But there remained work to be done. Ovid was not alone in marking how barbarians beyond the Danube were perfectly capable of negotiating the immense flow of its waters. Even the most formidable of natural boundaries could be crossed. The implications, for those tasked with securing the frontier, were tantalising as well as troubling. It remained the proud boast of the Roman people that their conquests were never made for conquest’s sake. Their wars were fought, not out of avarice or blood lust, but rather to safeguard their city’s honour and the interests of their allies. They had subdued the world, in effect, in self-defence. This was why, in the opinion of Roman statesmen, ‘our global dominion may more properly be termed a protectorate’.82 Would the heavens otherwise have permitted it to come about? Merely to ask the question was to answer it, of course. Clearly, then, it was for the world’s own good that it be placed, to its outermost limits, under the tutelage of Rome. The long and glorious age of peace presided over by Augustus rested, in his own proud words, on ‘the subjection of the entire globe to the rule of the Roman people’.83 In practice, of course, as all those peering across the Danube were well aware, the subjection of the globe still had a way to run. Yet that it would come, and to the benefit of those conquered as well as of the conquerors themselves, was a conviction the Roman elite increasingly took for granted. The promptings of ambition and responsibility alike, not to mention obedience to the self-evident will of the gods, urged continued expansion. At stake was the ultimate in prizes: ‘empire without limit’.84
What this meant in practical terms could best be seen beyond the currents of a river almost as broad and formidable as the Danube itself: the Rhine. When Augustus, looking to win the favour of the war god, had planted a temple of Mars on its western bank, he had dedicated to the shrine, in a formidable statement of intent, the sword of Julius Caesar. The conquest of Gaul, which had successfully drained for good a great sump of pestiferous barbarism, was the obvious model to follow. Caesar himself, in pacifying the western reaches of the Rhine, had recognised that he could not afford to leave the eastern bank to its own devices. Twice he had bridged the river; twice he had delivered to the Germans who lurked beyond it a punitive demonstration of Roman might.*5 Decades on, it remained as pressing a task as ever to whip the various tribes beyond the border into line. Gaul could not be policed adequately, still less fattened up into the cash-cow it otherwise promised to become, with savages forever breaking in from across the Rhine. This had been embarrassingly brought home in 17 BC, when Marcus Lollius, the future guardian of Gaius, had accidentally run into a German warband, suffering the loss of an eagle. Depending on who reported it, this defeat had ranked as either a fleeting discomfiture, speedily rectified by Lollius himself, or else a crippling blow to Roman prestige, almost on a par with the defeat of Crassus. Whatever the truth of the incident, it had decided the Princeps, ever cautious, ever decisive, to adopt an altogether more proactive response to the problem of the Germans. Travelling north of the Alps, he had personally set in train a momentous series of policies. The better to tax it, Gaul had been subjected to an intrusive census. A mint, guarded by an elite squad of a thousand paramilitaries, had been set up in the recently founded colony of Lugdunum – the future Lyon. Gold and silver, coined in prodigious quantities, loaded into wagons and transported northwards along an ever-expanding network of roads, had given a prodigiously muscular heft to the Roman presence in the West. Spasms of resentment in Gaul had been brutally stilled; a chain of six legionary fortresses built along the line of the Rhine; licence given by Augustus to cross the river and embark on the pacification of Germany itself. A feat as great and terrible as any in the history of Roman arms now beckoned: the winning for civilisation of the outermost limits of the world.
‘It takes courage to advance into a forbidden realm of shadow.’85 When Drusus, on his final campaign, had found himself hundreds of miles east of the Rhine, on the banks of a second mighty natural barrier, a river named the Elbe, a spectre in the form of a colossal woman had materialised before him and forbidden him to cross it. That the lands of the north were the haunt of phantoms and hideous monsters came as no surprise. In the gloomy forests which covered vast reaches of Germany, giant bull-like creatures roamed, and mysterious entities named elks, without ankles or knees; in the icy waters of the Ocean, which would retreat and then advance twice a day, tearing loose oak trees and engulfing entire plains beneath their flood-tides, there shimmered ‘the outline of enigmatic beings – half-men, half-beast’.86 Just as Ovid, peering askance at the Tomitans, had fingered them as lycanthropes, so in the savage reaches of Germany were the borders between animal and human even more unsettlingly blurred. Chieftains who wished for a policy briefing, it was reported by Roman scholars who had made a close study of German customs, were likeliest to consult a horse. Conversely, ‘the towering stature of the Germans, their fierce blue eyes and reddish hair’,87 spoke of a nature barely less bestial than that of some steel-clawed bear, padding over mountain slopes. Geography could not be bucked. Their bogs and trees shrouded in a perpetual drizzle, Germans were the spawn of their environment. The gods, who had considerately endowed Rome with a climate ideally suited to the growth of a mighty city, had doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate. Landscape, weather, people: Germany was unredeemably savage.
Or was it? Much the same, after all, could once have been said of the Gauls. Bad memories of them in Rome ran very deep. Back in 390 BC, a Gallic horde had erupted into Italy, annihilated six whole legions and sacked the city itself. Only with the conquests won by Augustus’s deified father had Gaul finally ceased to be a place of dread. Now, fifty years on, great changes were afoot beyond the Alps. Roman rule had brought to a people once notorious for their trousers and their gravy-soaked moustaches, their drunken brawling and their taste for collecting heads, a very different way of life. The grandsons of chieftains who had hurled themselves half-naked against the invading legions now draped themselves in the toga and rejoiced in the name of ‘Julius’. Rather than guzzle wines indiscriminately, they were coming to develop a nose for the classiest Italian and Eastern grands crus – and even, remarkably, to plant the odd vineyard themselves. Most promisingly of all, dotted across a landscape that had previously boasted only villages and rough stockades perched on hills, cities were starting to appear: islands of civilisation complete with flashy monuments and street-grids. Augustus, who had brought the fruits of peace to his fellow citizens, had brought them to the Gauls as well. Foundation after foundation duly proclaimed its gratitude: Augustodurum and Augustomagus, Augustobona and – just to vary things – Caesarobona. The most spectacular of all the Gallic monuments to the Princeps had been raised by Drusus in Lugdunum, where an altar to Rome and Augustus, complete with a double ramp and two giant winged statues of Victory, had been inaugurated in 12 BC.88 It provided, on neutral ground, and in a city that served as the hub of the provincial road system, a focus of loyalty for the whole of Gaul. Noblemen from more than sixty different tribes had flocked to its opening. As its first high priest, a man had been elected whose name, Gaius Julius Vercondaridubnus, perfectly expressed in its fusion of the native with the Roman the emerging mestizo order. Something startling had begun to glimmer: a future in which the Gauls, perhaps, would no longer rank as barbarians at all. ‘Enslaved as they have been, and living as their captors instruct them to live, they are all of them now at peace.’89