The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 1

by Theodor Mommsen

CHAPTER I.

THE NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY.

Northern boundary of the empire. The Roman Republic extended its territory chiefly by means of the sea towards the west, south, and east: little was done towards extending it in the direction, in which Italy and the two peninsulas dependent upon it to the west and east are connected with the great mainland of Europe. The region which lay behind Macedonia was not subject to the Romans, nor yet even the northern slope of the Alps; only the inland region behind the south coast of Gaul had been annexed by Caesar to the empire. Looking to the position occupied by the empire in general, this state of things could not be allowed to continue; the fact that the inert and unstable rule of the aristocracy had been superseded could not but tell with preeminent effect in this sphere of action. Caesar had not charged the heirs of his dictatorial power with the extension of Roman territory on the north slope of the Alps and on the right bank of the Rhine so directly as with the conquest of Britain; but in reality such an enlargement of the bounds suggested itself far more naturally, and was more necessary, than the subduing of the transmarine Celts, and we can readily understand why Augustus took in hand the former and omitted the latter. The task was divided into three great sections—the operations on the northern frontier of the Graeco–Macedonian peninsula, in the region of the middle and lower Danube, in Illyricum; those on the northern frontier of Italy itself, in the region of the upper Danube, in Raetia and Noricum; lastly, those on the right bank of the Rhine, in Germany. Though conducted for the most part independently, the military political measures in these regions had yet an inward connection; and, as they all had their origin from the free initiative of the Roman government, they can only be understood in their success or in their partial failure, when they are looked at from a military and political point of view as a whole. We shall, therefore, in our account of them, follow the connection of place rather than the order of time; the structure, of which they are but parts, is better viewed in its internal compactness than according to the succession of the several buildings composing it.

Dalmatian war. The prelude to this great aggregate of action was formed by the measures which Caesar the Younger, so soon as he had his hands free in Italy and Spain, undertook on the upper coasts of the Adriatic and in the inland region adjacent to them. In the hundred and fifty years that had elapsed since the founding of Aquileia, the Roman merchant had doubtless from that centre possessed himself more and more of the traffic; yet the state, directly as such, had made little progress. Considerable trading settlements had been formed at the chief ports of the Dalmatian coast, and also, on the road leading from Aquileia into the valley of the Save, at Nauportus (Upper Laybach); Dalmatia, Bosnia, Istria, and Carniola were deemed Roman territory, and the region along the coast at least was actually subject; but the founding of towns in a legal sense still remained to be done, quite as much as the subduing of the inhospitable interior.

Here, however, another element had to be taken into account. In the war between Caesar and Pompeius the native Dalmatians had as decidedly taken part for the latter as the Roman settlers there had taken the side of Caesar; even after the defeat of Pompeius at Pharsalus, and after the Pompeian fleet had been driven from the Illyrian waters (iv. 456)iv. 434., the natives continued their resistance with energy and success. The brave and able Publius Vatinius, who had formerly taken a very effective part in these conflicts, was sent with a strong army to Illyricum, apparently in the year before Caesar’s death, and that merely as the vanguard of the main army, with which the Dictator himself intended to follow in order to overthrow the Dacians, who just then were putting forth their rising power (iv. 305)iv. 291., and to regulate the state of affairs in the whole domain of the Danube. The execution of this plan was precluded by the daggers of the assassins. It was fortunate that the Dacians did not on their part penetrate into Macedonia; Vatinius himself fought against the Dalmatians unsuccessfully, and sustained severe losses. Thereafter, when the republicans took up arms in the East, the Illyrian army joined that of Brutus, and for a considerable time the Dalmatians remained free from attack. After the overthrow of the republicans, Antonius, to whom, in the partition of the empire, Macedonia had fallen, caused the insubordinate Dardani in the north–west and the Parthini on the coast (eastward from Durazzo) to be put to rout in the year 715,39. when the celebrated orator Gaius Asinius Pollio gained triumphal honours. In Illyricum, which was under Caesar, nothing could be done so long as the latter had to direct his whole power to the Sicilian war against Sextus Pompeius; but after its successful termination Caesar personally threw himself with vigour into this task. The small tribes from Doclea (Cernagora), as far as the Iapydes (near Fiume), were in the first campaign (719)35. either brought back to subjection or now for the first time subdued. It was not a great war with pitched battles of note, but the mountain–conflicts with the brave and desperate tribes, and the capture of the strongholds furnished in part with Roman appliances of war, formed no easy task; in none of his wars did Caesar display to an equal extent his own energy and personal valour. After the toilsome subjugation of the territory of the Iapydes, he marched in the very same year along the valley of the Kulpa to the point where it joins the Save; the strong place Siscia (Sziszek) situated at that point, the chief place of arms of the Pannonians, against which the Romans had never hitherto advanced with success, was now occupied and destined as a basis for the war against the Dacians, which Caesar purposed next to undertake. In the two following years (720, 721)34, 33., the Dalmatians, who had for a number of years been in arms against the Romans, were forced to submit after the fall of their fortress Promona (Promina, near Dernis, above Sebenico). Still more important than these military successes was the work of peace, which was carried on about the same time, and which they were intended to secure. It was doubtless in these years that the ports along the Istrian and Dalmatian coast, so far as they lay within the field of Caesar’s rule, Tergeste (Trieste), Pola, Iader (Zara), Salonae (near Spalato), Narona (at the mouth of the Narenta), as well as Emona (Laybach), beyond the Alps, on the route from Aquileia over the Julian Alps to the Save, obtained, through Caesar’s successor, some of them town–walls, all of them town–rights. The places themselves had probably all been already long in existence as Roman villages; but it was at any rate of essential importance that they were now inserted on a footing of equal privilege among the Italian municipia.

Preparation for the Dacian war. The Dacian war was intended to follow; but the civil war stepped in before it a second time. It summoned the ruler not to Illyricum, but to the East, and the heavings of the great decisive struggle between Caesar and Antonius reached even to the distant region of the Danube. The people of the Dacians, united and purified by king Burebista (Boerebistas, iv. 305)iv. 291., now under king Cotiso, found itself courted by the two antagonists—Caesar was even accused of having sought the king’s daughter in marriage, and having offered to him in turn the hand of his five–year–old daughter Julia. It is easy to understand how the Dacian should, in view of the invasion planned by the father and ushered in by the son with the fortification of Siscia, have attached himself to the side of Antonius; and had he done what people in Rome feared—had he, while Caesar was fighting in the East, penetrated from the north into defenceless Italy; or had Antonius, in accordance with the proposal of the Dacians, sought the decision of the struggle not in Epirus but in Macedonia, and drawn thither the Dacian bands to help him, the fortunes of the war might perhaps have ended otherwise. But neither the one nor the other took place; moreover, at that very time the Dacian state, created by the vigorous hand of Burebista, again went to pieces; internal troubles, perhaps also the attacks from the north by the Germanic Bastarnae and by the Sarmatian tribes that subsequently environed Dacia on all sides, prevented the Dacians from interfering in the Roman civil war, in the decision of which their future also was at stake.

Immediately after that war was decided, Caesar set himself to regulate the state of things on the lower Danube. But, partly because the Dacians themselves were no longer so much to be dreaded as formerly, partly because Caesar now ruled no longer merely over Illyricum, but over the whole Graeco–Macedonian peninsula, the latter became the primary basis of the Roman operations. Let us picture to ourselves the peoples, and the relations of the ruling powers, which Augustus found there.

Macedonian frontier.Macedonia had been for centuries a Roman province. As such, it did not reach beyond Stobi to the north and the Rhodope mountains to the east; but the range of Rome’s power stretched far beyond the frontier proper of the country, although varying in compass and not fixed in point of form. Approximately the Romans seem to have been the leading power at that time as far as the Haemus (Balkan), while the region beyond the Balkan as far as the Danube had been possibly trodden by Roman troops, but was by no means dependent on Rome.[1] Beyond the Rhodope mountains the Thracian dynasts, who were neighbours to Macedonia, especially those of the Odrysians (ii. 309)ii. 290., to whom the greatest portion of the south coast and a part of the coast of the Black Sea were subject, had been brought by the expedition of Lucullus (iv. 41)iv. 39. under the Roman protectorate; while the inhabitants of the more inland territories, especially the Bessi on the upper Maritza, were perhaps called subjects, but were not so, and their incursions into the settled territory as well as retaliatory expeditions into theirs were of constant occurrence. Thus, about the year 694 60., Augustus’ own father, Gaius Octavius, and in the year 711,43. during the preparations for the war against the triumvirs, Marcus Brutus had fought against them. Another Thracian tribe, the Dentheletae (in the district of Sofia), had, even in Cicero’s time, on an incursion into Macedonia, threatened to besiege its capital Thessalonica. With the Dardani, the western neighbours of the Thracians, a branch of the Illyrian family, who inhabited southern Servia and the district of Prisrend, Curio, the predecessor in office of Lucullus, had fought successfully; and ten years later Cicero’s colleague in the consulate, Gaius Antonius, unsuccessfully in the year 692 62.. Below the Dardanian territory, again, there were settled close to the Danube Thracian tribes, the once powerful but now reduced Triballi in the valley of the Oescus (in the region of Plewna), and farther on, along both banks of the Danube to its mouth, Dacians, or, as on the right bank of the river they were usually called by the old national name which was retained also by their Asiatic kinsmen, Mysians or Moesians, probably in Burebista’s time a part of his kingdom, now once more split up into different principalities. But the most powerful people between the Balkan and the Danube at that time were the Bastarnae. We have already on several occasions met with this brave and numerous race, the eastmost branch of the great Germanic family (ii. 308)ii. 290.. Settled, strictly speaking, behind the Transdanubian Dacians beyond the mountains which separate Transylvania from Moldavia, at the mouths of the Danube and in the wide region from these to the Dniester, they were themselves outside of the Roman sphere; but from their ranks especially had both king Philip of Macedonia and king Mithridates of Pontus formed their armies, and in this way the Romans had often already fought with them. Now they had crossed the Danube in great masses, and established themselves north of the Haemus; in so far as the Dacian war, as planned by Cæsar the father and then by the son, had doubtless for its object to gain the right bank of the lower Danube, it was not less directed against them than against the Dacian Moesians on the right bank. The Greek coast towns in the barbarian land, Odessus (near Varna), Tomis, Istropolis, hard pressed by these movements of the nations surging around them, were here as everywhere from the outset clients of the Romans.

At the time of Caesar’s dictatorship, when Burebista was at the height of his power, the Dacians had executed that fearful devastating raid along the coast as far down as Apollonia, the traces of which were not yet obliterated after a century and a half. It may probably have been this invasion that at first induced Caesar the elder to undertake the Dacian war; and after that the son now ruled also over Macedonia, he could not but feel himself under obligation to interfere here at once and with energy. The defeat which Cicero’s colleague, Antonius, had sustained near Istropolis at the hands of the Bastarnae may be taken as a proof that these Greeks needed once more the aid of the Romans.

Subjugation of Moesia by Crassus.In fact soon after the battle of Actium (725)29. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the grandson of him who had fallen at Carrhae, was sent by Caesar to Macedonia as governor, and charged now to carry out the campaign that had twice been hindered. The Bastarnae, who just then had invaded Thrace, submitted without resistance, when Crassus had them summoned to leave the Roman territory; but their retreat was not sufficient for the Roman. He, on his part, crossed the Haemus,[2] at the confluence of the Cibrus (Tzibritza) with the Danube, defeated the enemy, whose king, Deldo, was left on the field of battle; and, with the help of a Dacian prince adhering to the Romans, took prisoners all that had escaped from the battle and sought shelter in a neighbouring stronghold. Without offering further resistance the whole Moesian territory submitted to the conqueror of the Bastarnae. These returned next year to avenge the defeat which they had suffered; but they once more succumbed, and, with them, such of the Moesian tribes as had again taken up arms. Thus these enemies were once for all expelled from the right bank of the Danube, and the latter was entirely subjected to the Roman rule. At the same time the Thracians not hitherto subject were chastised, the national shrine of Dionysos was taken from the Bessi, and the administration of it was entrusted to the princes of the Odrysians, who generally from that time, under the protection of the Roman supreme power, exercised, or were assumed to exercise, supremacy over the Thracian tribes south of the Haemus. The Greek towns, moreover, on the coast of the Black Sea were placed under its protection, and the rest of the conquered territory was assigned to various vassal–princes, on whom devolved accordingly, in the first instance, the protection of the frontier of the empire;[3] Rome had no legions of her own left for these distant regions. Macedonia thereby became an inland province, which had no further need of military administration. The goal, which had been contemplated in those plans of Dacian warfare, was attained.