Riparian systems often hold associations with movement, communication, and connectivity, but for Romans, rivers often served as frontier lines and could be construed as barriers between civilization and foreign barbarity. Timothy Hart has written a smart monograph that addresses this incongruity by focusing on the Danube frontier. Beyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome offers a compelling model for understanding Rome’s relations with people beyond the limes. The study adopts a borderland perspective which views both sides of the Danube (Roman and non-Roman) as a single, interconnected region, examining the Danube and its adjacencies from the first through the fifth century CE. Hart pairs the borderland perspective with a study of the genealogy and implementation of Roman ideology, which viewed peoples on the other side of the Danube as uncompromisingly ‘barbarian’. Thus, at its core, this is a book about Roman policy toward the many different trans-Danubian peoples whom Romans collectively labeled Scythian, and the impact that the ethnic assumptions embedded in Roman policies had on the social structures, political ties and economy of a host of different peoples living in the empire’s shadow.
On the whole, the book is a superb success. Hart demonstrates nimble dexterity disentangling the relationship of ethnographic tradition to political rhetoric, archaeological evidence to the environment and topography to narratives for migration and settlement. The book is sensitive but not subservient to the well-entrenched Anglophone and non-Anglophone historiographies of the region, and Hart’s command of a burgeoning archive of Danubian material culture derived from field archaeology is impressive. The real contribution of this study, however, is to offer fresh insights into Rome’s interactions with ‘barbarians’ beyond the limes and Hart accomplishes this by placing two distinctive textual voices in conversation with one another: first, the ethnographic discourse (what Hart terms the ‘Scythian Logos’) that Romans applied to a host of different peoples (whether Sarmatian, Dacian, Marcomanni or Goths); and second, the voice of Roman policy, which Hart reconstructs from a mosaic of sources related to various treaties compacted with these peoples during successive imperial reigns (Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Aurelian, Constantine, Valens and Theodosius all feature prominently). The result is a satisfying, well-informed and insightful re-assessment of the complex intersection of Roman ethnographic perception and Roman Realpolitik.
The book is organized in two parts. Part One comprises an introduction and three chapters that establish methodological frameworks for understanding the incongruity of rhetoric and reality in the Danubian borderland. Part Two comprises three chapters that examine, in chronological sequence, case studies for how the Roman state enacted policies and treaties with people settled on the other side of the Middle and Lower Danube. The introduction outlines the concept of the borderland as a heuristic for understanding the many connections that straddled the Danube, underscoring the artificiality of the Roman idea of a frontier. As Hart notes, this approach to the Danube has been lacking in scholarship.
Chapter 1 provides a survey of the major topographical and climatological features of region. Hart finds that although the region comprises a complex system of mountains, rivers, broken foothills, and intermittently wooded steppe, the common factor characterizing the region is gradual transition from one topography to another, which generally facilitates movement and contact. One notable exception to this overall picture of connectivity that later becomes important to Hart’s explanation of settlement and politics north of the Danube is the relative isolation of the Middle Danube (the Hungarian Plain) from the neighboring micro-region to the east, the Lower Danube, which remained exposed to the so-called ‘Scythian Corridor’, a key point of access to nomadic populations of the Pontic Steppe. On the whole, the chapter is meticulously detailed and Hart successfully brings the various micro-regions north of the Danube into higher relief. Although a dense geographical description, the chapter does much to prepare the reader for Hart’s later explanations of the movement and settlement of various trans-Danubian peoples in subsequent chapters.
Chapter Two traces a second important framework, the ethnographic tradition for trans-Danubian peoples and the impact that a Hellenic literary tradition had on assumptions made by Romans when dealing with these peoples. The chapter first examines Herodotus’ description of Scythians as a ferocious and primitive nomadic people. As Hart notes, the perception of Scythians as marauding savages was a legacy from Hellenic thought that Romans readily appropriated and applied to any people north of the Danube. Hart’s emplotment of this trope is thorough and ranges from Herodotus to Ovid to Dexippus. The chapter also notes consequential realignments of this trope at important historical moments. For example, Trajan’s conquest of the Dacians required incorporating trans-Danubian people into an ideological framework as a passive, client people worthy of provincial status. The old trope of ‘Scythian’ marauders, however, remained a part of the Romans conceptual toolkit and could resurface, as it did during the Marcomannic Wars of Marcus Aurelius, to infuse the ideological justification for warfare beyond the limes with existential urgency. And just as easily, the ‘pacified’ image of settled farmers could resume, as it did when Commodus abandoned his father’s Marcomannic campaign by relegating trans-Danubians to the status of inconsequential bandits unworthy of Roman arms. Thus, the book defines two operative stereotypes for ‘Scythians’, one savage and the other weak, both primitive and to differing degrees nomadic. These ethnographic scripts obviously masked the genuine nature and diversity of trans-Danubian peoples, and the resulting disconnect failed to prepare Romans, in Hart’s view, for the arrival of better organized, non-nomadic peoples on the frontier, such as occurred with the arrival of Goths in the third century.
Chapter Three considers the complex social and economic reality of trans-Danubian peoples by providing an archaeological survey of settlement patterns for the Middle Danube. Here, Hart focuses on the Hungarian Plain, a region of the Danubian borderland that lay between the southward flow of the Rhine to the west and the Roman province of Dacia to the east, thus territory unincorporated by Trajan’s conquests, but which lay lodged in the embrace of three Roman provinces (Pannonia, Upper Moesia and Dacia). The chapter examines archaeological evidence for settlement patterns and surviving domestic architecture, pastoral and dietary habits and burial practices. Hart astutely addresses the methodological issues concerning the archaeology of ‘barbarian’ ethnicity and reconstructs a hybrid society of La Tène agricultural settlements (the Limigantes) and Sarmatian overlords (the Iazyges). The feature common to both peoples was controlled access to marketplaces for exchange with Roman military units settled in Dacia and along the Danube limes. Thus, Hart demonstrates that the reality on the ground was regular and predictable contact between Romans and unincorporated trans-Danubian peoples who not only lived settled, non-nomadic lifestyles, but who held a de facto client status as quasi-provincials of the empire.
Chapter Four moves downstream to examine interactions between Roman provinces of the Lower Danube (particularly Dacia, Lower Moesia and Scythia Minor) and trans-Danubian peoples influenced more or less directly by contact with the Pontic Steppe. The chapter opens with a brief survey of the basic parameters of Roman treaties with trans-Danubian peoples and then shifts to an account of Roman interactions with Gothic peoples on the Lower Danube (the Tervingi). The main focus of the chapter is Constantine’s treaty with the Tervingi and the disposition of the former province of Dacia. Although Roman forces had withdrawn from Dacia earlier under Aurelian, Hart notes the continued maintenance of Roman military fortresses in Dacia and suggests that Romans had never truly conceded the province as lost. Rather, drawing from a careful reconstruction of Constantine’s treaty in 332, Hart posits that Constantine accepted the Tervingi, a relatively new people with ties to the deeper Pontic Steppe, as the client caretakers of a region that spanned from the Don River to the Hungarian Plain. In essence, when the Tervingi moved westward in the wake of Aurelian’s withdrawal from Dacia, they encountered settled peoples in Dacia and the adjacent Hungarian Plain who already had long-standing relationships with Roman authority. This predisposed the Tervingi to assume a role as Constantine’s client intermediaries in the region. Hart points to noted novelties in Constantine’s treaty with the Goths, especially an unrestricted trade agreement and a lack of forced conscriptions into the Roman military, indicating that the Goths in Dacia and the Hungarian Plain served as clients of the Roman state and enjoyed privileges similar to Romans in the provinces. Thus, Hart introduces a new and more nuanced view of borderland relations between Romans and Goths in the early fourth century that replaces previous modern assumptions about a hard border policy separating Romans from non-Romans. Hart concludes the chapter with a survey of material culture deposits from the Pontic Steppes to Dacia to demonstrate, in broad strokes, the emergence and movement of a sedentary agrarian culture that illustrates the wealth that the Goths enjoyed under Constantine’s treaty.
With Chapter Five, Hart moves to a re-appraisal of a sequence of events very familiar in late-antique scholarship, the official admission of the Goths into Roman territory and their subsequent revolt and defeat of Valens at Adrianople in 378. According to Hart, the earlier enlistment of Gothic support for the coup of Procopius inclined Valens to frame a treaty with the Goths in Roman territory on conditions that differed substantially from the partnership that they had maintained with the Roman state since Constantine. The new treaty formed in 369 was predicated on anachronistic assumptions about the Goths as ‘Scythians’ and imposed taking hostages, revoked the former practice of giving gifts to Gothic leaders and ended the mutually advantageous trade agreement that had formed the core of Constantine’s treaty. This is a substantially new reconstruction of the event, framing it in terms of ethnography, imperial ideology and failed diplomacy. Rather than follow the theatrics of Ammianus Marcellinus, as many previous scholars have mistakenly done, and represent the Goths as a relatively unknown people suddenly impelled upon Roman horizons by the inexorable encroachment of the Huns, Hart carefully reconstructs a history in which Goths had become accustomed, under Constantine, to interacting with imperial authority as the caretakers of Roman interests on the other side of the Danube. Presented thus, the breakdown in relations that culminated with the disastrous defeat of Valens at Adrianople is better understood as Valens’ precipitous failure to appreciate an entrenched status quo in the Danubian borderland. In short, this reconstruction offers a subtle critique of both Valens and a long strand of modern scholarship that found it easier to envision the Goths as an alien ‘barbarian’ other, rather than a people who had developed a long-standing partnership with the Roman state. Hart also re-examines the impact of Hunnic power emerging on the Pontic Steppe and finds that relations between Goths and Huns had formed an important linkage between the Lower Danube and more distant steppe power. When Valens imposed a treaty that undermined the economic and social prestige of the Goths, this destabilized delicately balanced relations between the Goths and Huns. The model offered here is careful and measured, and ultimately more satisfying than traditional scholarly assumptions about Huns as the catalysts of an inexorable domino effect that would eventually cause the end of the western Roman empire.
Chapter Six offers something of an epilogue to the Roman defeat at Adrianople by tracing how ethnographic perceptions of the Goths changed over time. As Hart explains, following innovations in Theodosius’ policy by which Goths began to appear in high military command, Gothic identity gradually became detached from the traditional discourse of the ‘Scythian Logos’. Instead, as the Hunnic threat to the empire became more pronounced, the Huns came to occupy that durable role of the marauding nomad in the Roman imagination. In essence, ‘Goth’ became a normative identity and Huns increasingly became ‘Scythian’. The chapter concludes with brief attention given to how, over time, the ‘Scythian Logos’ would transfer, after the death of Attila, to the Avars, Slavs and Bulgars.
Overall, Hart’s monograph is a sterling work of scholarship. The prose is direct and accessible, the analysis is founded on careful reading of textual and material sources and Hart is circumspect to acknowledge where conclusions are necessarily speculative. In places where sources require caution, Hart is clear to indicate degrees of ‘likelihood’. But even where such qualifications may apply, the models constructed simply make sense, far better sense than older historiographies that only reify the cultural disconnect of ‘barbarians’ found in ancient ethnographic discourse. Hart succeeds at applying new insights to old problems and readers will wish that it had been possible to include more under the cover of this splendid monograph. For example, Beyond the River only briefly touches upon the topic of Christianity as a newly introduced medium of concourse within the Danubian borderland, and this naturally invites questions about the adoption of Christianity by Gothic peoples in the decades between Constantine and Valens. Similarly, the borderland perspective invites a re-appraisal of Attila’s confederation of subject peoples in the Danube region, where Ostrogoths, Gepids, Rugians, Herulians, and Lombards eventually come into historical view. In short, it is the success of the book that it whets the appetite for more. Readers familiar with the entrenched debates about Roman interactions with ‘barbarians’ will find themselves eager to apply new models for thinking about these issues, for which Timothy Hart’s monograph will serve as an essential guide.