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

double-tongued from the outset. On the Roman side one speaks historically, of men and women with names, of known events and established dates; on the barbarian side prehistorically, of uncertainty and anonymity, of peoples called after their burial practices and cultures known from their type-sites. This reflects a deep division in the study of antiquity. On the one hand classics students are heirs to a long and noble textual tradition. Those who live in Europe are surrounded by reminders of Rome. If they are Westerners their languages and customs are studded with reference points. Quite different are students of the barbarians, whose discipline is recent, whose text is the soil and, though some of their languages live on in ours, whose pursuit is often of faint traces. Yet, allowing for these discrepancies, it is odd that those who study the Rhine’s left or Roman bank should seemingly require a different terminology from those studying its right or barbarian bank. At university they would be members of different faculties, attending different lectures and sitting different exams. Such is the compartmentalism of classical and Iron Age learning which has blurred our understanding of the north-south interaction and fogged our view of the Roman empire’s edges.
    There are of course bridges across the scholastic river. Most prominent are the writings of Roman historians and geographers, crucial contributors to knowledge of the barbarian side: crucial because archaeology’s findings seldom match the power of language to penetrate minds and motives. This does, however, present a snag. While the Roman empire bequeathed words by the hundred thousand, those outside its European borders left none. Nor have barbarian oral traditions survived from this time. So classical authors became the spokesmen for the barbarian by default; and it could rightly be said that they hijacked our way of seeing his world. In comparing Roman and barbarian one must therefore allow for the partiality of the written sources; and it may help to remember that the Romans themselves were by no means superhuman, that they were not invariably ahead of their time and that where a gap between them and the barbarians existed it was sometimes smaller than Romanists might have one believe. What, then, was the nature of the Roman imperial state?
    The 20th century is a time of unprecedented growth in the complexity of officialdom, dominated by organizations of all kinds, mesmerized by experts and obsessed with theory. Modern conditioning ill prepares us for the crudity of imperial Rome: successful beyond all rivals yet backed by rudimentary bureaucracy, unsupported by political or economic thought, without parties to give voice to new aspirations or the flexibility to produce new institutions. In a constitutional sense this amounted to underpowered machinery carrying majestic coachwork; a mighty empire propelled by a governmental engine more fitted to driving a petty province, chauffeured by one man. It was without ministers or ministries; without home, foreign or colonial offices; without chiefs of staff, admiralty or war office; with an army lacking a professional officer corps, its command based on the principle of impermanence and its officials hamstrung by the limits placed on personal power. It is not surprising that, according to Dio, 1 Rome’s vital statistics could be contained in a notebook, carried perhaps on the emperor’s person.
    The modern economist’s tendency to equate wealth with industry, and poverty with failure to industrialize, has no ancient counterpart. The Roman empire resembled the barbarian lands in being dominantly agricultural. Produce, rents and property accounted for at least 90 per cent of GNP. Farming was the basis of the state. Yet even here, though Rome did not lack the skills of husbandry, she was backward in applying invention to its processes. The Gauls had already devised a mechanical reaper: in effect a