A 200-mile journey along Ancient Rome’s North-West frontier, in no sense parodying William Hutton’s endearing ‘History of the Roman Wall Which Crosses the Island of Britain from the German Ocean to the Irish Sea’.
The Romans were a hard-headed, brutal, pragmatic but oddly humble people. They conquered the Greeks, but stood in awe of their achievements and their wisdom. They persecuted the Christians, perceiving the threat they posed to their authority, then adopted their beliefs. In Britain, they destroyed the druidic cult, fearing the same threat as from the Christians, yet left their monuments standing and the people free to worship the same old gods, even raising golden statues to them. There were only two conditions to this humility: pay them tax and acknowledge them as masters.
With their superior technology and iron discipline, they were also fearless soldiers who found attack the best form of defence. For this reason they saw no reason to fortify their boundaries: if threatened, they would march out to meet the enemy, rather than crouch behind walls. The Latin for ‘frontier’ was limes, from which the English word ‘limit’ comes, and it meant something like ‘frontier road’, because that was what their frontiers were for the most part: just roads. The original border of Roman territory in Britain was the Stanegate, the road running east from Corbridge to Carlisle. These roads, plus a few forts and rivers, were adequate deterrants in most provinces, but in Britannia, the Romans found in the natives a determined reluctance to be civilized that in my view characterizes more than anything else the island folk.
Already during Agricola’s campaign in 79, it seems that a turf wall went up in Scotland, the Gask Ridge, but it was the emperor Hadrian who saw the need for something more permanent. Under Trajan he had seen the Empire stretched to breaking point in modern Romania and Iraq and he probably thought the time had come to start consolidating what had been won. With his flamboyance and passion for architecture, a great wall was begun, sixteen feet high, ten feet thick and seventy-three miles long ‘to separate the Romans from the barbarians’. The massive structure snaked over every hill it could find, heedless of cliffs and rivers, punctuated by four major bridges, sixteen large forts, seventy-nine small ones and over 150 turrets. And if this weren’t enough, deep ditches were dug enclosing the wall to the north and south and a road built to facilitate communication along its entire length. When the wall ended on the Solway Firth, Hadrian was still dissatisfied: another string of forts and fortlets, one Roman mile apart, was built along the Cumbrian coast to watch for attacks from the Irish and Scots. A network of roads criss-crossed the mountains in the interior, with yet more forts to guard them, supplying the whole militarized zone with goods shipped in to the safer ports further south. The scale of the enterprise beggars belief, but perhaps more surprising is that, with interruptions, the structure was occupied until the Western Empire began to crumble nearly three hundred years later. Remembering that the Berlin Wall was in use for about thirty years puts this into perspective.
In 1801, at the age of seventy-eight, an amiable old gentleman called William Hutton walked from Birmingham to Carlisle, along the length of the wall and back again, a journey of six hundred miles. His hugely entertaining account accompanied me on my own by comparison brief stroll, often refreshing, goading and humbling me. Striding along the ridge at Walltown Crags in the footsteps of the tough old antiquarian and looking northwards to the ‘barbarian lands’, it is awe-inspiring to imagine yourself at one extremity of a unified state that once stretched to the Persian Gulf, Morocco, Egypt and the Ukraine. How the Romans held those thousand peoples, languages, cultures and religions together will always be something of a mystery, and therein lies the appeal of this extraordinary frontier: from South Shields to Ravenglass, this is a road worth walking and contemplating again and again.
The Romans were a hard-headed, brutal, pragmatic but oddly humble people. They conquered the Greeks, but stood in awe of their achievements and their wisdom. They persecuted the Christians, perceiving the threat they posed to their authority, then adopted their beliefs. In Britain, they destroyed the druidic cult, fearing the same threat as from the Christians, yet left their monuments standing and the people free to worship the same old gods, even raising golden statues to them. There were only two conditions to this humility: pay them tax and acknowledge them as masters.
With their superior technology and iron discipline, they were also fearless soldiers who found attack the best form of defence. For this reason they saw no reason to fortify their boundaries: if threatened, they would march out to meet the enemy, rather than crouch behind walls. The Latin for ‘frontier’ was limes, from which the English word ‘limit’ comes, and it meant something like ‘frontier road’, because that was what their frontiers were for the most part: just roads. The original border of Roman territory in Britain was the Stanegate, the road running east from Corbridge to Carlisle. These roads, plus a few forts and rivers, were adequate deterrants in most provinces, but in Britannia, the Romans found in the natives a determined reluctance to be civilized that in my view characterizes more than anything else the island folk.
Already during Agricola’s campaign in 79, it seems that a turf wall went up in Scotland, the Gask Ridge, but it was the emperor Hadrian who saw the need for something more permanent. Under Trajan he had seen the Empire stretched to breaking point in modern Romania and Iraq and he probably thought the time had come to start consolidating what had been won. With his flamboyance and passion for architecture, a great wall was begun, sixteen feet high, ten feet thick and seventy-three miles long ‘to separate the Romans from the barbarians’. The massive structure snaked over every hill it could find, heedless of cliffs and rivers, punctuated by four major bridges, sixteen large forts, seventy-nine small ones and over 150 turrets. And if this weren’t enough, deep ditches were dug enclosing the wall to the north and south and a road built to facilitate communication along its entire length. When the wall ended on the Solway Firth, Hadrian was still dissatisfied: another string of forts and fortlets, one Roman mile apart, was built along the Cumbrian coast to watch for attacks from the Irish and Scots. A network of roads criss-crossed the mountains in the interior, with yet more forts to guard them, supplying the whole militarized zone with goods shipped in to the safer ports further south. The scale of the enterprise beggars belief, but perhaps more surprising is that, with interruptions, the structure was occupied until the Western Empire began to crumble nearly three hundred years later. Remembering that the Berlin Wall was in use for about thirty years puts this into perspective.
In 1801, at the age of seventy-eight, an amiable old gentleman called William Hutton walked from Birmingham to Carlisle, along the length of the wall and back again, a journey of six hundred miles. His hugely entertaining account accompanied me on my own by comparison brief stroll, often refreshing, goading and humbling me. Striding along the ridge at Walltown Crags in the footsteps of the tough old antiquarian and looking northwards to the ‘barbarian lands’, it is awe-inspiring to imagine yourself at one extremity of a unified state that once stretched to the Persian Gulf, Morocco, Egypt and the Ukraine. How the Romans held those thousand peoples, languages, cultures and religions together will always be something of a mystery, and therein lies the appeal of this extraordinary frontier: from South Shields to Ravenglass, this is a road worth walking and contemplating again and again.
This to me reads much like a modern English-language Montesquieu essay in which inevitably our noisy contemporary era is dwarfed by the immensity of antiquity. Montesquieu's mastery of the details of so many invasions, biographies, dynasties, empires, principalities, city states, fashions, battles, social customs, medical practices, and legal practices, among so many other subjects, covering the span of various millennia and stretching from the Farthest East then known all the way to Western Europe, and the way he dips into this knowledge font to make a simple point about universally and enduringly relevant subjects, are rare reminders of the forgotten colossal mosaic of events that is Classical history.
ReplyDeletePart of the noise of modernity that drowns out the past is the light celerity of the countless modern events and also the sheer size of contemporary human kind, which is at least as large as the aggregate of all the preceding generations, giving us a population-event cone with prehistory at the bottom, but as in the case of any vortex, the bottom, which is also the center, is always more vertiginous, brutal, momentous, and determinant than the vaster upper, outer surfaces. The initial historical acts performed over millenia by a slowly incrementing population of human players drive the vaster set of events of modern times just as the low pressure at the eye of the storm determines the winds at the outer edge of the storm.
I ramble meaninglessly, but I enjoyed this, the classical history references for which I hunger, and its significance to an oblivious modernity. My direct experience with the history of Romans, Etruscans, Greeks, Anatolia, Persia and elsewhere will be limited as I am caught up in the noise of contemporary events, but the second hand reconstructions by those who have delved, be they in the form of an operatic libretto of an epic or from a narrative such as this one or from my exposure to Greek and Latin lexicon and thinking via the modern scientific disciplines, keep me less deprived from this knowledge font.
I allowed a bone-headed mental lapse above requiring correction: I meant Montaigne, not Montesquieu. Is it not marvelous the manner in which the Internet preserves our most embarrassing blunders for the eyes of posterity to mirthfully data-mine?
ReplyDeleteThank you for the enormously insightful comments and the undeserved comparison to Mont(esquieu)aigne. Things like the 'noise of modernity drowning out the past' and 'the determinant centre of the [historical] vortex' simply hadn't occurred to me and have given me a lot of food for thought.
ReplyDeleteTo return the compliment, your comments reminded me of John Locke's ideas about education, which could equally apply to history here: change the course of the river just a few inches at the source, he said, and by the time you get to the sea, the river mouth has moved miles...