Rome and its Frontiers

The Dynamics of Empire

C R Whittaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415486781
• eBook ISBN: 9781134384129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Do the Romans have anything to teach us about the way that they saw the world, and the way they ran their empire? How did they deal with questions of frontiers and migration, so often in the news today?This collection of ten important essays by C. R. Whittaker, engages with debates and controversies about the Roman frontiers and the concept of empire. Truly global in its focus, the book examines the social, political and cultural implications of the Roman frontiers in Africa, India, Britain, Europe, Asia and the Far East, and provides a comprehensive account of their significance.

1 WHERE ARE THE ROMAN FRONTIERS NOW?

AN INTRODUCTION

Frontiers are very much in the news, but polemic is apparently an indispensable tool for discussing them. The eminent French political geographer, A. Siegfried, noticed this when he said:

The subject of frontiers, let us face it, is dangerous for a scholar, because it is so full of political passions and so burdened with prejudice. People have too many interests at stake, when they speak of frontiers, to be able to talk about them coolly. Misunderstanding is permanent.

The reason for such passion may be that identified by another Frenchman, Geouffre de Lapradelle, a professor of jurisprudence, who wrote:

The distinctive characteristic of the concept of frontier is its universal acceptance. From the man in the street or the peasant to the politician and the academic, according to the category and class of the person, it is capable of the most widely differing interpretations.¹

Everyone, it seems, is an expert on what is assumed to be a simple, straight-forward subject and emotions run high when anyone expresses a contradictory view. In the next chapter I shall discuss Roman strategy, which is closely linked to and excites even more passion than frontiers. Here I shall confine myself to the frontiers, as far as possible, by noting some of the current controversies, while at the same time providing an introduction to the later chapters which look at the subject from different angles.

Let me begin by asking why frontiers are in the news and why they are worth discussing. We might almost call our own age the century of frontiers. According to the web site of the International Boundary Research Unit at Durham University, about half of the world’s boundaries are less that one hundred years old, and there are at this moment (January 2003) forty-nine ongoing boundary disputes.² The interest most obviously stems from the geo-political consequences of frontiers, which we encounter in the media almost every day of our lives, with origins that are rooted in the past. Whether it be the disputes between Iraq, Turkey and the Kurds or the ethnic ties between the Pashtu of Afghanistan and Pakistan, each has an historical dimension attached to frontiers.

But the geo-political reality contains a tension. While history is moving inexorably, many would predict, towards a ‘borderless world’ because of economic globalization and the ‘deterritorialization’ of the state, conflicts over nationality and frontiers inevitably become more acute.³ In Britain the European debate, which is all about sovereignty, has divided political parties for the last twenty years or more.

The ‘Westphalian concept’ (that is to say, the model of the modern nation state created by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years War), with its rigid stress upon the principles of sovereignty and territoriality, institutionalized the frontier as an instrument of internal control and self-representation. But it is this concept that is now in crisis and to some extent out of date.⁴

The search is on, therefore, for new forms of political stability, even, it has been suggested, some sort of new ‘imperial’ formula; imperial, because empires by their nature are incompatible with territoriality. They rebel against boundaries and define themselves as cultural space, the sort of wider political community that is capable of containing the fragments of the old order.⁵ We have witnessed recently such formal essays into a new political order in Bosnia and in Kosovo, which have given priority to ethnicity and culture over territory and frontiers.

Similar examples and aspirations in recent history are legion, from Hitler’s claim to the Germans of Poland and Czechoslovakia, to the irredentist demands of the Croats and Slovenes of Austria and ex-Yugoslavia, or the megali idea of Greek unification with their blood brothers of Albania and Turkey, quite apart from the wider desires of pan-Slav, pan-Arab or pan-Muslim movements. As much strategic as ideological, they are nevertheless assertions that override territorial nationalism and frontiers, and they sometimes seek renewal in the rhetoric of old empires.⁶ Best known in recent years is what the Italians call ‘Euregione’, that is the vision of Europe as a supra-national carapace that will allow minorities to flourish. It is one more erosion of national sovereignty. But more to the point (as was declared at a recent conference held at Saarbrücken), ‘Borders and the concept of the “border” are bound to become issues now that Western Europe is discussing the abolition of economic and political borders.’⁷ It is not a prospect that pleases die-hards and the debate is often bitter.

At the same time as peoples seek wider solidarities, frontiers are becoming more permeable. An indication of the new mobility of populations and the pressures upon frontiers can be seen from the figures listed on the web site of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.⁸ In January 2002, there were over nineteen million persons of concern to them under the UN mandate, that is, about one in three hundred of the world’s population. ‘At the beginning of 2000,’ it reports, ‘an estimated 14 million people were living as refugees, uprooted from their homes and forced to cross an international border.’ In the fifty years of its existence it has helped resettle about fifty million people.

Quite apart from these figures which are mostly the effects of wars and political instability, there was also a huge displacement of populations as the consequence of European migrations in the nineteenth century on colonial ventures, from where since the Second World War there has been a reflux to the West of new migrants required by the booming economies. The migrants were aspiring to the extended political rights and the cultural pluralism inherent in the former imperial ideal, but what they provoked was new definitions of citizenship and discrimination that challenge the parameters of the old nation-state.⁹ In I analyse the immigration ‘problem’ (if that is what it was) in the later Roman Empire.

This is where the Roman Empire comes in. One interesting facet of political reappraisals in history is the constant reference that I have already noted to empires, and in particular to the Roman Empire, as a way of legitimizing wider ambitions. There is nothing new in such pretensions. Ivan III claimed to make Moscow into a Third Rome. The Hapsburgs saw themselves as the heirs to the Roman Empire. Italians and Greeks have used the Roman or Byzantine Empire to buttress their political needs, and the British compared their Indian Empire in detail to that of Rome. This was not just bombast. It was a claim to spread one’s own form of civilization and to unite plural cultures. But – and this is central to the imperial idea – empires have distinguished themselves from the nation-state by their recognition of people rather than territory and of borders rather than frontiers.¹⁰ ‘The Roman limes’, a modern political scientist has said recently, ‘was a flexible concept: a closed/open strategy where there were zones of exchange and buffers (‘marches’) surrounding the Empire, exactly as there are today with the EU.’¹¹ How accurate that statement is is another matter, and there are many fanciful, often inaccurate, notions about the Roman frontiers, some of which are examined in Chapter 9. All the more need that the Roman frontiers should be studied in their own right as well as with the weight of history on their backs. Modern boundary studies might benefit as much as ancient history.¹²

Students of historical frontiers cannot ignore the contribution which social anthropology and geography have made to the current interest in the subject.¹³ Locational analysis or studies of space and borders are included in university courses as a matter of routine, and I have made several references to such works in the following chapters.¹⁴ Many stem from Mary Douglas’s text, ‘All margins are dangerous’,¹⁵ since it is at the margins of society that there is the least structure and most energy. Hence, she argues, the importance of ritual and rites of passage, which give symbolic and visible substance to anxieties about boundary pollution. And hence, too, the use of metaphor, including that of the body, in ceremonies to maintain the culture through frontiers of imagination. In Chapter 6 I have taken up one of Douglas’s concepts that ‘boundary pollution focussed particularly on sexuality’.¹⁶

Rites of passage and the transition between the sacred and the profane are well documented in Roman history. Rivers, ploughed lines and walls to demarcate a magico-religious boundary figure prominently in Roman foundation myths, and they remained intensely real to the Romans on the frontiers of the Empire.¹⁷ But van Gennep’s classic study of rites of passage underlines the points of crossing, through portals, statues, arches and bridges, as much as the boundaries themselves. The profane, he claimed, is what is outside the sacred, but the rite of passage aims not to exclude but to incorporate.¹⁸ So the Roman imperial edict in AD17/18 ordering the erection of triumphal arches and statues on the borders of the empire was not a statement of the termination of empire, but defined a sacred threshold that assumed a transition to the world beyond.¹⁹ The same argument can be applied to rivers and bridges, which in Roman imagination were ritual boundaries to be crossed, not defensive frontiers. The discovery of a new cadastral stone on the borders of Roman North Africa, which was clearly not a frontier, prompts the comment by its discoverer, ‘It is first and foremost the signature of a conquering power that is exploring and constructing its space.’²⁰

Roman historians will be familiar with many examples of such ‘representations’ and metaphors. They were the subject of two recent collections of papers, one entitled Frontières terrestres, frontières célestes dans l’antiquité, the other Shifting frontiers in late antiquity. Their aim was to illuminate how the image and the reality of walls, gateways and boundaries fed upon each other in a seamless sphere o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Where are the Roman Frontiers Now?: An Introduction
• 2. Grand Strategy, or just a Grand Debate?
• 3. The Importance of the Invasions of the Later Roman Empire: Can Historians be Trusted?
• 4. Mental Maps and Frontiers: Seeing Like a Roman
• 5. Supplying the Army: The Evidence from the Frontier Fort of Vindolanda
• 6. Sex On The Frontiers
• 7. ‘To Reach out to India and Pursue the Dawn’: The Roman View of India
• 8. Indian Trade Within the Roman Imperial Network
• 9. Roman Frontiers and European Perceptions
• 10. The Use and Abuse of Immigrants in the Later Roman Empire
• Bibliography
• Index