Beyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome Ethnographic Landscapes, Imperial Frontiers, and the Shaping of a Danubian Borderland

Abstract

This dissertation examines the intersection of political, ideological, and ecological forces in the borderland region extending along and beyond the Middle and Lower Danube limites of the Roman Empire. This region, roughly coterminous with the Danube drainage basin, and covering the modern nations of Hungary, and Romania, as well as parts of Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine, was one of the most crucial stages upon which the later acts of Roman imperial history were played. In the following chapters, I employ ideas and models from current borderland studies and environmental history to compose a holistic account of the Roman-era Danubian Borderland that seeks to move beyond the horizons of individual Balkan academies and overworked models of ‘barbarian ethnogenesis.’ At the broadest level, this dissertation presents a case-study of how hegemonic power functioned in antiquity, in dialogue with diverse peoples and topographies. More specifically, I demonstrate how entrenched Greco-Roman ethnographic stereotypes and theories of environmental determinism were drafted into the service of Roman imperialism and came to profoundly shape the destinies of the people living on both sides of the river, frequently in unintended ways.

This dissertation contains two major sections. In the first, I examine the ecology and topography of the Danube Basin with an eye towards identifying natural boundaries and routes of connection across the landscape. This section also considers the arrival of Rome in the region at the dawn of the Common Era, and how the establishment of a military border along the right bank of the Danube served to disrupt the region’s preexisting natural and cultural rhythms. I approach this disruption by investigating how Rome’s continued military presence along the Danube not only forced Greeks and Romans to alter the way they perceived the native people of the Danube Basin, but also exerted a strong influence over the political and cultural organization of the people living beyond the Middle Danube whom the Romans called Sarmatian Iazyges.

In the second half of this dissertation, I shift my focus eastward in order to write a new history of the Lower Danubian Borderland during the third through fifth centuries CE, when this region stood at the center of social, political, and military transformations wracking the Roman world. Throughout this section, I discuss how perceptions of, and policies towards the people beyond the Lower Danube were inspired by Rome’s earlier encounter with the Iazyges in the plains beyond the Middle Danube. Crucially, I demonstrate how these ethnographic expectations - which developed to explain a particular cultural and natural setting - were misplaced when transferred from that original context to the ‘Gothic’ world of the eastern Danube Basin. Time and again, Roman decision makers thought they knew what to expect from the barbarians of this region, and in nearly every instance those expectations were proven inaccurate, frequently with disastrous consequences.

Much ink has been spilled over the years dissecting Rome’s encounter with the peoples beyond their Danube limes, but by reassessing that encounter through the lens of the tenacious, insidious ethnographic stereotypes of transdanubians common across the Roman world, we can refine our understanding of both later Roman history, and the hegemonic and ideological forces that shaped the development of the empire’s neighbors in the Danubian Borderland.