Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge Read Online Free PDF Page B

areas of thicket. Roads, or rather prehistoric tracks, were bad and circuitous. The heartland presented major difficulties of development: a waterlogged plain and, to its south, hills dense with forest. Biggest was the Hercynian Forest. Caesar was told it took nine days to cross from north to south. Eastwards no one knew its extent. 14 Though the Germans were generally sedentary, the habit of solving problems by migration remained common. The area of Germanic settlement was double that of present-day Germany. It included southern Scandinavia and what are now the Netherlands, plus Poland to the Vistula and what was till recently known as Czechoslovakia, as well as Germany proper. The Germans, barbarians of the forest, met the Sarmatians, barbarians of the grassland, near today’s Slovakian-Hungarian border. (One must, of course, allow for the absence of the Slavic peoples from central Europe during Roman times, as well as those later Balkan arrivals, the Magyars, Bulgars and Turks.)
    Cornelius Tacitus (whose approximate dates were AD 55–120) is rightly regarded as a supreme literary stylist as well as Rome’s greatest historian. A master of minimalism, he pared description and squeezed comment, gaining in expressive power but losing something of the juice from which history is brewed. His fascination with the Germans perhaps began in youth, when his father may have governed Gallia Belgica, a province adjacent to the Rhine. In the Germania, an ethnographic work, Tacitus makes important observations on Germanic society: notably that it was in some respects egalitarian, with shared decisions and a sense of personal liberty, unknown to the Celts. He also wrote of the German campaigns of Augustus and Tiberius in his last and greatest work, the Annals, recognizing how the combination of intransigent tribes and intractable terrain, plus a non-existent infrastructure, made Germany a poor prospect for absorption.
    A century earlier it had been less easy to judge the German War as a mistake. History seemed to lead Rome toward it. A record of success on every front, in all climates and terrains, against a wide range of enemies, lent it support. This was, nevertheless, deceptive. Rome’s Mediterranean and Near Eastern subjects had largely belonged to the Punic or Hellenistic empires. They were accustomed to obedience and taxation. For them, as for the Celtic underclass, conquest merely meant a change of master. By contrast Germany had never known a foreign yoke and it made her an obdurate resister. The conflict would remind the caesars that the easy way to get an empire had been to acquire someone else’s; the hard way to chase irreconcilable barbarians through bog and bush.
    In summary, we need not disparage Germanic attainment either in artisanship or cultural levels. The final centuries of the Iron Age were a time of substantial advance, in which the Germans participated; though less than the Celts who were, after all, the Mediterranean’s nearest neighbour. In the early decades of our era, however, with Rome in Gaul and on the upper Danube, free Celtica dwindles and it is Germany’s turn to be the nearest neighbour. Development accelerates accordingly. As time passes the Germans will prove better learners than the Romans. In this sense they will be the Japanese of antiquity: absorbing from the Roman west the ability to combine; from the Sarmatian south the skills of horsemanship; from their own, Scandinavian north, the capabilities of weapon-forging and shipbuilding; as well as being both stimulated and shaken into motion by the migratory upheavals which surrounded and involved them during the later Roman period. All this, combined with their widening world picture, points toward two momentous achievements: the 5th-century transformation of the western Roman empire into the Germanic kingdoms and – some three centuries later – the Viking Age.
    It is a curious outcome of history that, while Rome