Bendix, 'Frontiers of the Roman Empire.  A Social and Economic Study', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9409
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9409-bendix-frontiers

C. R. Whittaker, <i>Frontiers of the Roman Empire.  A Social and
Economic Study</i>.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1994.
Pp. xvi, 341. ISBN 0-8018-4677-3.
  Reviewed by John Bendix -- Bryn Mawr College

  Anyone with the panache to start a book about the Roman Empire
with an apposite quote from Rudyard Kipling's children's book
<i>Puck of Pook's Hill</i> deserves attention.  Indeed, before we
are even out of the introduction, we are given a <i>tour
d'horizon</i> which takes in everyone from Grotius to Frederick
Jackson Turner, from Bismarck to Herbert Spenser and Owen
Lattimore, slowing toward the end with some well deserved
flattery for Lucien Febvre of the French Annales school of social
history to which this text owes much of its perspective.  For a
book about frontiers, C. R. Whittaker's vision is refreshingly
unbounded.

  It had better be.  After all, Whittaker has posed questions
which must be answered satisfactorily not only about Britain's
walls (Hadrian's, the Antonine) and German <i>limes</i>, but also
about camps on the Danube, North Africa <i>clausurae</i>,
Armenian defenses, and forts in Syria.  His themes, in order of
chapters, are crisp: the interrelation of frontiers with the
growth of empire, why frontiers stopped where they did, the
economy and society of the frontiers, and the pressure on and
subsequent collapse of the frontiers.  While Whittaker summarizes
abundant archaeological and textual evidence about the
peculiarities of the frontier in each region, what he is after is
the <i>nature </i>of the frontier.  With Febvre, he believes that
"social relations project themselves spatially" (p.11), and that
frontiers reflect ideology.  

  That ideology partly resulted from a Roman cosmology which
mixed a perception of space in terms of harmony, order,
regularity and accessibility with an assertion of power and
control over areas not directly controlled by the Empire. 
Examples are provided by the ambiguous usage of the term
<i>provinciae</i> and in how <i>externae gentes</i> were treated
as though they were subjects.  The ideology also derived from
surveying and practices associated with the sacralization of
land.  The result was that two different kinds of land were
recognized: the organized, purified, enclosed, bounded land and
the unorganized, unsanctified, vague zone that lay around or
beyond it, protecting it, a frontier zone which ended at some
poorly specified natural marker like a river or a mountain (p.
20).  By extrapolation, Whitakker argues, during the Republic,
there was therefore no frontier policy, and during the Empire no
clear demarcation of where its limits were.  The frontiers of the
Roman Empire, to adapt Richard Barnet's coinage, were no more
real than the equator.

  Should we be scandalized by this revisionism?  Only if we are
blinded by the sense of borders and frontiers that the French
Revolution and the rise of nationalism left us with.  We think of
frontiers today as heavy black lines on a map, as Mark Monmonier
in his <i>How to Lie with Maps </i>(1991) sarcastically put it,
which states draw around as much territory as they dare to claim,
and in case anyone objects, they merely point to the map and say
"it's on the map, so it must be real" (p. 88).  Maps and borders
are cartographic icons of the state and its power, and the
crossing of borders today entails bureaucracy, but as late as
Louis XV, 

a border was a zone whose definition was sufficiently vague that
residents of some border villages were able to avoid being taxed
by governments on either side, sufficiently permeable that men
and goods could flow across it with relative ease, and
sufficiently uncertain that not even repetitive and interminable
negotiations could resolve disputes over a boundary's exact
location.

It is precisely this sense of a frontier as zone of indeterminacy
that Whittaker embraces; not surprisingly, this definition of a
"natural border" comes from the (neo-Annales? post-Annales?)
<i>Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution </i>(1989) of
Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf.  A modern German analogy may help;
Whittaker is asking us not to look at the Berlin Wall and the
state power it reflected, but rather marvel at its permeability,
and consider all those who crossed through (or under or over) it,
legally and illegally, while it still stood.  

  There is a remarkable diagram, adapted from Hedeager (1987),
half way through the book that shows what this meant in economic
terms: pottery brooches, bronze, glass, coins, and silver cups
from the Roman Empire were all found more than 200 kilometers
from the Roman Border inside Free Germany, within what was an
economy lacking in markets and money.  Conversely, clothing,
amber, hides, soap, and other items made their way across the
border the other way and into the Roman Empire.  In cultural and
military terms as well, while there was a myth of the contiguous
frontier (and one especially connected to rivers), the repeated
evidence contradicts it: military encampments on both sides of
the Danube and parts of the Rhine, Roman forward posts 30
kilometers north of Hadrian's Wall, Syrian forts which lay on a
road that crossed migration routes (similar to the Tunisian
walls), etc.  Great constructions served military functions, to
be sure, but Lord Curzon's assessment of the Great Wall of China
as 'more of line of trespass than a frontier' (p. 84) rings true
to Whittaker; walls were there to serve as tripwires and to exert
control over regions beyond, not impede trade, migration or
cultural diffusion.

  Near the end of the book, Whittaker points out that we all
look at frontiers from the inside outward, and that the
"barbarians" had a rather different view--witness the peace
negotiation between Valentinian and the Alaman king in the middle
of the Rhine and Valens's negotiating with the Goths on the
Danube (p. 241).  For the "barbarians" as well, the ideology of
the frontier existed, only theirs was an ideology outside looking
in.  The struggle occurs in the frontier zone, the no-man's-land
of material and cultural influence; perhaps it is the use of
social history in this analysis that makes the Roman Empire sound
so modern.