judaeo-Christian belief reached the future West. In all the above respects it is the Roman empire’s extent and longevity, as much as the talents and efforts of its individuals, which permitted enrichments to civilization unmatched by tribes lacking literacy, unity, or continuity.

By the accession of Augustus, Rome owned most of the Mediterranean seabord, Gaul to the Rhine and Syria to the Euphrates. Acquisition had not been systematic or based on a sustained vision. A torrent of territory had fallen to the Republic during its later years, the result of spectacular victories by generals like Pompey and Caesar. In fact they had been moves in a power game, ambitions on a collision course both with the Senate and each other. These were the forces over which the consuls lost control, compelling Rome toward the thirty-five-year débâcle of dictatorship, assassination and civil war which encompassed the Republic’s dissolution; leading to the emergence of Octavian, Julius Caesar’s great nephew and heir, as Rome’s first emperor (later to be named Augustus).

Including the additions made by Augustus and his successors, the empire would be among history’s more extensive, covering three-and-a-half million square miles of land and sea, with a land area about the size of the United States and Alaska. This Augustus managed with a peculiar mixture of strength and tact, wishing to be known by no more imposing a title than princeps (first citizen), though posterity, dismissing subterfuge, bluntly called him emperor: first of some seventy holders of that office between his taking power in 27 BC and the fall of Rome some five centuries later. From princeps there comes the term ‘principate’, meaning either the reign of an individual emperor or the early imperial period generally. This regime, described by Tacitus as ‘neither of total slavery nor total liberty’,⁶ would vary in its ratio of freedom to tyranny with each occupant of the throne.

Augustus, probably Rome’s most successful emperor, charmed the Senate with generous amnesty and gentle persuasion, allowing it to retain the inner empire and its members to lead legions and govern provinces as before, while he controlled the high command and the outer territories, including the frontiers. The forces were overhauled and the Western world’s first standing army created, consisting of 150,000 legionary and a similar number of auxiliary soldiers. The concentration of power in one man, who controlled the military machine, as well as the permanence of that machine, would deter both internal and external challengers. Augustus’ reforms thus offered a genuine prospect of peace, though long habits of strife and the pursuit of glory would render Rome incapable of grasping it fully.

The expression pax Romana, adopted from the elder Pliny, was used by that writer incidentally, in describing plants ‘now available to the botanist from all corners of the world, thanks to the boundless majesty of the Roman peace’.⁷ During the 1st century AD the principle of a universal peace will at times be honoured more in breach than observance, in the sense that most of Rome’s rulers reverted at least once to external ventures. But the pax Romana is not to be sneezed at. Despite notable exceptions, the empire and its battlefronts would soon fall quiet for almost two centuries. This was something new to the human condition. The temple of the double-faced Janus, traditionally open in time of war, had been closed only twice in the seven centuries between the city’s foundation and Augustus’ accession. Within the Barbaricum, where feuding and raiding were facts of life, a prolonged or widespread peace was similarly unknown. Given such unpromising precedents, the imposition and maintenance of the pax Romana was an extraordinary feat and perhaps mankind’s greatest achievement until that time.

Augustus’ professional army of twenty-eight legions, assisted by some 300 auxiliary units, was now posted to the outer provinces where it would remain for three centuries and more. There the exterior nations, counting only those within reach of imperial territory, may have outnumbered Rome’s soldiers by ten to one: a guess which envisages a compact corps of full-timers facing the vast potential of a prehistoric world in which all were part-time warriors.

Rome’s erratic expansion had left anomalies which Augustus resolved to correct. Spain’s north-west corner, the Alpine lands and much of the Balkans still lay outside the empire and would be dealt with in turn. A serious underrating of difficulties beyond the Rhine would then entice Augustus eastwards. Our second Episode recounts the disastrous outcome in Germany: the first, clear, large-scale failure of Roman imperial expansion. The shock of this rebuke led to the famous advice, contained in Augustus’ will, that the empire should not be expanded further. In deference to his stepfather’s wish, Tiberius turned to a foreign policy based on diplomacy, and with the exception of the British venture (described in Episode Three), the carrot would prevail till the end of the 1st century, when Trajan brought back the stick. Nevertheless, despite inconsistencies between one ruler and the next, Rome was gradually turning her back on adventurism: not only because of the absence of easy victims or dangerous enemies, but also because defence costs, coupled with economic stagnation, were reducing the means to attain more distant and difficult territorial goals.

A corollary to the cessation of expansion would be an armed frontier, soon to evolve along the Rhine and Danube. It would continue to be strengthened throughout the period and be joined by others in the Near East and North Africa. This represented an exchange of the informal boundaries of the Republican period, held by treaty and supported by bribery or menace, for a precise line of exclusion guarded by Roman soldiers. The barbarians would be allowed through its checkpoints in time of peace and in numbers acceptable to the Roman authorities, providing entry was in daylight, unarmed and after payment of dues.⁸ Though the army would continue to patrol the near Barbaricum, gathering intelligence, mediating in disputes and paying stipends to friendly chieftains, the frontier could now be sealed at a moment’s notice. However, that the mistress of the world should even consider hiding behind barriers suggests deep changes in attitude, whose origins are also described in Episode Two: a recognition of the size of the outside nations, an acceptance that the gulf between those inside and outside the empire was unlikely to be bridged and barbarian envy unlikely to be assuaged. Time confirms this pessimism. The centuries offer no example of a frontier’s dismantling because improved relations made it unnecessary; or of voluntary fusion between the empire and its neighbours brought about by the onset of goodwill.

The First Episode sees the poet Ovid looking from the wall of a Black Sea outpost onto savage but skilful horsemen. This exemplifies the security problem of antiquity. On the one hand, a cultural gap and disparity of wealth between the classical and barbarian worlds too big to promise indefinite peace; on the other, advantages in military technique too small to guarantee a permanent Roman lead. Furthermore the pax Romana, with it laws against the bearing of arms, created a state whose civilian majority would forget how to