Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (5 page)

Furthermore, being the world's longest natural road, the Eurasian steppe drew influences from its entire course; from China to Greece, with echoes north from Siberia and south from Iran, the Caucasus and Asia Minor. The result was a steppe art, derivative but distinctive, familiar yet outlandish. Here the Sarmatians were heirs to the Scyths and Cimmerians. Like them, their princes loved gold. Grave goods include adornments, plaques and vessels, typically decorated with sinuous or contorted animals. Many pieces are in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, some with electrotype facsimiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Unfortunately it is sometimes difficult to distinguish steppe-made objects from those by Greek craftsmen, manufactured for the Sarmatian market.

Despite the steppe's apartness and the essential separateness of its way of life, this strange and frightening world was surprisingly penetrable. It was a short sail from the Aegean to the Black Sea; and by this period Greek commercial outposts had long been established round the entire coast at approximate 100-mile intervals, tolerated by the barbarians as their principal source of outside products.

The first and last Episodes deal with two peoples, the Getans and the Dacians, at opposite ends of the Sarmatian spectrum. The Getans, one of the tribes still spread along the Black Sea's northern coast, were among the most backward. They were also restive, for others were jostling behind and the way ahead was barred by Rome's Danubian provinces. Prudent measures would in due course reduce the tension: recruitment into the Roman army, controlled admission into the empire and diversion into the east Hungarian plain. However, these improvements would come too late for the poet Ovid, whose exile to the Black Sea in
AD
9 (subject of the opening Episode) coincided with a time of exceptional disquiet.

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 metuant
20
(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.