The limes is the archetypal feature of Roman metageography, but it was more than a simple term to refer to the border that divided Roman-controlled from non-Roman territory.790 791 Depending on the location along Rome’s tri-continental empire, the limes could manifest itself as a Roman “Maginot Line,” a lure for profit, an indistinct hinterland, the barrier between “us” and “them,” or the psychological frontier of civilization itself, the Lower Danubian limes manifested each of these cultural visions of the landscape.
The Danube was patrolled by the Roman navy and heavily guarded by the Roman army in an attempt to offer both security against peregrini as well as opportunity for business. Riverine frontiers always have been notoriously porous and logistically difficult, if not impossible, to defend. In 369, the emperor Valens (364-378) went so far as to establish only two border customs stations in scythia Minor (Noviodunum and Daphne) where trade between Romans and Goths could take place.792 the other cities of scythia minor also, however, provided opportunity for commerce and served as trade centers precisely because of their locations. A fifth-century inscription from a cemetery south of Tomis (today Constanta),793 for example, identifies Fl. Servandus as comes commerciorum, the Roman bureaucrat who had authority over border trade.794 the comes commerciorum not only supervised commerce but also attempted to control espionage across the limes by foreign businessmen and the flight of Romans to enemy populations to whom they could divulge information.795
The Roman Empire always felt under threat by migrating, transhumant, and displaced populations who encroached on Roman territory. the epithets, “barbarian” and “barbaricum,” are symbolic of both a “cultural limes"" and the difficulty Romans had with disaffected peoples whose behavioral patterns were at variance with Roman notions of how a population should “belong” or be fixed in space. In fact, many groups foreign to the empire could, and probably were, considered peoples without a place.796
Thus in Johnston’s ternary system of understanding “place,” we have moved from the geophysical environment and the built environment to the population. Cultural landscapes develop as a result of human behavior, and part of the strategy for the Roman colonial system was to “manage” or control diversity by fossilizing mutable populations. Whether by simplifying or remaking group identity or through forcible resettlement, imperial regimes often link people with “place.” Late antique historians often labeled non-Roman populations under anachronistic names derived from Herodotus, tacitus, and other earlier authors: for instance, “Scythian” (an iron-Age population from the south Russian steppes) became a generic appellation assigned to the Goths, as well as to geographic space, and Goths also could be referred to as “Getae” (an Iron-Age population on the lower Danube related to the Dacians).797 The Roman name for the Lower Danubian province of scythia Minor, therefore, was both ethnographically and historically inaccurate.
The barbarae nationes, consequently, were gathered together as a psychologically manageable collectivity. The “barbarians” were not identified precisely on the basis of language, religion, geographic origin, and so on, but more likely judged as to whether their pattern of behavior was (in)compatible with the Roman perception of how a people should relate or “belong” to place. the limes, then, in Roman metageography, was also a way to define and maintain “human unrelatedness”—a frontier between place and placelessness, between the Ordnung of Rome and the disorder of barbaricum.
World History
