Edge of Empire: Rome's Frontier on the Lower Rhine

LENDERING & BOSMAN

“In this place, a poverty-stricken tribe lives on high terps and hand-built platforms, which raise their homes above the known high water mark. When the waves wash over the surrounding land, the inhabitants look like seafarers, but when the water subsides they have the appearance of shipwrecked people.”

To him and his comrades, this was the edge of the world. In the sea, he expected to

find fabulous monsters, and on land, savage barbarians.

Every ancient author writing about the Low Countries, was preoccupied with the complete contrast between the civilized people of the Roman Empire and the tribes of noble savages or barbarians living outside it. Julius Caesar exploited this preconception to enhance his own reputation, boasting that he had overcome the ‘bravest of all Gauls’; Tacitus employed the same stereotypes when he described the Batavian Revolt; and, in Late Antiquity, the Franks were still described as resembling monsters.

The reality was different. The presence of the Roman army along the River Rhine radically changed the way of life in the small Roman province of Germania Inferior, and the need to maintain and feed this large army became a significant incentive for economic change. The

to resemble their occupiers.

Historian Jona Lendering and archaeologist Arjen Bosman have combined their considerable expertise to create a successful synthesis of historical and archaeological evidence in this history of Rome’s Lower Rhine frontier. Their award-winning book is now available in English for the first time.

“An excellent overview and source collection.” –Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Cover design by Andrew J. Brozyna, www.ajbdesign.com

Rome’s Frontier on the Lower Rhine

tribes living along the lower reaches of the Rhine and close to the North Sea gradually began

EDGE OF EMPIRE

T

hat’s how a Roman officer described the people living on the shores of the North Sea.

EDGE OF

EMPIRE Rome’s Frontier on the Lower Rhine

JONA LENDERING & ARJEN BOSMAN

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EDGE OF EMPIRE Rome’s Frontier on the Lower Rhine

By Jona Lendering and Arjen Bosman

Karwansaray Publishers 2012

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Published in 2012 by Karwansaray BV Weena 750 3014 DA Rotterdam The Netherlands www.karwansaraypublishers.com © KARWANSARAY BV 2012-10-08 The cover design incorporates elements symbolizing the Roman presence along the Lower Rhine.

Over the stark landscape of a river delta, we superimposed three face-masked helmets which belonged to troopers of the Roman cavalry units based, and in some cases recruited, in this area. From left to right, they were found on the Nijmegen Kops Plateau, in the river Waal near the same city, and in the Canal of Corbulo near Leiden. The background consists of the text of a funerary inscription of a soldier buried “at the dam at Carvium” (modern Herwen, NL), an extra indication of Roman attempts to engineer the waterways in this region of the empire. More information on this stone at: http://tinyurl.com/9rkuca9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-94-90258-05-4 Translated and expanded English edition of Jona Lendering and Arjen Bosman, De rand van het Rijk (© Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep; Amsterdam 2010).

Translation by Marie Smit-Ryan Copy-editing by Duncan B. Campbell Maps designed by Carlos García Unless otherwise indicated, all photos © Livius.org, Military Legacy, or Karwansaray BV Illustrations José Antonio Germán, Johnny Shumate, and Graham Sumner Design and typesetting by MeSa Design, Elst, the Netherlands Cover design by Andrew J. Brozyna, Longmont, CO, USA Printed by High Trade BV, Zwolle, the Netherlands Printed in the EU

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Contents

List of maps

V

Introduction

VI

1 Preconceptions 2 War on the Edge of the World 3 Romanization Begins 4 The Other Side of the Rhine 5 A Turning Point?

6 Chauki and Frisians 7 Romanization 8 The Batavian Revolt 9 A Frontier Zone in Peacetime 10 From Gold to Iron to Rust 11 Militarization 12 Transformation

2 10 30 36 48 64 78 92 108 136 146 158

Epilogue

170

Appendix

172

Acknowledgements

176

Literature

177

Notes

178

Index locorum

184

General Index

185

III

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List of maps

Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul

13

The Low Countries in the Late Iron Age

15

The Battle of the Sabis

16

Agrippa’s Roads

32

Drusus’ Campaigns in Germany

41

Tiberius’ Campaigns in Germany

45

The Roman Occupation of Lower Germany

49

The German Campaigns of Ahenobarbus and Germanicus

58

The Low Countries in the First Century

61

The Batavian Revolts

96

The Low Countries in the Second Century

106

Xanten

115

The Low Countries in the Fourth Century

143

Frankish Expansion

164

V

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Introduction

Half a million pages, printed on both sides: a twenty-five-metre high paper tower could be built from the number of reports Dutch archaeologists wrote between the first publication of this book in Dutch, in 2000, and the revised edition, in 2010. The data explosion is not only confined to the Netherlands. In the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, the number of excavations carried out between 2005 and 2011 increased sevenfold. There appears to be no end to the information coming to light about the Roman Empire’s border along the Lower Rhine, the daily life of the province of Germania Inferior and its preoccupation with supplying the needs of the Roman army, and the later transformation of this region into a powerful Frankish kingdom.1 Nor can two authors know everything. Nevertheless, they thought it worth the effort to weave the many different strands into a compact, accessible history of the Low Countries in Roman times.

In the first centuries of our era, the area between Cologne and Boulogne-sur-Mer developed into one of the most prosperous parts of Europe. On a number of occasions, its potential was converted into power: in AD 69, it became the Emperor Vitellius’ power base when carrying out his coup d’état; in the third century AD, as the Gallic Empire, its emperors taught their colleagues in the Roman Empire how to reorganize the Empire’s defence; in the fifth century, the Frankish rulers of this region guaranteed that Late-Roman tradition was continued and created a mighty kingdom.

This rise to power is remarkable, because in the Roman Empire, the provinces of Germania Inferior and Belgica had been outlying districts. They were particularly important because they were part of the Rhine border as well as being its hinterland, thereby forming the buffer protecting Gaul. The texts from this period written about the region make fascinating reading, even though, more often than not, they are about war.

What strikes one is that writers had a very poor knowledge of these provinces. Their stories are full of stereotypes, and anyone making a study of the Low Countries in Antiquity would be well advised to first separate facts from fantasy. This works best when sources are continually compared with the actual archaeological finds.

However, it is these very preconceptions that make the texts so entertaining. Even before Caesar subdued Belgica, his countrymen were convinced that there, on the edge of the world disc, very brave barbarians lived: valiant warriors who fought their enemies ruthlessly and without mercy. In his book about the Gallic War, Caesar manipulates the expectations of his readers by referring, over and over again, to barbarian customs, thereby giving his victory over the Belgic tribes an extra brilliance. And not even one hundred and fifty years after Caesar, Tacitus portrays the leader of the Batavian Revolt as a noble savage, although this Julius Civilis had received a Roman upbringing, had served for twenty-five years in the Roman armies and enjoyed Roman civil rights. A few centuries later, the Christian writer Salvian attempted to drive home to his readers the evil of their ways by pointing out that even the barbarians in the Low Countries led purer lives, since they did not commit all sins at the same time!

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The authors of Edge of Empire have given many lectures in which the preconceptions of classical Antiquity about the population of Germania Inferior have been discussed. After the lectures there were always people who maintained that one still finds this kind of stereotyping today, in reports about the inhabitants of unfamiliar parts of the world. It is true, we can only recognize the preconceptions in Antiquity because we experience similar ones in our own time. Conversely, the realization that certain misconceptions that exist today were also to be found in Antique society, impresses on us just how deeply they are rooted.

A study of these is one reason to read about the Low Countries under in Roman times, but the reader must feel free not to take this all too seriously and, we hope, just find pleasure in reading Edge of Empire.

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1 Preconceptions • The Entry of a God The entry of a god: that is how it must have seemed to the inhabitants of the Low Countries when, in the summer of 57 BC, the army of Gaius Julius Caesar marched into their lands. As tens of thousands of heavily-armed Roman legionaries trekked through the countryside of the Scheldt and the Meuse, the natives were awe-struck. One group of warriors surrendered at the first sight of a Roman siege tower. The sentiments of these Belgian tribes must have been similar to those of the German chieftain two generations later, who, on seeing a Roman army for the first time, requested a meeting with the enemy general. For a while he was silent in the general’s presence and then declared his joy at having the privilege of looking upon a god.

Yet, the invaders were not complete strangers to the natives. Through trading contacts, the Belgians had already developed a taste for Mediterranean products. A chieftain who wanted to cut a dash poured Italian wine for his guests. From merchants’ tales, they must have known that the Romans lived many days’ journey to the south on the shores of a big sea. The merchants, however, had never been there themselves; they had learned this from other merchants who had also heard it at second hand. The native inhabitants will have heard that Rome was a town, and in their minds’ eye they will have pictured it as an immense village with houses of stone, but much more would have been beyond the realms of their understanding. That the population of Rome’s capital lived in tenements of four or five storeys – if indeed they ever came to hear of this – would have been dismissed by them as a great joke.

Now that they were confronted by the race that, a year earlier, had only been a name to them, it turned out that the tall tales they had heard were based on fact. More than that, they must have realized that even the wildest tale did not do justice to the reality. And this was just the beginning. Up to now, they had only seen the Roman legionaries, the objects they lugged with them, and the wooden camps they built. Nobody in their wildest dreams could have foreseen the changes that they were about to face.

• Carthaginian, Greek and Roman Geographical Knowledge The Romans were just as much in the dark about their opponents. Worse still, the geographical knowledge they possessed had not been accumulated through any effort of their own, but had been picked up second-hand from the races they had conquered in the course of centuries, such as the Greeks and the Carthaginians. The latter were regarded as excellent seafarers who had even ventured onto the hazardous Atlantic Ocean. In the sixth century BC, one explorer, whose name has been passed down to us by the Romans as Himilco, went in search of the region where tin came from. His quest was important because this metal was (and is) essential for the manufacture of bronze. Although his own account of his travels has been lost, we know from Roman sources that the Carthaginian sea captain reached his goal and must therefore have landed in Brittany or Cornwall.2 It is not reported anywhere that he sailed the North Sea, but it is possible that he also went in search of the place where amber

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came from. That would explain why, from the sixth century BC, Greek authors speculated about a northern amber river with the name Eridanus.3 As we shall see, this soft mineral probably came from Heligoland and the Baltic Sea region, from where a trade route ran to Bratislava and northern Italy.

The Carthaginians jealously guarded the secret of the sea route to the Tin Islands. Operating out of the ports of Malaga, Tangier and Cadiz, they saw to it that not one foreign ship managed to reach the Atlantic Ocean. Any strange ships they encountered to the west of Sardinia were sunk with no quarter given.4 In a treaty that the Carthaginians concluded with the still-small city state of Rome in the sixth century BC, the latter agreed that they would not venture into western waters, and we can assume that there were similar treaties agreed between Carthage and other cities.5 Despite these measures, the Carthaginians did not manage to completely monopolize ocean-going trade, as the Greeks had an outpost in Marseilles from which merchants travelled up the Rhône to the north. In settlements such as Lyon they exchanged their goods with native traders, some of whom transported tin up the Loire or the Seine, while others came along the Rhine and Saône with amber.

Nevertheless, the Greeks knew precious little about the lands to the northwest. This is not surprising as these regions were virtually inaccessible. They could not be reached overland – it is not very likely that merchants from Marseille ever got further north than Lyon – or by sea, as the Carthaginians blocked the sea passage. Still, there were reports about the far west. One of these was The Ocean by Pytheas of Marseilles. This Greek seafarer claimed that, in around 325 BC, he had succeeded in slipping past the Carthaginian blockade and had sailed the northern seas. Modern scholars assume that he did indeed reach the British Isles. However, Pytheas also claimed that, further north, he had seen drift-ice that had come from a ‘frozen sea’, and that he had reached a place where amber could be found.6 The Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder writes that Pytheas maintained that amber came from the German tribe of the Guiones, who lived on the coastal plain along the Ocean. This plain was called Metuonis and was 1000 kilometres long.

At one day’s sail lay the island of Abalus where amber was washed up in spring. Pytheas went on to say that this was refuse from the frozen sea and that the inhabitants used it as fuel and sold it to the neighbouring Teutons. The Greek scholar Timaeus also believed this, but he called the island ‘the Royal Island’.7 We would have to look for Abalus near Jutland, where the Teutons lived. The most obvious candidate is Heligoland, where amber is indeed to be found and which lies about a day’s sail from the north-German coast. That amber was used for fuel poses more of a problem, as it is most unlikely that the inhabitants of Abalus were not aware of the value of the product they sold. A possible explanation is that Pytheas was talking about turf and that Pliny got matters confused.

On the way to Heligoland, the Greek explorer must have sailed along the Flemish and Dutch coasts, but his description has been lost. However, his younger contemporary Ephorus of Cyme, an historian, remarked that in the northern coastal region more people died in the struggle against the water than in fights with their fellow men,8 and it is plausible that he picked up this interesting piece of information from Pytheas. Be that as it may, it is a description that typified the Low Countries and it has lost little of its validity throughout the centuries.

This is the sum total of what the Greeks knew for sure about the Low Countries. The Romans adopted this very scant knowledge after they conquered the Greeks in the second century BC. Of course, the Romans had their own ideas about the tribes of the north, usually referring to them as ‘Gauls’. Although these tribes lived across a large area on both sides

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of the Alps, they all spoke the same Celtic language and had a material civilization which archaeologists categorize under the La Tène cultures.

In 387 or 386 BC, Gauls from the Po valley had, without any warning, invaded and sacked Rome. The terror this inspired in the Romans was not easily erased and they never quite lost their fear of the northerners. Notwithstanding this, at the end of the third century BC, the Romans extended their rule to the area they called Cisalpine Gaul (‘on this side of the Alps’), namely the Po valley. A century later, they annexed the region to the west of the Alps and formed it into a Roman province, which still today is called Provence. The more northerly regions remained unexplored, and the Romans called the inhabitants of these regions slightingly ‘long-haired Gauls’.

Gauls, Celts and La Tène

The word ‘Celts’ is one of the most problematic expressions in ancient anthropology.

Perhaps the word originally referred only to the peoples immediately north of Marseilles, but as early as the fifth century BC, the Greek researcher Herodotus used the name for the inhabitants of a much larger area which embraced both present-day Port-Vendres (at the foot of the east Pyrenees) and the source of the Danube (in the Black Forest).

A century later, Ephorus used the same word for everyone from the west.

Later writers use the term ‘Celtic’ as a synonym for ‘barbarian’. In this way, the Greek author Cassius Dio refers to the tribes east of the Rhine as Celts, although these peoples are called Germans in almost all other sources. (When Dio talks about Germans, he is referring to the inhabitants of the Roman provinces of Germania Inferior and Germania Superior.) Following on from Dio’s choice of word is the use of the term ‘Celts’ by Christian writers of the Middle Ages, to refer to the peoples of all the regions not subjected to the Romans, such as the inhabitants of Ireland.

The use of the word ‘Celts’ in this way would have caused raised eyebrows amongst the classical writers, because in all this linguistic confusion there was one thing that everyone agreed upon: the inhabitants of the British Isles were not Celts. It was Caesar’s opinion, for example, that they were Belgian tribes who had sailed westward, and although we do not have to accept this unquestioningly, his remark proves that he did not see the Britons as Celts. The geographer Strabo also distinguishes the Britons from the Celts.

From ancient times, the Romans called the races living in the Po valley and in central France ‘Gauls’, but Caesar asserts that they called themselves Celts (see page 10).

Presumably, it was the other way around: the people who called themselves Gauls were called Celts by others. Be that as it may, it is pretty certain that the region Caesar referred to as Celtic was linguistically distinct from the Aquitanian-speaking region in the southwest and the Belgian-speaking region in the north (see page 10-11). The language spoken by Caesar’s Celts is related to a number of ancient languages that linguists began referring to as the Celtic language group. The distribution of these races corresponds roughly with that of the small number of Iron Age cultures that fall under the ‘La Tène’ umbrella.

Therefore, one cannot actually use the term ‘Celtic’ at all, let alone use it to refer to people who, from an archaeological point of view, belong to the La Tène culture but speak a German language. When the word is used by the authors of this book, it is usually to designate the language group.

The Romans were fascinated by the haircut of the barbarians of the north.

Independent Gaul was called Gallia Comata, ‘Long-haired Gaul’; Tacitus was to comment on the painted hair of the Batavian leader Julius Civilis, and Sidonius Apollinaris would, as late as the fifth century AD, notice the peculiar hair style of the Frankish warriors. This coin, minted by Julius Caesar, shows a British warrior with a remarkable haircut (private collection).

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Besides Gauls, the Romans also identified Germans. At the end of the second century BC, two tribes of Germans, referred to in our sources as Cimbri and Teutoni, had left their motherland, Jutland, to trek south. There, they were defeated in battle by the Romans, who noted that the migrants had a much simpler way of life than the Gauls and spoke a different language. As a consequence, the Romans began to differentiate between these two peoples. In the following chapters you will see that this differentiation is open to question.

To sum up: in the northwest there lived barbarian Gauls and even more savage Germans, and somewhere in their lands, tin and amber were mined. This was all the Romans knew of the area north of the Alps. They did not even know about the existence of the Rhine before the beginning of the first century BC.

• Civilization and Barbarism The Greeks and the Romans may not have known much about the northwest of Europe, but what they did not know, they made up. An example is the Greek author, Xenophon of Lampsacus, who, around 100 BC, gave the first ethnological description of the people in the far north. He tells that at a three days’ sail from the northern coast there is an island of immense size called Balcia.

Pytheas calls it ‘the Royal Island’. The Bird Islands are also mentioned – there, the inhabitants live on birds’ eggs and oats – and other islands where people are born with horses’ hooves and so they are called ‘Horse footers’. On other islands again, you can find the ‘All ears’ people: the inhabitants have ears of such extraordinary size that they cover the rest of their otherwise naked bodies.9 Pure fantasy, as you can gather. Fortunately, there were Romans who saw through such unreliable accounts. The quote here has been passed down to us by Pliny, who mentions at the same time that Xenophon had a doubtful reputation. Nevertheless, this did not stop Pliny from passing it on, and we may assume that such ideas were always in circulation. Even critical minds were influenced by them. In this way, leading ancient scholars sometimes entertained quite strange ideas about social geography.

The central theme in these accounts was always the contrast between the civilized Greeks and Romans on the one hand, and the rest of the human race – the barbarians – on the other. Further, the world was divided up roughly into a number of concentric rings. The inner ring consisted of Greece and Italy, which were almost completely surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea. Encircling this group were the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa.

And, finally, there was an outer ring consisting of the large world sea, the Ocean. The civilized world was in the centre, and the ancients assumed that, where the earth bordered on the Ocean, there lived barbarians and wild people who were hardly distinguishable from the freaks and monsters that lived beyond the edge of the world. Every Greek and Roman knew the stories about the monsters in the world sea and knew that, in this place, primordial chaos reigned.

Civilization and barbarism were in many respects the antitheses of each other. To start with, there was a question of contrasting geography. The civilized Greeks and Romans lived along rivers and on coastal plains; the barbarians, on the other hand, lived in forests and mountains. (The logical conclusion was that the shore of the Ocean resembled a forested fjord landscape.) The different geography translated into contrasting modes of production: while the civilized areas had a fertile soil which made agriculture possible, the poor soil of the barbarians only supported stock-breeding. Counterposed to the civilized, bread-eating people were the nomadic barbarians with a diet of meat and dairy products.

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It goes without saying that their way of life was also very different. The Greeks and Romans could live in towns and did not need to carry weapons because they lived in peace with their neighbours. In their free time, they could relax, for instance, by studying. (The Greek word scholê means “free time”.) The barbarians, on the other hand, never remained in one place for long. They were constantly on the move with their herds through the wild, mountainous countryside. They always had to be on the alert for cattle thieves; that is, if they were not on cattle raids themselves. Consequently, they always carried weapons. While the life of the civilized town-dweller was regulated by laws and ethics, the barbarians lived in isolated villages and did not put much store by laws and morals. By the same token, the barbarians did not respect the laws of hospitality and did not baulk at either seeing their guests as edible delicacies for their own consumption, or offering them as sacrifices to appease their gods.

Naturally, good taste only existed in the towns around the Mediterranean Sea. There, people were well-coifed and wore chitons, tunics or chic togas, while on the edge of the world, barbarians had moustaches and beards and dressed – that is, if they did not go naked – in trousers. You could not get anything more uncivilized than that!

According to this view, the barbarians found themselves in a vicious circle. They lived in an inhospitable wilderness where it was impossible to till the land. Consequently, they had to go on raids to survive, and, because of that, lived in a permanent state of war. If it should occur to any of them to grow crops, it would be a futile exercise, as it would not be long before they would have to abandon their land. Under these existential circumstances, any form of cultural activity was impossible. In the view of the Greeks and Romans, this would surely lead to social disorder, causing the barbarians to avoid human company and to prefer the isolation of the inhospitable countryside. The only escape from all this misery was to be defeated by the Romans, who were then quite willing to teach civility and morals to those they defeated.

Until it came to that, the barbarians were belligerent, hot-headed and unreliable. Because they were always fighting, there was no time for reflection. That is why they valued strength above reason and adhered to a simple warrior ethic. Their lives centred on values such as honour and courage. Because they never took time to think deeply, they quickly warmed to any undertaking where they could display their courage and thus gain fame.

Generally speaking, they were always impatient for change. They never stayed long in one area, and replaced their leaders frequently; they did not abide by agreements, and marital fidelity was unknown to them.

At least, that is how the Romans thought about the tribes that lived on the northern coast of the European continent. In the first place, their view was based on partly or wholly distorted information about the inhabitants of remote lands. In the second place, this caricature sprang from the reversal of what the Greeks and Romans regarded as normal. A reader in Antiquity was not surprised if a writer stated that the men of some peripheral tribe did not shave their faces but the back of their heads.10 In the third place, this image was based on transferring the customs and characteristics of one barbarian tribe to another. Nobody thought it was unusual that Tacitus applied to the Germans the Persian custom of making important decisions when inebriated.11 How little of what they concluded actually corresponded to the truth is evidenced by the fact that not one of the writers in Antiquity ever mentioned the hunting weapons used by the inhabitants of the Low Countries. If they had really seen the hunters of the north, they would certainly have described their weapons: after all, their boomerangs must have been quite striking. But not one source mentions them, so that the archaeologists who dug them up were completely unprepared for such a find.

Even critical minds, such as the geographer Strabo, were influenced by these caricatured descriptions of the lives of the people in the north. They did, however, shade some nuances into their picture. They recognized that the barbarians displayed noble characteristics, while

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Reconstruction of an Iron Age boy from the area of The Hague.

He uses a boomerang (Drawing

by Johnny Shumate).

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in the civilized world there was the temptation to descend into decadence and unmanly behaviour. Moreover, they recognized that absolute barbarism did not exist anywhere and that, even in the Graeco-Roman world, there were illiterate peasants. But Strabo and likeminded intellectuals also knew that the people living on the periphery led simple lives and were tempestuous fighters.

What the Romans who marched into the Low Countries in 57 BC knew about the territory of their campaign came down to this: there was ebb and flow; the days were not always the same length as they were in the south; and aggressive Gauls, and even more war-hungry Germans, lived there. And because the inhabitants were not really home-loving and were wont to trek south every now and then, a preventive attack on their homelands could be seen as a legitimate form of self-defence for the Romans.

The Romans’ decision to attack must have been made in the last months of 58 BC. General Gaius Julius Caesar had carried out successful operations along the Saône in the previous summer and had defeated a group of Germans near the Rhine. Full of self-confidence, he decided to proceed further north as far as the Ocean. Some time earlier, he had impressed the Senate by marching along the ocean coast of Portugal as far as Galicia. Here, he had found gold mines and had returned a rich man. Who would not want to repeat such successes?

The push to the edge of the world was the metaphorical leap into the void. We already discussed how little the Romans knew of this area – a place that had never been visited by Mediterranean merchants and was only known from the accounts of seafarers who, centuries before, had sailed along its coast. It is no coincidence that Caesar’s Gallic War begins with a number of explanatory remarks about the land of the long-haired barbarians.

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LENDERING & BOSMAN

“In this place, a poverty-stricken tribe lives on high terps and hand-built platforms, which raise their homes above the known high water mark. When the waves wash over the surrounding land, the inhabitants look like seafarers, but when the water subsides they have the appearance of shipwrecked people.”

To him and his comrades, this was the edge of the world. In the sea, he expected to

find fabulous monsters, and on land, savage barbarians.

Every ancient author writing about the Low Countries, was preoccupied with the complete contrast between the civilized people of the Roman Empire and the tribes of noble savages or barbarians living outside it. Julius Caesar exploited this preconception to enhance his own reputation, boasting that he had overcome the ‘bravest of all Gauls’; Tacitus employed the same stereotypes when he described the Batavian Revolt; and, in Late Antiquity, the Franks were still described as resembling monsters.

The reality was different. The presence of the Roman army along the River Rhine radically changed the way of life in the small Roman province of Germania Inferior, and the need to maintain and feed this large army became a significant incentive for economic change. The

to resemble their occupiers.

Historian Jona Lendering and archaeologist Arjen Bosman have combined their considerable expertise to create a successful synthesis of historical and archaeological evidence in this history of Rome’s Lower Rhine frontier. Their award-winning book is now available in English for the first time.

“An excellent overview and source collection.” –Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Cover design by Andrew J. Brozyna, www.ajbdesign.com

Rome’s Frontier on the Lower Rhine

tribes living along the lower reaches of the Rhine and close to the North Sea gradually began

EDGE OF EMPIRE

T

hat’s how a Roman officer described the people living on the shores of the North Sea.

EDGE OF

EMPIRE Rome’s Frontier on the Lower Rhine

JONA LENDERING & ARJEN BOSMAN