The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

The circumstances present themselves in a complex form, consequently the traceable motive which induces those in power to deal with them is never simple. It is necessary therefore for the student of history to abstract from the complex motive that part with which he wishes specially to deal; and that must be done in the present as in every other instance in which human motive is in question.

The problem of the ethnic frontier was one which presented itself at every stage of the making of the Roman Empire. It was perhaps most strikingly illustrated in the relations with the Gauls and Germans.

The original Gallic province had indeed a marked physical frontier in that elevated region of Auvergne and the Cevennes, together with those ranges which come from the Alps to meet the Gallic mountain system on the middle Rhone. It was, however, bordered on two sides by the lands of the free Gauls. So long as this continued its history was a stormy one. The Gauls of the province were ever restive under the Roman yoke. Every commotion outside the province was echoed within it. The haphazard provincial policy of the last century of the Republic ignored, in so far as possible, discomforts which it had not the energy to remedy. It was not until Cæsar became governor that the work was undertaken by the conquest of the Gauls who remained free.

But while solving one ethnic problem, Cæsar found himself face to face with another. Germans had made their way into Gaul, and showed every disposition to go farther. He invented a new solution. He converted the German settlements along the river into a military frontier, allowing the immigrants to retain their lands on condition that they prevented their kinsmen from crossing the Rhine. He sought to create an antipathy of interests where there existed no antipathy of race. The plan was but partially successful, and in the end the Roman legionary had to do the work that the German provincial was intended to do. Cæsar evidently aimed in his Gallic wars at the establishment of a physical frontier in the shape of the Rhine. The same policy has been tried again and again since his day. It has invariably been unsuccessful in modern times, simply because the Rhine is not an ethnic boundary. Cæsar left the problem unsolved, and his successors had to take it up where he left it. Under Augustus the policy of advance was first tried. Its failure was due to various causes,—some of them, perhaps, preventible; but one, and perhaps the major, reason for failure was the impossibility of reaching the far borders of the Germanic races. The problem presented itself on the Elbe in a still more difficult form even than on the Rhine, in that the new-sought frontier was farther from the Roman base.

After the disaster to Varus in A.D. 9, the policy of advance was given up. The apparently natural, but really artificial, frontier of the Rhine was definitely decided upon. The maintenance of it, owing to its artificiality, absorbed for well nigh a century a large part of the military resources of the empire. But the denationalization and romanization of the Germans within the border created in course of time an ethnic boundary where none had previously existed, and with its creation the problem was for the time being solved. Here, as elsewhere, Roman Imperial policy created an ethnic boundary where it found none.

Britain furnishes at least two prominent examples of the problem. Reference has been already made to the motive underlying the expedition of Julius Cæsar. Agricola, the greatest and the most humane of the governors of the province in the early years of its existence, found himself dragged ever farther northwards by sheer necessity of conquest. By his time, moreover, the problem had taken a more or less definite shape in men’s mind. Tac. Germ. 1. Tacitus, his biographer, recognized at least one side of it. “Germania,” he says, “a Sarmatis Dacisque mutuo metu aut montibus separatur”—an ethnic or physical frontier. He reports, too, a significant remark of Agricola in reference to the possibility of the conquest of Ireland: “Idque etiam adversus Britanniam profuturum, si Romana ubique arma et velut e conspectu libertas tolleretur.” The practical ethnic question was evidently in Tacitus’ time in process of becoming crystallized into a political theory.

It would require too much space to recount in detail all the examples of the ethnic problem which have been conspicuous in mediæval and modern history. It has cropped up again and again within the memory of the living generation.

Austria had to face it in Italy in 1859–60. She has to face it now in the Sclav provinces of the North.

Denmark’s attempted solution of the problem in Schleswig-Holstein cost her those provinces in 1864.

The demand for the cession of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 would hardly have been made by Germany had not the problem in these regions presented itself to her in a seemingly favourable form.