Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (4 page)

Prompted by Caesar, who called all larger, northern European defended settlements
oppida
(towns), archaeologists sometimes describe the 2nd and 1st centuries
BC
as the period of the ‘
oppidum
culture', signifying acceptance of the widespread urbanization then emerging in barbarian Europe. This phenomenon is an important measure of advance; and there can be little doubt that the major centres, particularly the tribal capitals, contained those skills and services deserving the name of town; such as trade and manufacture, organization and administration. Some would become Roman (and in due course modern) cities. The army's practice of
deductio in plana,
the ‘leading down' of hostile tribes to resettlement areas ‘on the plane', meant that Roman cities would tend to be founded on flat land, sometimes in proximity to former forts.

On the Continent, the definitive phase of Celtic prehistory known as La Tène (after a site on Lake Neuchâtel) was now in flower. Society was dominated by military families. ‘The common people', wrote Caesar, ‘are regarded as little more than slaves.'
12
Control of trade with the Roman world enhanced princely power and gave spur to the arts. Bards were employed to celebrate the feats of the mighty. Artistry, decorative metalwork and jewellery were superb. Carpentry was advanced. Carts, agricultural vehicles and (in Britain) splendid war chariots were constructed; and a network of unpaved roads and inland waterways developed to assist trade. There were substantial corn surpluses. Tribal coinages were minted. By the eve of conquest, descent from the forts and establishment of towns in road, waterway or seaport locations suggests the triumph of trade over fear. Those strongholds would, however, be reoccupied as trouble approached. Mimicking Rome, the Gauls had begun to elect annual magistrates, and in the face of Roman invasion the tribes proved capable of forming alliances with unified leadership and concerted action. There is no knowing how far this swiftly advancing civilization might have gone had not Rome's shadow fallen across its formative years. Certainly modernity would not classify the Celts as ‘barbarian' at all, but rather as an emergent group of nation states, some of which had already left the equivalent of what might today be described as a Third World condition.

Attribution of the term ‘civilized' to the Iron Age must be qualified by the fact of human sacrifice, forbidden under Roman law but familiar to all who lived outside the empire's European frontiers. In the Celtic instance we have a description by the poet Lucan of a shrine near Marseilles, demolished by Caesar in 49
BC
. Though poetic licence and sensational reporting must be allowed for, it indicates the luckless though perhaps occasional fate of captives:

A grove there was, untouched since ancient time,

Whose overarching boughs made roof of gloom

And chill shadow. The gods with gory rites

Were worshipped, altars heaped with grisly

Relics and every tree trunk blotched with human

Blood. Here were gods' grim likenesses, rough-hewn

From crudest timber. They said the ground

Groaned, yews yawed backwards then reared up again;

And from boughs not burning, light glowed weirdly.

Snakes twined and slithered round bare branches.

Here worshippers, fearing to worship, left

The place to the gods …
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Both Celts and Germans had earlier marched on Italy (
c.
390 and 100
BC
); events so bitterly remembered that one may speak of a chronic fear of the transalpine tribes, ensuring that Romans would not feel safe until northern Italy – and ultimately most of western Europe – were under control. The struggle to ingest the Celtic world had already taken two centuries and by the reign of Augustus only the British Isles lay outside the empire. Its most dramatic step, Caesar's eight-year war against Gaul, had brought Rome close to her other northern adversary, the Germans. At the time this narrative begins Augustus had reached a crossroads. Should the eagles venture the Channel against the still free Britons; or the Rhine against Germany? His choice of the latter alternative is the starting point of the second Episode.

Proud, powerful and turbulent, the Celts had equalled – even exceeded – Mediterranean norms in several aspects of technology and artistic expression. But in the more telling areas of cohesion, discipline and organization they were a step behind; sufficient to make them losers in almost every clash with the Roman army. Owing in part to geographical position, they were the chief victims of expansion; and of their wide areas or settlement of influence, only the Scottish Highlands and Ireland would in the end escape Rome's grasp.

How did the Celts fare under Roman rule? Though it was not imperial policy to extirpate the languages or customs of conquered peoples, a four or five-century occupation inevitably diluted native ways. La Tène art withered on contact as its patrons, former Gaulish princes, became Roman provincial nobodies. It would be replaced by empire-wide, melting-pot standards of artistic expression, with neither barbarian vigour nor Mediterranean maturity. On the other hand, peace, improved roads, new markets, urban growth and service in the imperial armed forces all contributed to a stability and prosperity unknown before the conquest.

In the face of Roman aggression the relatively advanced state of the Celtic and related peoples had told against them. Their lands, more developed than the German, boasted better drainage, greater woodland clearance, higher standards of grain production and transportation; all of which provided a sounder basis for conquest than the forest and swamp of central Europe. Furthermore, the Celts were victims of their own braggadocio. An impassioned sense of honour obliged them to seek battle. This was a fatal flaw, for the Roman army was at its best in set-piece encounters. By contrast the Germans surrendered readily and regrouped stealthily. They were masters of hit and run. Despite the stupendous hillforts and an array of armament which dwarfed the German arsenal, German resistance would be the more successful.

By contrast, the Germanic legacy in art, artifacts and fortifications is smaller. In stone building it is especially slight. There were no towns. Villages were of semi-sunken huts: wooden, thatched, windowless and chimneyless; plus occasional timber longhouses, with family at one end and animals at the other. Farming included tillage and animal husbandry, but its scope was subsistence and its method often slash and burn. Barley was the leading staple.

Fighting was largely on foot. Weaponry was light, with spears and shields more common than swords, and helmets or body armour rare. Germany's vast iron deposits had barely been scratched. Pottery was hand-made, while the Celtic was wheel-made. Standards in woodwork, leatherwork and textiles were relatively high. Population was considerable but concentrated in valleys between large 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.
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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 herself ceased to be, her neighbours and subject-nations in many cases still exist. The Sarmatians are an exception. Settling in Europe's least stable corner, they have long been overwhelmed by later travellers along the same Eurasian corridor from which they had themselves emerged during the 2nd century
BC
. Nomads leave few traces; indeed nomadism itself is today a half-forgotten way of life. Nevertheless the Sarmatians are of special interest, being visitors from deeper inside barbarian space and further into prehistory than Europe's other barbarians. Their arrival anticipates even more dangerous enemies, like Huns and Turks, ultimate extinguishers of classical antiquity.

The first Episode describes the steppe, its western end now lost beneath the wheatfields of southern Russia and the Ukraine. In former times it offered the shepherd an alley of grass, linking China to Europe via their respective back doors. In the classical age of Greece it had been the Scyths who travelled this road; in the early Roman period the Sarmatians. Wanderers could of course join or leave the pastoral pipeline almost anywhere on its 5,000-mile flow. The Sarmatians, an Indo-European people, perhaps originated in Afghanistan or north-eastern Iran. By the period of this study their leading tribes had penetrated the Balkans, settling in Thrace (Bulgaria) and Dacia (Romania). These had by now become farmers. The rearguard remained nomadic: mounted shepherds, their families in wagons, knowing no world but grass and sky. They ate, parleyed and slept on horseback. They were ferocious fighters. Women might not marry till they had slain an enemy. On their death Sarmatian kings, like their Scythian forerunners, were interred under mounds surrounded by murdered slaves and slaughtered horses.

The steppe had seen no plough and would not till the 18th century, when Russian soldiery was followed by a mattock-wielding peasantry. Only then would thickest sod be punctured to reveal the world's richest soil – the celebrated black earth, or chernozem – ending the nomadic way of life for ever. On the other hand, though without arable skills, the steppe was far from craftless. Trees in the streambeds provided timber for wagon building, while animal products (wood, hide, sinew, bone and horn) were turned to multiple uses, which included equipping the mounted archer with whip, lasso, saddle, shortbow and scale armour; the last of horn shingles, stitched to leather.