Pax Romana

by Adrian Goldsworthy

  The very presence of the Roman soldiers in such numbers in the frontier zones created new demands and new markets. Trade piggybacked on the state-run system for supplying the armies and soon developed a momentum of its own. The sale and purchase of food, drink and clothing all feature prominently in the correspondence from officers and soldiers in garrisons at opposite ends of the empire. In areas like the Rhineland, such large concentrations of troops and animals could not be maintained solely by the produce of the surrounding area, and from early on these garrisons drew on the resources of peoples beyond the frontier. Sometimes this took the form of a levy on a tribe as part of their alliance with Rome, for instance the cattle taken from the Frisii. More often farmers and herdsmen realised that there was a great demand for their produce and that the Romans paid a good price, even after tolls and levies. Apart from grain and meat, the army required a constant supply of animal hides to make leather tents, saddles and harnesses for animals, belts, boots, clothing and shield covers.5

  Merchants followed army units on campaign. In spite of the Augustan ban on marriage, many soldiers took ‘wives’ and raised families who followed them, so that almost as soon as a fort was built a civilian settlement grew up around it. If the base proved permanent, then these canabae grew and steadily became more organised, and many in time gained the formal status of a vicus – a settlement often covering a larger area than the fort itself. If the army moved on, then some former bases became towns in their own right or were established as colonies. All this meant that, apart from the soldiers and the slaves owned by the army, the establishment of the Roman army in a region greatly increased its population. On the heavily garrisoned Rhine and Danube, population density was higher in the frontier zones occupied by the army than inside the provinces.6

  All these soldiers and civilians required staples and luxuries, some of which came from outside the empire. This traffic was too useful to be stopped, and may even have been essential to support the military and civil populations of the frontier zones, which meant accepting the risk that merchants passed on information of use to potential attackers, or that spies masqueraded as traders, was better than blocking all trade. The danger was reduced by restricting the access of certain groups, but even in this case the imperial authorities wanted the commerce to go on. Apart from foodstuffs and other goods, some communities may also have relied on labour from outside the empire, including the army, which recruited auxiliary soldiers from beyond the frontiers. It also looks as if the transhumant pastoralists on the frontier in North Africa had a symbiotic relationship with more settled communities. Each had goods to trade, while the pastoralists provided much-needed seasonal labour at harvest time. All benefited from the arrangement, so that over the course of a year some of these groups crossed into and left the directly governed Roman provinces, their movements being channelled by the fossatum ditches and walls and supervised by the army.7

  Raids were dramatic episodes in a wider context of peaceful exchange and movement across the frontiers, whether they attacked the provinces or were launched by the Romans as an assertion of power. In some areas raiding by either side was extremely rare, because of the inclinations of the peoples bordering the empire or the effectiveness of the Roman army’s presence as a deterrent. As frontier lines remained in place for generations, there are signs that some communities outside the provinces adapted to supply the needs of the garrisons and civilian settlements, farming more intensively or mining natural resources. Yet the picture is not simple. In some areas few native settlements are known in the lands beyond the Roman frontier, and elsewhere the farms and villages that were occupied show scant signs of contact.8

  TRADE AND TREATIES

  Roman goods – in the sense of things produced within the empire – travelled a long way. Ports like Berenike and Myos Homos on the Red Sea coast of Egypt flourished primarily because of the trade with India and Sri Lanka, making use of the monsoon winds to undertake this great journey, and sometimes calling at ports on the southern Arabian coast. An anonymous first-century AD description lists the wares most in demand in one Indian port:

  . . . wine, principally Italian but also Laodicean and Arabian, copper, tin, and lead; coral and perdidot [a green gemstone]; all kinds of clothing with no adornment or of printed fabric; multi-coloured girdles, eighteen inches wide . . .; Roman money, gold and silver, which commands an exchange at some profit against the local currency . . . For the king there was imported in those times precious silverware, slave musicians, beautiful girls for concubinage, fine wine, expensive clothing with no adornment and choice unguent.9

  The big profits came from sailing back west with the luxuries of the east, silks and cotton, gems, ivory, onyx and pearls, scents and spices – the Romans developed a great fondness for pepper. India was not a single state, but was divided into many kingdoms and there were marked regional and local differences. Kingdoms in the north tended to be bigger and had a monetised economy, and had had contact with Greek culture and settlers for a very long time, something greatly reinforced by the incursion of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. This pre-existing exchange and influence sometimes makes it difficult to know the source of Western influences on artworks. Far more Roman coins have appeared in hoards buried in southern India, where money was rarely used in commercial exchanges, and it looks as if a lot of the Roman gold and silver coins acquired by the locals were used as bullion rather than currency. In the first century AD Pliny the Elder expressed concern at the amount of money leaving the empire every year to purchase luxuries from the east. Such worries did nothing to reduce the scale of imports, and there is no good evidence that it had a seriously detrimental impact on the economic life of the empire. On the whole all parties benefited. Shifts in the balance of power in northern India created favourable conditions for the trade with Rome, and placed more emphasis on the sea lanes than the overland routes along the ancient Silk Road.10

  Roman traders and their employees formed more or less permanent settlements in India and Sri Lanka, while there is evidence for Indian communities residing in the ports along the Red Sea coast. Plenty of Romans – both citizens and in the broader sense of inhabitants of the empire – went beyond the frontiers in search of profit, just as they had done under the Republic. In the early first century AD there was a sizeable community living in the heartland of King Maroboduus of the Marcomani, ‘drawn from their respective homes and implanted on hostile soil first by the commercial privileges, then by the lure of increased profits, and finally forgetting their own country’. During Nero’s reign a Roman equestrian journeyed overland from the Danube frontier to the Baltic, visiting trading posts and markets and bringing back considerable quantities of amber which was used as ornaments in a series of games celebrated in Rome. A tombstone found in Slovakia, well outside the empire, commemorates Quintus Atilius Primus, who served in Legio XV Primigenia as an interpreter and a centurion. After his time in the army he became a trader or businessman (negotiator) – helped no doubt by his ability with local languages – and lived among the Quadi, dying at the grand old age of eighty. Until the great wars during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Marcomani and Quadi enjoyed generally good relations with the Romans, and had ready access to many products from inside the empire. Excavation has revealed buildings constructed in Roman style and even including one or two small bath houses. Some were most likely the homes of men like Atilius, but others reflect an enthusiasm for some aspects of comfortable Roman living on the part of local leaders.11

  Not everyone wanted the same things from the empire. The Greeks and Romans called the people of the Sahara the Garamantes, portraying them sometimes as raiders and enemies, telling fanciful stories of their strangeness, but also admitting that they had a capital, were ruled by one or more kings, and traded in semi-precious stones and other products. Archaeology presents a picture of stable communities of stone houses, as well as larger temples, public buildings and monumental tombs, although it also confirms the
ir warlike prowess, with depictions of warriors on foot and horseback, and even in chariots. In this harsh environment, settlements could only exist around springs and oases, but the Garamantes created irrigation systems to permit them to farm over a wider area. Roman sources emphasise how far they lived from the fertile Mediterranean coast, with the geographer Ptolemy mentioning journeys of twenty and thirty days to reach their villages.12

  There were several campaigns into Garamantian territory under Augustus, and some Garamantes allied with Tacfarinas, but on the whole major military operations by the Roman army were rare in this area. In spite of the distances involved, trade and other peaceful contact were commonplace – in AD 69, when the leaders of Oea recruited Garamantes to help them in their dispute with Lepcis Magna, they clearly knew how to get in touch with their leaders. Coins are rare finds in Garamantian settlements, suggesting that money was not the basis for trade, which either relied on some alternative tokens of wealth or on barter. Domitian’s reign saw a resurgence of conflict, ending in treaties imposed by the Romans. Later in his reign, a Roman representative accompanied the king of the Garamantes on a campaign against the Ethiopians, marching for four months until they reached Lake Chad.13

  The long reach of the Garamantes added to the products they could offer from their own lands, such as gem stones, worked beads and salt. They also supplied exotic African animals for Roman entertainments, and talk of hunting the peoples to their south suggests that they were slavers. Some of their captives are likely to have toiled on Garamantian farms, but many went north to the markets of the Roman province. Ancient sources describe the Garamantians as dark-skinned, but saw them as distinct from the even darker Ethiopians, and it is probable that they resembled the mixed population of modern Berbers. Their activities as slave hunters provided the empire with many of the black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa occasionally mentioned in our sources. The Garamantes were traders and raiders, like so many of the peoples of the ancient world, with trade the most common form of contact, admittedly sometimes selling captives or spoils from raids. Here as elsewhere, the Romans aimed to maintain military dominance in the region, while engaging in mutually beneficial commerce.14

  Evidence for Romans living or journeying outside the empire is rare and usually no more than a mention which does little to explain the background. On the other hand, vast quantities of objects from the Roman Empire are found in the lands outside it, for instance at sites in Scandinavia, the Baltic states and even Russia, apart from in Africa and the east. Trade to these parts of the world receives little or no mention in our sources, so the evidence is almost exclusively archaeological, which presents its own problems of interpretation. A lot of material, especially prestigious and expensive objects such as fine tableware or jewellery, comes from burials. Some tombs in Russia combine goods from the empire with artefacts from the almost equally distant China of the Han dynasty. Roman-made weapons, especially swords, are also surprisingly common finds even at considerable distances from the frontier – in fact more Roman swords have been discovered from sites outside than inside the empire. One reason for this is the large-scale deposits of military equipment found in dozens of Danish bogs that were once lakes – with no fewer than 100 swords at one site. These were mainly Roman in pattern, most made within the empire and sometimes stamped with their makers’ names or symbols of Roman power, combined with local copies.15

  Tacitus mentions that before a battle some German tribes pledged the spoils of victory to the gods, sacrificing prisoners and all their equipment when they won. The deliberate throwing of weapons and other items – sometimes ritually broken beforehand – into lakes in Denmark reflects the same idea, and this practice, combined with local conditions which preserved the deposits, offers a far more detailed picture of the weaponry in use in these regions than can be gained solely from grave offerings. Most bog finds date to the third century AD, so a little later than our period, and the consensus is that they represent the spoils of a defeated enemy, most likely invaders from another tribe, dedicated to the gods in thanks for the victory. The bigger sites have been interpreted as containing equipment for 200 or 300 warriors, with between a fifth and a quarter wielding swords as well as spears and javelins. At Ilerup Ådal in Denmark, a deposit of equipment from the early third century also contained reindeer-bone combs and other items from southern Norway or Sweden, and it looks as if the attackers had come from there to raid. This was the largest deposit at a site where several dedications were made over the course of successive generations.16

  The combination of these ritual dedications and the environmental conditions which turned lakes into peat bogs and preserved many of the objects offers unusually spectacular finds for this region. Other areas outside the empire are less fortunate, and regions where it was not the tradition to bury corpses or ashes with grave goods yield far fewer, if any, Roman treasures. The distribution of Roman goods beyond the frontiers is not even, but this may reflect the cultural practices of the peoples involved or the extent of modern archaeological work in a country as much as it does real differences in access and taste. Under the Principate a lot of wine and other substances previously transported in amphorae were shipped in barrels, which are inherently less likely to leave any trace in the archaeological record, so we cannot hope to follow trade routes in the same way that we can for the Republican era. Objects placed in a grave were usually precious and thus prestigious, and tend to show few traces of heavy usage. In death as in life, possession of such things was a mark of status. In contrast, finds from settlements are more likely to comprise broken or lost items, and may have traces of modification and repair. Fragments of Roman pottery trampled into the floor of a house or the surface of a yard suggest its use in everyday life. In the past, archaeologists were drawn to the rich potential yields of graves, and it is only more recently that ordinary settlements are being investigated in greater detail.

  With these caveats, there are discernible patterns in the types of goods leaving the empire. Prestigious items clearly were important and valued by the elites in many regions. In Europe in particular, the prominence of elaborate tableware for use in feasting, and especially communal drinking, hints at the importance of these things for the elite in many societies. Whether ceramic, silver, occasionally gold and more often bronze, highly decorated vessels to hold, pour and drink wine added to the grandeur of gatherings where a chieftain entertained lesser leaders and his household, displaying his wealth and generosity. Clusters of burials with such objects suggest established dynasties lasting for many generations. Weapons are another indication of the power and prominence of princes and chieftains. Graves containing military equipment show a gradation from a man armed only with one or more spears to ones of higher status, possessing a good sword or the spurs that indicate a horseman. The sheer quantity of swords found in bogs makes clear the substantial numbers of well-equipped warriors in the following of some leaders.

  Coin hoards are another indication that some individuals came into the possession of considerable amounts of wealth, but how they used it is more complex. Tacitus claims that the tribes nearer the frontier made more use of money, and preferred the older silver coins. It certainly does look as if many people outside the empire valued coins which were purer in their silver content – something which over time declined as Roman coins were debased and became tokens rather than intrinsically valuable. Silver coins are most common and bronze coins of the sort used for small purchases are rare, suggesting that these were not used as an active currency. On the other hand, their lesser worth made bronze coins less likely to appear in a hoard, and practices must have varied from region to region and over time. Silver and gold coins made impressive gifts for a chief to present to a favoured follower, even if they were not actually used as money. There is evidence that the Germans used coins as bullion, to be melted down and made into other precious things. Yet this does not appear to be the case in Scotland, where a number of silver hoards have turned up. Since t
his region certainly did not have a monetised economy, it looks as if the coins were valued as portable wealth, to be accepted and given as conspicuous gifts rather than spent.17

  In northern Britain funerary ritual did not require lavish grave goods, so the region has produced no splendid collections of prestigious objects to rival finds on the continent. Yet it is clear that considerable quantities of items from the Roman province of Britannia and from the wider empire reached what is now Scotland. They occur in so many settlements as to suggest that some access to these things was commonplace and not limited to a tiny elite. Samian pottery – vessels that were not cheap, but were not luxury items either inside the empire – was available, if not in the quantities or variety found on sites within the Roman province. This may reflect their cost in relation to local buying power, or local taste. There were also regional variations. The western coast and Isles were less populated and had access to fewer imports than the Lowlands. Wherever they are found, it is always much harder to say how these and other objects were used, and whether employing Roman tableware or brooches meant some adoption of Roman-style cooking or dress. Many items were repaired or turned into something else – for instance, the base of a large pot cut away to make a smaller, shallower vessel. Pieces of decorative pottery and fragments of glass bowls were reshaped into whorls, counters or beads. These were eagerly sought out by the inhabitants of Scotland, who were short of mineral resources, so that most work in copper and bronze came to rely on metal originally brought in from the empire. Recent excavations at a village site near Fienstedt in Germany have shown the stock-piling of scrap metal fragments from the provinces for reuse by local smiths.18

  The usage of Roman material varied considerably, whether it was valued for – or in spite of – its association with Rome, and whether it was something rare and precious, something for everyday use, or simply a commodity to be turned into something else. In every case it must have reached the lands outside the empire in one of three ways, as a gift, through trade or through plunder, but only occasionally will this be suggested by the material itself or the context in which it was discovered. Two richly decorated silver cups found in a grave at Hoby in Denmark had the name Silius scratched on their bases, and were stamped with the name of their manufacturer, Cheirisophos. A senator named Caius Silius commanded a fleet which sailed around the coast to the Baltic during Augustus’ reign, and a few years later under Tiberius was legate of Germania Superior, so that there is a good chance that the cups were his gift to a friendly leader. If so, it is a reminder that diplomatic activity stretched a very long way from the frontiers.19