With this brief list of parallels and precedents to the German frontier policy which we have ascribed to Augustus, we hope to have shown that there was no striking innovation involved therein, nothing really beyond the range of the expedients and experiences of an ancient statesman. In thus attributing to Augustus in Germany a policy bearing so modern a designation as that of the “buffer state”, we feel convinced that we are not modernizing the ancients, but only recognizing how very ancient some of our supposedly modern expedients of statesmanship in reality are.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The whole history of Iran has been dominated by the ever recurring struggle with Turan, the barbarians of the northeastern steppes and deserts, down even to the 18th century. Compare Ed. Meyer’s excellent characterization of this relation, Gesch. d. Alt., III, p. 103 ff.
[2] The feeble Greek colonies on the north coast of the Black Sea, though dependent upon the Empire, were hardly an integral part thereof, and really existed more through the favor of the barbarians, for selfish personal ends, than by reason of their own strength or the protecting arm of Rome. They were little more than trading posts preserved for their mutual serviceability, not the frontiers of empire. Compare Mommsen, Röm. Gesch., V, p. 277 ff., especially 286.
[3] See V. Chapot, La frontière de l’Euphrate de Pompée à la conquête arabe, Paris, 1907, pp. 377, 381.
[4] Upon the general inadequacy of rivers as frontier lines there are some good remarks by Lord Curzon, The Romanes Lecture: Frontiers, Oxford, 1908, p. 20 ff., and Miss Ellen Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment, New York, 1911, p. 360 ff. It is only rarely in fact that a large river actually forms a boundary line; exceptions like the Rio Grande, a short stretch on the upper St. Lawrence, the La Plata, the Amur, the lower Aras and the lower Danube, only emphasize the rareness of the phenomenon. Besides, rivers play a relatively slight rôle in military history; they can be crossed only too easily, if not in the direct face of the foe, as at Wagram, Fredericksburg, or the Yalu, at least at some point above or below. In the long course of the German wars the river Rhine plays a most subordinate part; battles were fought freely on one side or the other, but none, that we have noted, for its actual passage, unless an exception be made of an action of Drusus in 12 B. C., which Dio 54, 32, 1, thus describes: “Having watched for the Kelts until they were crossing the Rhine he cut them to pieces.” This may have been a battle for a crossing, but it seems much more plausible that it was a mere attack from an ambuscade, the river playing merely an incidental part. Of course these remarks apply only to the period of mobile armies. In modern trench warfare, with solid lines hundreds of miles long, any ditch, even such as the trifling Yser canal, may be a formidable obstacle; but this is a wholly new phase of military tactics.
[5] The North American Indians were incomparably less numerous and more widely scattered than the Germans, but our Indian wars were frequent, difficult, and costly to life and property. Probably no other nations with which civilized peoples have had to deal have made such a cult of valor and of rapine as did the ancient Germans and the North American Indians.
[6] O. Seeck (Kaiser Augustus, p. 110 f.) only partly recognizes the difficulties involved in the constant pushing forward of the lines of empire. It is wrong to ascribe to Augustus the absurdities which a policy of indefinite advance entails. Cf. p. 67.