Fort at Vindolanda, AD 105. The fort housed the First Tungrian cohort
and a Batavian cohort.
The effects of imperial neglect can be seen on the British
frontier. The archaeological evidence from Scotland shows a lively
cross-frontier exchange in the first and early second centuries. Roman goods
found their way into native hands, from fine enameled brooches and sets of
bronze tableware to hinges and horseshoes. While the Votadini enjoyed a
profitable alliance with the Romans, deposits of mixed Roman and non-Roman
scrap metal at several sites indicate that local smiths were also doing jobs
for the Roman soldiers stationed on the frontier. Even some modest farmsteads
had access to Roman goods. During this period of strong cross-border ties, many
emperors devoted at least some of their energies to Britain, and the frontier
was briefly advanced into Scotland in the mid-second century. Starting around
160, however, the Marcomannic Wars took imperial attention away from Britain
for several decades. Despite some frontier shakeups under Commodus, it was not
until 208 that another emperor, Severus, took an active interest in the
province. Roman artifacts in Scotland show a corresponding decline after 160.
Even casual exchanges, such as Scottish crafters working for frontier soldiers,
seem to have dried up. While we might have expected provincial commanders to
take up the slack and maintain regional ties when an emperor was busy
elsewhere, the Scottish evidence suggests that they did not—or, more to the
point, they were not permitted to.
The Roman emperors’ relationship to the frontier was
contradictory. They could have enormous effects on frontier societies, whether
by leading their soldiers out on campaign or by pulling them back and assigning
them to border control. When an emperor turned his attention to a frontier
area, it must have been akin to an earthquake or flood: an unpredictable,
irresistible event that could change local conditions for generations, but
whose aftereffects were mostly left to the locals to deal with. When they turned
their attention elsewhere, their subordinates were limited in what they could
do to compensate for their neglect. Most of the empire’s frontiers, most of the
time, were left to themselves, shaped largely by the actions of the peoples who
lived along them.
The Army on the
Frontier
The most stable Roman presence on the frontier was the army.
While some frontiers were more fully militarized than others, all were marked
with fortresses and outposts where Roman soldiers were stationed to maintain
security and control. In regions with urbanized societies, such as Egypt and
Syria, the army’s influence was mostly limited to the hinterland zones. In
other areas, where local societies functioned on a smaller scale, such as
Britain and Arabia, the army’s effect on social and economic conditions was
more widespread. Across the Roman world, the peoples who lived at the fringes
of Roman power mostly knew Rome through its army, whose presence could be both
beneficial and disruptive.
Soldiers were usually well paid, since the emperors depended
on their loyalty. The regular provision of wages and supplies brought a steady
flow of cash and merchants into regions that in many cases had previously been
economically underdeveloped. The frontier army was a market for goods and
services from both inside and outside the empire. In the West, the pottery and
bronze industries of Gaul were stimulated by demand in the frontier regions.
The economic effect was less visible in the more developed East, but in
outlying regions such as the Egyptian oases, Roman forts provided a new market
for local goods. The reach of the frontier market extended well outside the
range of Roman authority. Peoples as far away as Himlingøje and Mecca increased
their leather and textile production to meet Roman demand.
The Roman army also offered employment to soldiers recruited
in and beyond the frontier zone. Barbarian auxiliaries were a vital part of the
Roman army for the same reasons that Greek mercenaries had been employed by
Egyptians and Persians: economically underdeveloped regions make prime
recruiting grounds for troops. After the revolt of Batavian soldiers serving
near their homeland in 69 CE, the Roman army began to station auxiliary units
away from the regions where they were recruited, so that future rebels would
not have the benefit of being surrounded by their own people. Once stationed in
their new locations, these units tended to recruit locally and lose their
original ethnic character over time, but troops were also relocated from one
part of the empire to another as military needs dictated. Because of this
reshuffling of personnel, we find, for example, a Pannonian soldier
commemorated with a funerary stela at Gordium in central Anatolia and offerings
to Syrian gods in the forts of Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain. Some of
these soldiers married local women and started families, creating new
communities with ties to both the army and the local peoples. Their sons were
often recruited into the Roman army a generation later. Other auxiliary
veterans returned home across the frontier and played a role in mediating trade
and diplomatic connections between Romans and non-Romans. Recruitment from
beyond the frontier fostered the growth of a distinct military society that was
neither entirely Roman nor native to the lands in which it developed.
The Roman army could also be disruptive. The militarization
of the frontier interfered with traditional trade routes and seasonal movements
of laborers and pastoralists. Tacitus noted that unimpeded border crossing was
a privilege reserved for few, such as the friendly Hermunduri tribe:
For them alone among
the Germans is there trade not only on the [Danube] riverbank but even deep in
the most magnificent colony of the province of Raetia. They cross here and
there without guards and while to other people we show only our arms and forts,
to them we have opened our homes and estates.
The portoria, a customs duty of 25 percent, was collected on
all goods entering the empire’s eastern provinces. On other frontiers the rates
may have been lower, but there were still fees. The eastern trade routes could
be highly profitable: the record of a loan contract from Egypt documents a
cargo of perfumes, ivory, fabrics, and other luxuries from India in the second
century CE valued at more than 9 million sestertii. (For comparison’s sake, by
the late second century, a fortune of 20 million sestertii could put one in the
lower echelons of the imperial aristocracy.) High customs fees and valuable cargoes
encouraged smuggling. The Romans began to station customs enforcers in client
kingdoms beyond the frontier to help monitor the traffic.
Simply knowing what was going on along the frontier was a
challenge in itself. Surveillance posts and patrols were obtrusive shows of
force, but more subtle forms of spying are hinted at by the historian Ammianus
Marcellinus’ mention of the arcani, or “hidden ones”: “Their duty was, by
hastening far and near, to keep our generals informed of disturbances among nearby
tribes.” A fragmentary tablet from Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern
Britain, with the text miles arcanus (“hidden soldier”) may relate to these
same spies, and another Vindolanda text possibly records a scrap of an
intelligence report on the locals’ fighting capabilities.
All this surveillance can only have been an aggravation to
those who lived along the frontier. Tacitus described a Germanic tribe
complaining that the Romans would not allow them to meet with their fellow
Germans who lived within the borders, “or else charge us a fee to meet unarmed,
practically naked, and under guard, which is even more insulting to men born to
arms.” The authority of frontier soldiers to stop, search, and tax travelers
was ripe for abuse. A merchant’s letter of complaint found at Vindolanda
suggests some of the misconduct soldiers indulged in. The beginning of the
letter is damaged, so the details are unclear, but it seems both the merchant
and his goods were threatened with violence, perhaps as part of a shakedown:
he beat me further
until I would either declare my goods worthless or else pour them
away. . . . I beg your mercy not to allow me, an innocent man
from abroad, about whose honesty you may inquire, to have been bloodied with
rods like a criminal.
The letter further details how the mistreated merchant had
appealed up the chain of command as far as the provincial governor with no
luck.
If a merchant who could write good Latin and knew how to
work the system got so little satisfaction for his grievances, the ordinary
people who lived in the outer shadow of Rome’s frontier cannot have fared much
better. With no effective recourse against exploitation, peoples of the
frontier zone resorted to raiding and revolt, such as the Frisians, who were required
to pay a tribute of oxhides to Rome, even though they lived beyond the Rhine.
In 28 CE the Roman centurion assigned to oversee the tribe demanded hides of
higher quality than the Frisians could supply. When their appeals for relief
brought no results, the Frisians revolted, killing more than a thousand Roman
troops before they were subdued.
Acting both as agents of imperial power and on their own
motivations, Roman soldiers made up one of the main forces at work on frontier
society, but Rome was not the only force along the frontier. Many other
peoples, cultures, and political forces, both those local to the frontier zone
and those farther away, interacted with Rome, pursuing their own agendas and
putting their own pressures on those who lived at the edges of Roman power.
Between Rome and a
Hard Place
A series of inscriptions from Volubilis in the foothills of
the Atlas Mountains on the Atlantic coast of North Africa records eleven
occasions over the first and second centuries CE when Roman officials held
negotiations with the Baquates, a collection of seminomadic tribes. To judge
from the inscriptions, the negotiations seem to have come to a satisfactory end
on each occasion. These inscriptions testify to the possibility of peaceful
coexistence among those who lived at the fringes of the Roman world, but the
fact that these negotiations had to be repeated over and over again also
indicates that, in the long term, frontier relations remained unstable.
What was true at Volubilis was true of the frontier as a
whole. While a tranquil coexistence was sometimes possible, and large-scale
hostilities were relatively rare in the empire’s first two and a half
centuries, the frontier was never quite settled. The disquiet of the frontier
arose partly from the nature of the societies along it, but also from the way
it was caught between worlds. The society of the frontier was constantly being
pushed and pulled by many different forces, both Roman and non-Roman. These
tensions were felt both inside and outside the demarcated boundaries of Roman
control. The conflict between different forces with different agendas
destabilized local societies.
Many of the peoples who lived in and around the Roman
frontiers are conventionally described as “tribes.” This vague word is applied
to various kinds of small-scale societies with no formal government that are
held together by networks of extended family ties and personal relationships.
Where Roman authors such as Caesar and Tacitus imagined stable ethnic groups
with names and defining traits, we should instead see most of the Roman
frontier zone inhabited by loose and changeable conglomerations of people who
were ready to form, dissolve, and re-form alliances as their interests shifted.
Trying to cope with these unstable groups was a challenge for the limited
resources of Roman foreign policy. The brutality in many of Rome’s interactions
with these peoples only sowed further disruption.
There were other societies at the edges of the Roman world
that were larger, more stable, and better able to deal with Rome on an equal
footing, including Kush, Parthia, and Himlingøje. For much of the first few
centuries of the Roman Empire, these peoples enjoyed relatively peaceful
relations with Rome. Their stability and organization made it easier for them
to pursue consistent long-term policies toward Rome and to rebuff Roman efforts
to meddle in their spheres of influence, but the existence of smaller, less
well organized states and peoples in between these major players also helped
stabilize relations. Kush had ongoing conflicts with the same desert raiders
that harassed the Roman southern frontier. Rome and Parthia managed to keep the
peace for more than a century in part because they were able to limit their
conflicts mostly to competition over influence in Armenia. Relations in the
North were helped because, during the Marcomannic Wars, the rulers of
Himlingøje were at war with the same peoples the Romans were fighting.
Caught in between these larger forces, the “tribal” peoples
of the frontier did what was necessary to survive. Sometimes they were able to
make a profitable peace with Rome and their other powerful neighbors. Sometimes
they were pushed into open war. Much of the time, they got by in a state of
uneasy cooperation, taking chances to profit from trade or military service
when they could get them, indulging in petty raiding and customs evasion when
they could get away with it, and suffering the abuses of bored soldiers when
they had to.
Good fences may make good neighbors, but what is good for
the neighbors is not always good for the fence. Earlier conceptions of the
Roman frontier often imagined the peoples just beyond the Roman borders as an
outer wall of client states, held in place by Roman diplomacy and intimidation
as a bulwark against uncertain threats from the unknown lands of the far
distance. When significant new threats to the security of Roman military and
political authority arose in the third century, however, they did not come from
the far-off reaches of Scandinavia or central Asia but from the frontier zone
itself. The peoples that Rome had been bribing, intimidating, patrolling, and
generally meddling with for centuries finally began to push back in more
effective ways. In the third century, peoples all around the edges of the Roman
world—in Scotland, Germany, the Black Sea steppes, Arabia, and North
Africa—began to succeed at what Arminius had attempted in the first decade CE:
to create large, stable alliances that could stand up to Roman power.
