#Augustus learned after Teutoburg

[augustus-scaevola]

Augustus: Germania's getting horny again.

Otto: LEAVE ME ALONE

[roathena]

thank you so much for your interest my fellow history student :)

here are some things I can think of right now:

I think Augustus was pretty smitten by Livia, so I headcanon Octavius as bisexual rather than gay.

The reason why Octavius has a specific type is because in real life Augustus was blonde and had blue eyes (I love my emperors a bit self centered).

Augustus loved gambling, so I imagine Octavius going a lot to the Wild West saloons to bet with other cowboys and Jed having to drag him out to prevent him from losing half of Rome's savings.

It was a bad idea letting him read the Wikipedia article of the Julio-Claudian dinasty. Jed will never forget Octavius screaming at the screen about what a bunch of wankers his sucessors were and how they fucked up the empire he spent a lifetime building. And let's not talk about the night he spent crying after reading about the fall of the roman empire.

Octavius has a lot of deja-vus. There was one time when general Varus lost a bunch of men attacking the Wild West and Octavius told him angrily "Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!" and both of them stood there a moment looking at each other like "this has happened before, hasn't it?" (Battle of the Teutoburg Forest).

Octavius is very good with children, not only because he had been a father in his previous life, but also because he wasn't much of a good father and tries to make it better now being more gentle and kind with kids.

He also tries to be extra nice with Ahkmenrah because, after all, Augustus was the responsible of the end of the independent kingdom of Egypt and the death of its last ruler, Cleopatra.

Jedediah once claimed that latin was just fancy spanish and he probably could understand it pretty easily (he knows spanish because he has worked with mexicans in the railwork). Octavius, being the proud roman he is, started speaking only latin with him to prove it wrong (and oh boy how wrong was Jed, I say this as a spaniard having had latin classes). Also, Jed ended up learning latin because he doesn't like being proven wrong, so at that point Octavius started talking in ancient greek to mess with him (roman politicians knew both languages).

Regarding Octavius relationship with Jed, the first time they y'know was a bit complicated given the roman ideas about same sex relationships, where the passive part of the relationship was seen as less of a man. Octavius couldn't bring himself neither to be passive nor to "put that dishonor" on Jed, so Jed had to reassure him that times had changed and those roman ideas were nonsense.

He does a lot of offerings to Venus (goddess of love), not only because he thinks of her as her divine ancestry, but also because he needs help with a certain cowboy.

Augustus got sick very easily and so it's the same with Octavius, who has to be taken care by Jed.

I'll think of more later, this is what i have for the moment

studying about the roman empire and Octavius Augustus means I can make more headcanons about Octavius from Night at the museum that are historically accurate

[italianartsociety]

Barbarian Burial Sheds Light on Legion’s Legends

Roman writers and artists often made the "wild and savage" "barbarians" of Germania the subject of their historical reconstructions and commemorative stonework. Still, we know very little about the battle capability of the Germanic tribes who managed to sometimes successfully hold of the Roman Legions. The few known battle sites in Germany itself (most notably centered around the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest) contain very little in the way of well-preserved remains, and questions abound about how large “barbarian” armies actually were and how they were organised.

Archaeologists working in Denmark may now be able to shed some surprising light on this mystery. Researchers working in a sprawling 185-acre wetland have uncovered 2,000-year-old human remains that are challenging traditional ideas about "barbarian" warfare in northern Europe. The research, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,   also provides a unique look at how Germanic tribes memorialised their battles, in stark contrast to their Roman counterparts.

Although they battled Germanic tribes across much of Europe in the First century, Roman armies never made it as far north as southern Scandinavia, and the team didn’t find evidence for direct Roman involvement in this battle.They did learn, however, that the Germans moved the dead to the bog with the specific intent of memorialising those slain in battle, arranging their bones in complicated patterns, grouped in some cases by type.

The northern European tribes were both admired and reviled by the Romans, who incorporated their bearded, trousered iconographies into their own grave markers as well as triumphal arches and towers. There is another reason for the popularity of barbarian motifs in the art of the late Empire. The reigns of Constantine the Great and his sons which saw the foundation of the Christian Empire are meagre in Christian iconography while profane images such as triumphal and military reliefs are numerous.

The object pictured is the supposed sarcophagus of St. Helena, mother of Constantine, who went to the Holy Land and discovered the True Cross during excavations there. The sarcophagus is certainly from her mausoleum in Rome called the Torre di Pignattara. Her remains were removed to Constantinople in 331. The sarcophagus may have been made for Constantius I (surnamed Chlorus, d.306), father of Constantine. Later, the sarcophagus was reused for Pope Anastasius IV (d. 1154) and placed in St. John Lateran.

The Erotes and garlands emphasize the purely triumphal character of the decoration. The porphyry sarcophagus also shows: Roman horsemen driving bound barbarian captives; above right, bust of emperor; three Roman horsemen armed with spears riding victoriously over fallen or captive barbarians; below center, armed soldier squatting, pointing up with finger of left hand; above right and left, busts of emperor (Constantius Chlorus?) and empress (Helena?); top of sarcophagus, Eros holding garland, two winged reclining figures, recumbent lion.

Reference: Kristin Romey. “Thousands of Human Bones Reveal 'Barbarian' Battle Rituals.” National Geographic. 22 May 2018. 

Column of Marcus Aurelius: The Emperor's campaigns against the Germanic and Sarmatian barbarians, detail of reliefs from the west side, ca. 181. Piazza Colonna, Rome, Italy. Photo: Art Images for College Teaching.

Late Empire and first Barbarian Kingdoms, 285-451. Map: University of California, San Diego.

Europe After the Barbarian Invasions, c. 476. Map: University of California, San Diego.

Arcus Novus of Diocletian Base B, Barbarian captive, c. 294 Photo: University of California, San Diego.

Porphyry sarcophagus, c. 320. Rome: Museo Pio Clementino (Vatican Museum). From cave of La Madeleine (Dordogne).

Silver Cup, showing barbarians receiving clemency from Augustus, c. 10-20. Photo: University of California, San Diego.

Ludovisi battle sarcophagus, relief showing combat between Romans and barbarians, ca. 250. Museo Nazionale, Rome.

Further Reading: Heather Peter. Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 

David M. Gwynn. Christianity in the Later Roman Empire: A Sourcebook. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 

Posted by Jean Marie Carey

[bookingvacation]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[skitours]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[airlineticketsbg]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[yourtour]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[mihovatravels]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[balkanholiday]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[atozholidays]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[hostravels]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[asktravels]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[bulgariatoursm]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[heartours]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[adventurebulgaria]

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The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.

[travelandtrips]

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life

The people across these rivers mimicked the Romans’ life as they understood it, and as much as they could afford it. Climate imposed some differences. They drank beer more than wine, and they raised livestock as well as grain. Their natural habit of moving to find more or better land in a loosely populated landscape alarmed the Romans, who, anticipating and fearing unrest, tried to teach them stability. The result was that the Romans created what they feared, for the river people also learned organization from Rome, and thus warfare. “The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius,” says one modern historian.13 One of his ancient predecessors saw it happening in the third century:

The barbarians were adapting themselves to the Roman world. They were setting up markets and peaceful meetings, although they had not forgotten their ancestral habits, their tribal customs, their independent life, and the freedom that came from weapons. As long as they learned these different habits gradually and under some sort of supervision, however, they did not find it difficult to change their life, and they were becoming different without realizing it.14

North of the Danube, in modern Moravia and Slovakia, where old textbook maps show us the names of the Marcomanni and Quadi barbarian tribes, archaeology reveals numerous villas in the Roman style, some with bathhouses, some decorated with the kind of tiles seen in Roman army camps, and all yielding up through excavation bits of Roman military equipment, clothing, and jewelry.

For Rome, it turns out, had no theory of its own empire. As long as Rome expanded, it had a sort of idea of its future, pushing frontiers to the horizons while conquering additional peoples. For all intents and purposes it reached the limits of empire well before Nero ever fiddled in the first century CE. The Rhine and the Danube were too inviting. Each was navigable, and Rome could easily reach either one overland from its central territories. The two originate a few miles from each other, forming a nearly continuous line between them from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from the Netherlands to Moldova.15 Augustus famously called back his forces from advancing toward the Elbe, and many reproached him for timorousness after a ghastly defeat in the Teutoburg Forest not far past the Rhine in northern Germany. He demonstrated good strategic sense, though, in seeing that the Elbe would be harder to supply and defend from the Mediterranean than from the Rhine.16

 The establishment of Roman rule in Britain

So Rome thought it could stand still. The establishment of Roman rule in Britain and its moderate advance there were both accomplished in the first century. Then Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola thought longingly that if he had one summer and one legion he could add Ireland to the empire.

In io6 CE, Trajan, easily one of the three or four best emperors, succeeded in bringing Dacia (roughly Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains) into the Roman fold in the early second century, but it slipped from the Romans’ grasp during the bad years of the third century and never tempted Rome again. Romanization lightly tinted its landscape for a very long time, however, in the presence of the Roman soldiers’ god Mithras, who remained a fixture in Dacia well after Rome departed. We even find Mithras in the Crimea, where no Roman army ever dreamed of going.

Eventually the Romans’ imagination failed, and failed decisively. No Roman writer, no Roman ruler, no Roman adventurer (Trajan alone perhaps excepted) seems ever to have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers. None of the other frontiers presented even this problem. To the east, Persia seemed eternally present; to the southeast balkan tours 2022, the Arabs seemed eternally negligible; on the southern flank of the African provinces, border skirmishes and management were necessary, but the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier and Egypt had a long history of being able to control its relations with the people closer to the source of the Nile, none of whom were a military threat. Rome settled for stasis and imagined that stasis could be permanent.

By establishing its frontiers along the Rhine and Danube, Rome remade European geography forever. Groups attracted to the border areas then squabbled with each other and occasionally raided across the lines. Rome had every opportunity to incorporate and rule its neighbors gradually. It would have been able to establish economic relations, form a friendly alliance, send troops to join its allies against attacks from beyond, and finally assimilate and consolidate new holdings. At this distance, it is impossible to tell how feasible such a strategy would have been, but Trajan’s work in Dacia suggests that he at least saw a possibility there. Absent his vision, Rome chose instead to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across its frontiers that it neither controlled nor influenced nor understood. Every emperor from Augustus forward shares the blame for that passivity.