Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (6 page)

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-Roman 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

T
HOUGH
O
VID'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.

The Turks call it
Kara Deniz
(Black Sea) in contrast to the Mediterranean,
Ak Deniz
(Blue Sea) and for good reason. Emerging from a Bosphorus bright with lawns and palaces, the very act of entering seems to induce a mood change, appropriate to the sea's name in all languages except Greek and Latin. The Greeks called it
Pontos Euxinos,
the Hospitable Sea and the Romans followed their lead. But this was a publicity stunt, rather as Eric the Red was to change Whiteshirt Land to Greenland, ‘so that people will go there'. Indeed, with the bluntness of men whose business was to sail rather than sell, Greek mariners had called it
Axenos,
the Inhospitable. What influenced the change?

In the absence of later arrivals (Turks, Slavs and Bulgars), the Greek lands were adjacent to the Black Sea's western end and Greek ships could penetrate its eastern. This is at longitude forty-two degrees, somewhat further east than present-day Moscow. So the Black Sea brought Greece to Inner Asia's doorstep. Not surprisingly the twin seas, Black and Aegean, though wedded by water, were culturally divorced. The Greek view of this alien world is evoked by the Golden Fleece legend, in which fear and fascination mingle. Here was a sombre sea surrounded by savages, lacking the comfort of harbours and islands, yet tempting boldness with a rich reward. The picture is darkened by Euripides'
Iphigenia in Tauris,
with death on a barbaric altar as the price of shipwreck. Eastward loomed grim mountains: Virgil's ‘rugged, rock-bristling Caucasus'
2
where Prometheus endured eternal torment. Doubtless the origins of the Fleece legend may be sought in Caucasian gold, swept down in the freezing torrents, to be panned by prospectors and filtered through wool. But there were other prizes, which in the end proved richer. Where Jason led businessmen followed, pursuing, if not gold, then a golden rule: that whenever unlike peoples meet, money is to be made. Such convergences are eternal settings for commerce, since each side has something the other lacks.

To exploit this opportunity, the Greeks required anchorages, warehouses, interpreters, homes, defences; in short, the infrastructure of safe and stable business, repeated every hundred miles round this profitable shore. And to promote the exchange of goods, an exchange of adjectives, from inhospitable to hospitable, from hostile to welcoming, would encourage the colonists bound for these Pontic cities. At least five centuries before Rome's arrival, two dozen trading stations had been established. Some were at the mouths of the rivers which drain down from the immensity of what we now call Russia: the Dniestr, Bug, Dniepr and Don. Others were on the Crimean peninsula and the Sea of Asov. Yet more lay in Georgia and along the northern coast of Asia Minor. Especially active as founder of these outposts was Miletus, on the Aegean coast of today's Turkey, ‘mother of more than ninety cities',
3
though herself a daughter of Athens. Tomis was a Milesian foundation. It is a process still familiar to maritime nations, whose emporia, such as the depots along the Gold and Ivory Coasts, Singapore, Shanghai, Calcutta and many more, were so placed that they could be established, defended and, if necessary, evacuated by sea. However, in these modern instances, technology and strength favoured the incomer. By contrast, the Greeks were without particular advantage and faced impossible odds, surviving because the local peoples wanted them to.

There is ample evidence of the store set by barbarian societies upon trade and the goods it brought. Strabo speaks of ‘the Caucasian people taking produce to market by sliding down the snowy slopes on sledges made of animal skins'.
4
The eastern Black Sea was reputedly the terminus of a caravan route from somewhere so distant that no one knew its origin. Pliny tells us that Dioscurias (Sukhumi) was ‘the common emporium of seventy tribes … all speaking different languages';
5
and that ‘dealings were done by our businessmen, aided by a staff of 130 interpreters'.
6
Similarly Strabo on Tanais, at the Don mouth: ‘It is a market for both Asiatic and European nomads … who bring slaves, hides and such things as they produce; the Greeks giving in exchange clothing, wine and other commodities associated with civilized life'.
7
Nevertheless, though normally tenable, and though there were also Greek colonies in unfriendly parts of the Mediterranean, the Pontic were the most precarious.

Cities like Tomis, on the Black Sea's northern shore, faced a particular problem in that the world on whose edge they were precariously poised was itself precarious; for they were liable, after a long investment in bribes and trust building, to be confronted by new and even fiercer arrivals. This can be understood by seeing geography more widely, particularly that of the former Soviet Union whose zones of natural vegetation run crosswise in broad and even bands: tundra, pine, deciduous woodland, woodland mixed with grass, and finally grassland. The last, too dry for tree growth, was known as the grassy steppe: a strip barely 150 miles deep and running the entire length of the Black Sea's northern shore. Today it is largely the southern Ukraine where, with the aid of irrigation from those mighty rivers, the landscape is one of waving wheat and heavy-headed sunflowers; ideal for mechanized farming, though the dense and matted sod remained unbroken till the late 18th century, when Russia's southward expansion transformed the steppe way of life.

Steppe
is Russian for
prairie
or
pampa.
This grassy or Pontic steppe is so flat that the Greeks called part of it the Racecourse of Achilles. Though generally more undulating, the short-grass prairie of the American high-plains states, which can still be seen in the National Grasslands of Nebraska and the Dakotas, is essentially the same. Virgin steppe, now rare in the Ukraine, survives at nature reserves like Askanya Nova; in spring melodic with lark song and vivid with wild tulip. Huge flocks of birds rest in mid journey between Northern Russia and the Middle East. Here too the Przewalski horses, pinkish-beige and white-maned, drum the dry plain. Introduced from Mongolia, these are possible descendants of the sturdy ponies of steppe prehistory.

Early summer is more spectacular still: the plain sprouting fescue, needlegrass and feathergrass; whirring with grasshoppers and bobbing with marmots. Hyacinth, lavender, sage, mint, vetch, milkweed and, most typical of all, the pungent wormwood,
8
with its grey-green leaf and yellow flower, colonizing ground made bald by lightning-kindled grass fires. Hawks hang in the bare blue and everywhere is an endless horizontality, broken only by the bumps of
kurgans
(burial mounds or round barrows) scattered widely over the vivid, green grassland.