Free Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge by Derek Williams

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    As with many a second book, Romans and Barbarians owes its inception to excessive zeal in writing the first. When sketches for a work on the Roman frontier (published in 1996 as The Reach of Rome ) promised to be unmarketably long, associates and colleagues (especially Dr Andrew Dalby and my literary agent, Caroline Davidson) pointed to the lands and peoples outside the imperial boundaries as valid subjects for a book in their own right. Though hesitating to accept so strenuous a challenge, it was undeniable that certain incidents arising from the Roman-barbarian connection were rich in interest; and that, rather than forgo the fruits of long study, the best of them could be shaped into a second book of less studious but more human character. Owing to historical chance and the even more haphazard accidents of textual transmission (by which some accounts of ancient history survived the centuries, but so many did not), several of the most memorable events fell into a group approximating to the 1st century of the Christian era. This served both to limit the canvas and offer the unity of a single period: that of the first ten caesars, when Rome’s power reaches its zenith, and dominance over the outside world, begins, almost imperceptibly, to slip.
    These two collaborators, then, are the first to be thanked. I acknowledge the assistance of a distinguished philologist, Anna Partington, who advised on a variety of origins and meanings. It is my loss that she was not consulted till the eleventh hour, when the book’s closing date was drawing near. I am also grateful to Samantha Hopkins for typing the text, to Alexander Stilwell and Imogen Olsen for perceptively reading and correcting it; to its Editor, Claire Evans, for co-ordinating and augmenting al our efforts; and to many friends whose reception of my earlier effort emboldened me to pursue its sequel. My work is especially fortunate in its Editorial Director, Carol O’Brien of Constable Ltd, whose view is that writing need not be the monopoly of career authors, nor history the sole province of professional scholars.
    The book draws on mainstream Greek and Roman sources, supplemented by archaeological findings and recent thinking. Most of its authors are to be found in the Loeb Classical Library (original texts with translation), with some published in translated form by Penguin Classics. The Tristia and Ex Ponto appear in volume VI of the Loeb Ovid and, in freer form, in D. R. Slavitt’s Ovid’s Poetry of Exile (Baltimore, 1990). While grateful for the many insights afforded by parallel efforts, the author’s translation of these and other source material attempts to steer a middle course between the precision of the Loeb and the boldness of the less formal renderings.
    Insofar as this book can claim originality it lies in the marshalling of random historical incidents (none unknown, but all deserving to be better known) into a single study. More unusual is its chosen ground, where classical and Iron Age scholarship meet. Throughout the 20th century there have of course been books on Rome in plenty, including many aspects of the empire and its provinces. More recently these have been complemented by a growing body of work on European late prehistory, notably the Celtic, Germanic and Sarmatian Iron Ages. While both zones of knowledge are indispensable, the student of antiquity’s no-man’s lands has largely been left to build his own bridges across the Rhine and Danube: rivers which once separated Roman from outsider and now sunder one academic discipline from another. Accordingly, the remarkably small group of works which emphasize interrelationship and examine the Mediterranean-Northern interaction has proved unusually valuable. These include H. D. Rankin’s The Celts and the Classical World (London, 1987) and B. W. Cunliffe’s Greeks, Romans and Barbarians (London, 1988).
    In his Concluding Thoughts on the proceedings of