С. Уиттакер о римской границе

[himeroscopia]

cyberleninka.ru/article/n/amerikanskie-istoriki...
Жуков К.В. (Гуманитарный институт НовГУ) АМЕРИКАНСКИЕ ИСТОРИКИ О ВОЕННЫХ ПРИЧИНАХ ПАДЕНИЯ РИМА // ВЕСТНИК НОВГОРОДСКОГО ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО УНИВЕРСИТЕТА ИМ. ЯРОСЛАВА МУДРОГО, Выпуск№ 73 / том 1 / 2013

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Монография С. Уиттакера «Границы Римской империи. Социально-экономический анализ» [Whittaker C. R. Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study. Baltimore, 1994] посвящена анализу границ Римской империи, которые, хотя и стали объектом интенсивного изучения сравнительно недавно, тем не менее явились заметным фактором в историографии позднего Рима. Уиттакер отмечает, что важность этой проблемы далеко не всеми историками признаётся и адекватно воспринимается. Упрощённое восприятие «границ Рима» как области исследования имеет в своей основе ошибочное представление о природе их возникновения, их роли и значении. Доказать ошибочность такого подхода и является основной задачей этой работы.
Римляне, как полагает автор, не имели определённого представления о границе. Развитие идеи о том, что есть некая линия, разделяющая «цивилизацию» и «дикость», иногда преподносится как римская концепция границы и исходит из идеологического отношения к кризису позднего Рима. Империя как военно-экспансионистское государство всегда держалась на необходимости «постоянно расширяться». Любая линия, возникшая в результате очередного приостановления экспансии, носила временный характер. Граница, или «limes», согласно Уиттакеру, на являлась окончанием экспансии, а служила временной линией коммуникации и «обеспечения» для войск. Укрепленная лишь для защиты продовольственных складов и расквартированных здесь войск, граница предназначалась для дальнейшего использования ее в качестве плацдарма для будущих военных действий и безусловного продвижения только вперед. Границе никогда не отводилась роль «защитного периметра». Такое положение дел сохранялось и в период поздней империи. Хотя Уиттакер отрицает наличие какой-либо единой централизованной политики империи в области перспективного планирования, стратегии, за исключением вышеупомянутых для «limes» задач, он настаивает на том, что «имперский интерес был всегда направлен в области, лежащие впереди за «limes». И как последствие осмысления кризиса империи уже с конца II в. н.э. риторики начали говорить в красочных тонах об империи, окруженной военными лагерями, которые отделяли цивилизацию от варварского мира. Согласно Уиттакеру, благодаря преувеличению и приукрашиванию риториками поздней империи, современные ученые слишком близко к сердцу приняли идею о природе и роли римских границ. Исходя из суждения, что граница - это линия, Уиттакер создает прецедент рассматривать эту линию раздела между двумя противоположностями. И хотя Уиттакер это не подчёркивает, ясно, что «концепция линии» ведёт к неправильному пониманию и представлению о том, что до- и послеримская Европа была полна племён, постоянно находившихся в движении и пытающихся прежде всего проникнуть на чужую территорию, проявляя при этом большую жестокость, он полностью игнорирует точку зрения древних историков, согласно которой римляне были невинно вовлечены в такого рода борьбу, пытаясь защитить себя и выходя при этом за границы собственной территории. Как считалось в прошлом: если граница нарушена, она находится на пути к гибели. И если характеристику римской границы Уиттакер принимает всерьёз, то ни одно из положений Э. Гиббона не сможет устоять.
Вторая главная тема, к которой обращается Уиттакер, - это фактическое состояние и роль границы, которую он, на наш взгляд, правильно рисует как «глубокую зону, которая включала «limes», поддерживающие провинции, и коренное население, жившее за ее пределами (граница, зона, и т.п.). Включение Уиттакером в состав «глубокой зоны» коренного населения во многом объясняет повышенный интерес современных историков к данной проблеме. Но позиция самого Уиттакера по данной теме имеет слабое место, которое кроется в недостаточном внимании и учете таких фактов, как длительность (во времени), протяженность и суровость последствий римских вторжений для других народов.
Подобная слабость связана и с третьим утверждением Уиттакера о том, что «кризис III в. протекает вплоть до V в. н.э. как процесс, согласно которому расширялась пограничная зона, включая все новые территории».. Этот процесс правильно определяется им как «романизация» или «окультуривание» до общепринятых для римских провинций норм и, в конечном итоге, четкие границы между жителями римских провинций и варварами стерлись до такой степени, что было невозможно ясно определить «где что». Подобное рассмотрение имело бы целостное значение для изучения предмета упадка Рима, если бы оно рассматривалось в совокупности всех сложных явлений и процессов, проходивших в «центре», а не изолированно, как это ошибочно делает Уиттакер.
Таким образом, словесное признание многоас-пектности проблем падения Рима, но при этом изолированное от этих проблем рассмотрение (пусть даже и такой важной темы, как граница Римской империи) не дает возможности реальной оценки границ и их роли в упадке Рима.
...""

Товарищ Жуков несколько сбивчиво излагает...

Позже у Уиттакера вышла ещё: C R Whittaker Rome and its Frontiers: The Dynamics of Empire 2004 (где есть, в частности, глава " Sex on the frontiers" - PP. 115-143)

6 SEX ON THE FRONTIERS
Probably the most famous example of sexual imagery of the frontiers is the
picture entitled ‘America’ by Jan van der Straet (see figure 1). Theodore
Galle’s engraving of the sixteenth-century drawing portrays Amerigo
Vespucci discovering the continent. 1 America is depicted as a naked woman
half-rising from a hammock on the sea shore of a savage, wild land, and
making a gesture of wonder or alarm towards Vespucci, who stands before
her fully clothed and armed with, what are described as, ‘empowering’
instruments of violence (a sword), of technology (an astrolabe) and of
conquest (a banner bearing the Southern Cross). Below are inscribed the
words, Americen Americus retexit, & semel vocavit inde semper excitam (‘Americus
rediscovers America: and once he called her she was thenceforth always
aroused’). The allegorical feminization of the land is heightened by the obvi-
ously erotic metaphor of intended rape and conquest by a masterful,
intruding man. But the dangers of the frontier are also gendered by the
scene in the background, where barbarian women are feasting on a dismem-
bered human (male, we must presume) leg and thigh. 2 The conquest is
signified by the matching names of Americus/America that seal the possession.
Van der Straet’s drawing finds astonishing resonance in two reliefs that
come from the Romano-Greek Sebasteion at Aphrodisias (in present-day
Turkey). The first allegorically portrays Claudius vanquishing Britain (see
figure 2) and the second Nero conquering Armenia (see figure 3). 3 The first
shows the emperor in heroic nudity apart from a helmet, cloak and baldric
with empty scabbard, standing over and holding down, with his knee on her
thigh, the female figure of Britannia. With his right arm he raises a sword
and with his left he pulls Britannia’s head back by the hair, while the
woman struggles with her right arm raised, one breast exposed, and with her
left arm she holds her tunic from slipping off. The second displays Nero,
also nude with cloak, baldric and empty scabbard, standing with his legs
apart behind the female figure of Armenia, who is slumped on the ground
between his legs. As her cloak falls away, she is revealed fully naked and her
arms are spread-eagled by the man. There is little doubt that both highly
erotic scenes were intended to present a metaphor of conquest by rape. 4
115
Figure 2 Claudius and Britannia. Imperial relief from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias.
Photo supplied by the New York University Excavations at Aphrodisias.

The sword (or spear or dagger) is one of the commonest tropes for the
penis in both ancient and modern literature and iconography. A dirty joke
was told about Mithridates who, when being frisked by a Roman guard, told
him, ‘To watch out that he didn’t find a different telum (weapon) from the
one he was looking for’. In the fifteenth or sixteenth century the image of a
marauding Landsknecht has a sword hanging down between his legs. Not for
nothing, according to a study of mass rape in Bosnia, was a weapon called
‘the soldier’s bride’. 5 The symbolism of the hair also spans the ages and
cultures, and scenes of rape are often identified by pulling women by the
hair or touching it. 6 Both the Aphrodisias sculptures abandon the conven-
tional idealization of provinces at peace for the realism of war on the
frontiers.
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Figure 3 Nero and Armenia. Imperial relief from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias.
Photo supplied by the New York University Excavations at Aphrodisias.

As for names, we hardly need reminding that Claudius gave the title of
Britannicus to his son, just as he himself received the title of Germanicus
when his uncle, the Elder Drusus, triumphed in Germany. This reverses the
Amerigo–America couplet, and Roman triumphal titles were so routine that
they were perhaps without great significance. Nevertheless a fragment of
Cassius Dio’s history says of the Emperor Gaius (Caligula) that ‘He was often
called Germanicus and Britannicus because of his adulteries, as though he had
mastered the whole of Celtica [viz.Germania] and Britannia’. 7 A stone relief
found at Kula in Lydia shows a warrior on horseback with a lance riding at a
woman whose breasts look bare (although the stone is badly worn) and her
hands are bound behind her back. The inscription below names the rider as
Caesar Germanicus and the woman as Germania. 8 The sexualization of
conquest is explicit.
Sexual imagery and its association with frontiers and imperial conquest is
part of a wider discussion. It is largely due to feminist history and the inspi-
ration of Foucault that we are now more aware of the coding of Nature as
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feminine in Western intellectual tradition, from which we cannot exclude
the Greeks and the Romans. 9 As one writer recently puts it, ‘Imperialism …
seemed to be a highly gendered phenomenon’. 10 Sexual metaphors abound.
Imperial expansion and the crossing of frontiers are symbolized as ‘penetra-
tion’ of ‘virgin’ lands by ‘manly’ heroes. Gender language becomes the trope
for power relations. 11 While the land is feminized, frontier societies are
imagined as the arena for masculine values and interests. Sexuality, however,
is not exterior to the historical events but part of the discourse of power, ‘a
result and an instrument of power’s design’, in Foucault’s words. 12 The early
documents of the exploration and colonization of America constantly refer to
the land in terms of innocent beauty, virginity and rape. ‘Like a faire virgin,
longing to be sped/And meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed’, wrote Thomas
Morton in 1632. Not just a virgin, however, but also a mother and a widow
left ‘weeping for her children’, in the words of John Hammond in 1656. 13
Roman history and historians are full of parallels of such sexually loaded
imagery. Well known, and far from being vulgar jokes, are the metaphors of
the plough (vomer) for the penis, sowing in fertile fields, or boundary stones
(termini) and ditches (fossae) for the male and female genitalia. 14 A phallus
was regularly paraded in the symbolic beating of the boundaries, averting
evil but asserting dominion. 15 The ingredients of feminized land, male
phallic power, military conquest and boundaries are all present. The image
of the weeping mother was a regular icon of Roman conquest on coins and
triumphal monuments. On the Gemma Augustea cameo, now in Vienna, and
on the Grand Camée de France in Paris the imperial families of Augustus and
Tiberius reign serenely above a scene of dejected barbarian prisoners and
sorrowing women, one with a babe in her arms. 16 A seated, mourning
women was first used on coins as a symbol of conquest by Vespasian after his
campaign in Judaea, and it continued so until the Later Empire, as, for
example, can be seen on Constantine’s portrait of weeping Francia. 17
Sexual geography, the gendering of space, and particularly of space
beyond the frontiers, is common in medieval and modern imagination.
McClintock cites a dramatic example from Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s
Mines, of a supposedly sixteenth-century Portuguese map of the African
mines, which resembles the body of a woman laid out on her back, hills as
breasts and genitals the mines by which intruders penetrated. 18 The fiction
is not so far-fetched. Fact can be even more explicit. On a fourteenth-century
map Opicinus de Canestris of Avignon mapped the Mediterranean as the
‘Sea of Sin’, upended and orientated West–East, to depict Europe and Africa
face to face as human figures. Europe, the male, has a protruding penis in
the shape of Italy as he bends towards Africa, the woman, who is whispering
in his ear (Spain). Just in case we miss the message, she says, ‘Come copulate
with me’ – and Europe is wearing a sword and scabbard. 19
Romans had no difficulty imagining the body in space. Vitruvius, the
architect, drew parallels between the proportions of a man flat on his back
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and those of a temple. 20 In this case it was a classical temple where men
dominated. But the conceptualization of lands as feminine and passive was
automatic to the Roman mind. 21 They readily accepted the polarities of
what Foucault called ‘the dead, the fixed, the inert’ on the one hand and the
masculine energy of historical action and progress on the other. 22 The fron-
tiers were in theory no place for women, unless it be in the barbarian
beyond. The Elder Drusus, the night before he crossed the Elbe into
unknown territory in 9 BC , dreamt he saw a superhuman woman (obviously
Germania), who forewarned him of his death. 23
Concentration on women beyond the frontiers as the embodiment of
barbarity and sexual licence has often been a prominent theme in writers and
artists. Vespucci’s own writing in the sixteenth century containing fantasies
about the libidinous behaviour of Native American women (who, for
example, supposedly enlarged the penises of their husbands) and van der
Straet’s picture of their cannibalism are matched by Greco-Roman tales of
the barbarity and sexual promiscuity of African and Indian women. 24 A
series of warrior queens and women leaders stalk the history of Roman
conquest, threatening the foundations of empire: Cleopatra in Egypt, unnat-
ural wife of Antony, with the ‘barbarous wealth’ of the East: Boudicca in
Britain avenging ‘her scourged body and the outraged chastity of her daugh-
ters’; Cartimandua, cunning manipulator who outmanoeuvred her husband
to rule the fierce Brigantes; Veleda in Gaul, object of ‘excess of superstition’
and prophetess of the extermination of Rome’s armies; Zenobia of Palmyra,
who claimed descent from Cleopatra and ruled ‘longer than can be endured
from one of the female sex’. 25 Their portraits perpetuated the stereotyped
image of barbarian disorder and danger, often tinged with overt sexual refer-
ences. 26
The sexual theme of gendered geography in the examples I have given
includes rape as a prominent, even an essential, ingredient of artistic repre-
sentation. Just as in Western colonial history military conquest of territory
was mirrored by conquest of women, Roman frontier history also contains
what Porter called ‘a vast cultural reservoir of phallocentric aggression’, 27
either actual rape of a symbolic figure, as in the case of Boudicca’s daughters,
or the symbolic representation of rape to celebrated conquest. On the Gemma
Augustea, mentioned earlier, at the scene of Augustus’ military triumph the
weeping woman on the left is paralleled by another woman on the right
being brutally pulled along by her hair. 28 There can be no doubt about the
meaning. In Ovid’s description when the centaurs break into the wedding of
Peirithoüs and Hippodame a woman ‘is seized by the hair (raptatur comis)
and forcibly dragged away’. 29
Such scenes appear repeatedly on subsequent imperial monuments, such
as on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius in Rome, and for the first
time on coins under Constantine. 30 Most explicit is the scene (XCVII) on
Marcus Aurelius’ column showing a woman being pulled by her hair, her
120
clothes falling from her shoulder, as she begs for mercy from the soldier.
Another (see figure 4), very obviously in the context of violence, shows a
woman grasped by the hair, again bare breasted as she tries to cope with her
child. Even the language of sacking cities was adapted to describe the
violence of rape and the rapist – expugnator pudicitiae, expugnata filiae pudicita
and the like. 31
The victory columns of Trajan and Marcus bring me to an important
distinction in the gendering of conquest. Van Gennep, in discussing incor-
poration rites that sometimes included sexual acts with strangers, noted that
coitus does not in these cases signify fertility, but union. Studies of rape in
Ecuador stress that we must separate rape for genocide (such as that in
Bosnia) from rape for booty. 32 These distinctions should be kept in mind
when we examine the scenes of conquest on the Roman columns. Many have
been struck by the difference between the levels of violence depicted there.
The scenes on Trajan’s column are relatively calm, those on Marcus Aurelius’
column look like a ‘final annihilation’. 33

Figure 4: Scene XX from The Column of Marcus Aurelius, Piazza della Colonna,
Rome. Photo by courtesy of the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge.
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The differences are particularly pointed in the scenes of women. The
Trajanic destruction of villages shows relatively undramatic action, but on
the Antonine column one scene (XX) shows a soldier catching a woman by
the hair, who has one breast bare as she holds on to her child. Another
(XCVII), described earlier, is even more violent. I am tempted to see in these
contrasts the differences between fertility and union or between rape for
booty and rape for ethnic cleansing. Whatever the reality of the erotic
aggression of all rape, the official version was at pains to make a distinction.
Although this may seem far-fetched, they correspond in fact to different
historical realities. 34
Dacia, the arena of Trajan’s wars on the column, became a Roman
province, whereas southern Slovakia, where Marcus Aurelius fought his
victorious campaign, remained outside the administered empire. Even if
Marcus had once intended creating two new provinces, the plan had been
abandoned by the time the column was erected. While on Trajan’s column it
looks as if the artist toned down the violence in Dacia in the light of future
reconciliation. This is not as fantastic as it sounds. The figure of Dacia on
Trajan’s coins goes through a transformation from a captive woman on her
knees, representing gens devicta, to later images of her seated peacefully
among the legionary symbols of a frontier zone, stereotypically posed as
provincia pia fidelis. 35
Some sort of similar transformation takes place in the iconography of
Germany. On the coins of Domitian after his campaigns there in the first
century AD , Germania capta is shown seated, chin in hands, long hair and
upper body naked. Under Trajan, although still half-naked, she is no longer
in mourning. But under Hadrian the woman is fully dressed, though with
one breast exposed, showing, according to Toynbee, ‘Germania taking her
full share of imperial responsibilities’. However, the figure identified as
Germania from the Hadrianeum in the Campus Martius (now in the Villa
Doria Pamphilji) is still cast as a wild-looking prisoner. 36 That may indicate
that sentiment about Germany was ambiguous, as Tacitus knew when he
wrote his monograph, Germania, under Trajan. It was a name given to a vast
hinterland beyond the frontiers of the northern provinces as well as the title
applied to two provinces. The frontiers between the two were just in the
process of being consolidated at this time under Hadrian’s successor,
Antoninus Pius, with artificial, military walls, extending into Schwabia and
Bavaria.
There is, however, an oddity in what seems to be the general rule about
the portrayal of provinces that has implications for how the Romans concep-
tualized their frontiers and, indeed, their Empire as a whole. Among the
feminine personifications set up in Hadrian’s temple, the Hadrianeum, in
the Campus Martius, there are two that seem out of place among the admin-
istered territories of the Empire; those of Scythia and Parthia. The
Hadrianeum followed very much the traditional display of simulacra gentium
122
that we now know so well from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias. There, too,
among the fifty or so estimated gentes or ‘peoples’ (of which only thirteen can
be positively identified) there are included some that seem out of place, such
as the Daci, the Bospori, the Arabi and the Iudaei, who were not among the
administered provinces at the time. The solution put forward is that they
represented ‘the effective reach of imperial power’ and were intended to
‘suggest peaceful incorporation’. 37 In the case of the Hadrianeum not all the
gentes are clearly identifiable, but it is usual to follow the names that were
listed by Toynbee from the Hadrianic and later Antonine ‘province’ series of
coins. 38
The thing to stress, however, is that the images were not, in fact, all
provinces in the sense of administered territories. Many were generic
peoples. They were the part of the Empire, says a recent study, that was in
process of being integrated and ideologically assimilated. 39 Setting up simu-
lacra was a practice begun by Pompey in a portico at Rome, imitated by
Augustus also in a portico at Rome and then copied all over the Roman
world (probably at sites such as the Stoa in Corith) by other emperors to
represent the nations dependent on Rome. It was a form of ‘triumphal art’ to
show the extent of the Roman imperium, including the outlandish periphery
of an empire without end. 40
A likely explanation of the inclusion of Parthia and Scythia in the coin
series was, according to Toynbee, because they were ‘symbolic of the great
tracts of the world outside the Empire’. But she also points out that both
figures, although in national dress, were shown holding out a large crown in
the right hand, in the same pose as many of the provinces, such as Asia and
Cappadocia, representing the payment of aurum coronarium, a sort of tribute
and mark of deference. 41 The Romans, we should conclude from this, did
not limit their vision of empire to the formal, visible frontiers of the admin-
istered provinces.
If that is true, we ought to look and see if there are any other simulacra
gentium, which are not representations of half-naked, dejected barbarians but
women who are clothed, confident and ‘ideologically assimilated’. As far as I
know only one exists, and that is the icon of India.
The earliest, positively identifiable, female personification of India is on a
silver bowl from Lampsacus, now in the National Museum at Istanbul (see
figure 5). She is clearly ‘India’ because of the accompanying animals (a
hanuman monkey, a parrot, a guinea fowl), and she is seated on a chair of
ivory tusks, the conventional symbol of India. The bowl is thought by some
to date from the first or early second century. It is a pity, of course, that no
figure has survived from the age of Augustus. But with only a quarter of the
simulacra identifiable in the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, it is perfectly possible
that India was a part of the repertoire. On the celebrated Augustan cup from
the Boscoreale hoard (now in the Louvre), depicting seven conquered female
gentes behind Mars, the middle figure (now cut out by a souvenir collector)
123
may represent the East with a crescent on her head; and that could provide a
link with India through Egypt. But it is all very unsatisfactory as evidence.
From the Later Empire, however, in the mosaic scene of the Great Hunt at
the Piazza Armerina in Sicily, there is a seated, female figure in the South
Apse described by one critic as a ‘dark skinned lady’ (see figure 6). She is
plausibly ‘India’, even if there is dispute about whether some of the accom-
panying animals, a tigress, an elephant and a phoenix, are associated with
India, since they may simply illustrate the animals coming to Rome through
Alexandria.

Figure 5: ’India’ portrayed on a silver dish found at Lampsacus.
Now in the Archaeological Museum, Istanbul. Photo by Hirmer-
Verlag, Munich.

But did the Romans actually believe India was, like Parthia, within the
orbit of imperial power? In Chapter 7 I have collected the literary evidence
to support the view that the Emperor Augustus did, indeed, consider that
his victory over Egypt was also a victory over India, and that India had
become a sort of province. Particularly revealing is the scene imagined by
Vergil in the Aeneid of the triumph of Apollo (Augustus’ patron saint, as it
were) over the ‘People of the Dawn’ who had been mustered by Cleopatra,
Egypt’s female incarnation of barbarian orientalism. 42 The ‘People of the
Dawn’ are certainly Indians, who were, therefore, defeated fighting for
Cleopatra. It so happens that the later commentary by Servius on Vergil’s
Aeneid, at the conclusion of this very passage on the triumphs of Augustus,
refers to the portico of Augustus at Rome which was called ‘ad Nationes’.
124

Figure 6: ’India’ from the Great Hunt Mosaic at the Piazza Armerina,
Sicily. Reproduced by permission of S.F. Flaccovio Editore, Palermo.

On this monument, says Servius, ‘He had placed the simulacra gentium.’ The
portico is reasonably thought to have preceded the iconographic programme
later used in the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, a programme corresponding,
also, to the peoples subservient to Rome that Augustus listed in the posthu-
mous account of his achievements, the Res Gestae. 43 This record famously
included the delegations coming from Indian kings which, to many Romans
at least, signified submission. 44 We know, too, that images of the conquered
gentes were paraded at Augustus’ funeral on the instructions left by the
deceased emperor, again almost certainly a repeat of the list in the Res Gestae
that was put up at the entrance to the emperor’s tomb. 45
125
The defeat of Egypt is closely connected to the Villa Farnesina across the
Tiber in Rome, which is considered to have been originally the residence of
Cleopatra after her defeat by Julius Caesar in 46 BC . It was then redecorated
about 19 BC to celebrate the marriage of Agrippa, victor over Cleopatra at
Actium, to the flighty princess, Julia. The paintings were loaded with polit-
ical messages, and in a room of the central aedicula no one could mistake the
symbolism of Apollo and Dionysus conquering the East, the latter with
branches sprouting from his body on which figures described as ‘Orientals’
are standing. They very probably included Indians, since Dionysus’ conquest
of India was a popular myth. 46 That can be seen on the Dionysus mosaic of
the fourth century from the Villa della Ruffinella, where Indians are being
whipped into submission. 47
More pointedly evoking conquest, although without a female figure, is
the ivory diptych held in the Barbarini Library showing an emperor,
thought perhaps to be Constantius, with the inevitable ivory tusks of Indian
tribute in the lower register. 48 Even in the Later Empire there is good reason
to think India was still thought of as a Roman domain. In a curious docu-
ment written by someone called Palladius, probably in the fourth century,
the author says of the Indians, ‘They honour and fear the Roman arche
[empire]’. If, as I believe, the Roman Empire was defined by roads not fron-
tiers, we might note, too, that the Peutinger Table ends in South India near
the port of Muziris, where a temple of Augustus is prominently marked (see
figure 7). 49 It raises the intriguing question: did this Indian Sebasteion
follow the same triumphal, artistic programme as that at Aphrodisias?

Figure 7: The roads of South India, showing the Temple of Augustus at Muziris.
Extract from Section 12 of the Peutinger Table.

126
It is time to return to frontiers by examining the sexual associations with
religious ceremonies of borders. In many societies rituals and rites of passage
connected with frontiers heighten sexual consciousness. In her classic book,
Purity and danger, Mary Douglas pointed out that ‘Boundary protection
focuses particularly on sexuality’, since it is through females that the purity
of the caste can be polluted. If, as she also argues, ‘Women are the gates of
entry to the caste’, rituals were devised in order to resolve anxiety, but
equally to maintain the culture. 50 The boundary was a magico-religious line
between the sacred and the profane, between the outside and the inside, and
it was often signalled by sexual landmarks, such as the phallus, Hermes or
Priapus. Such symbols possessed power to mediate the act of crossing the
threshold, but also to penetrate or pierce the feminized, often dangerous
unknown. 51 The old Slav custom during plagues of naked women ploughing
deep furrows around a village illustrates the sexual sensitivity of the
boundary and the role of women as conservators of internal safety. 52
Among Roman cults there was similar sexual consciousness associated
with boundaries. The god Liber was honoured by a phallic image that was
carried in procession as a protection against witchcraft and the evil eye (fasci-
natio), particularly at crossroads and outside the town. 53 Fascinus, the divine
spirit of the phallus, was the protector both of the boundary, and of the
general who fought beyond it. The phallus symbol (turpicula res) that was
worn by triumphing generals was carried as an amulet (bulla) by boys to
avert fascinatio until they had passed through the rites of passage into
manhood. The triumphator, after his conquests, also carried the sacred phallus
under his chariot. And we are told that the sacred phallus was tended by the
Vestal Virgins at Rome, whose festival, the Vestalia, was also part of the
military calendar of rituals of the frontiers. 54
The sacredness of the walls of the city, epitomized in the story of Remus,
who was killed for the sacrilege of leaping over the unfinished walls of
Romulus, was equally significant for the wall or the entrenchment of the
military camp, where death was the penalty for anyone who tried to climb
over them and avoid the gates. 55 Doubtless that was true also of the artificial
barriers around the Empire, although the sources do not say so specifically.
The ritual act of drawing the lines around the city with a plough drawn by a
cow and a bull was understood in sexual terms of male power and female
fertility. 56 The symbolism of sex and frontiers was also a two-way traffic.
Augustine used the frontier as a metaphor for ‘a zone of interchange and
communication’, when he was grappling with the frontier of the body in
terms of sexuality and celibacy. Other Christian fathers constantly made use
of the language of frontiers and fortifications to discuss the issue of
virginity. 57
If liminal space was an area of uncertainty to be mediated by ritual, it was
also an area of opportunity, where violence could be fruitful. In the end, the
rape of the Sabine women may have been legitimated by the heroic outcome,
127
but the sexual violence included in crossing the boundary was commemo-
rated forever, says Plutarch, by the ritual of carrying brides over the
threshold, ‘Because the Sabine women were carried in by force and did not
go in of their own accord’. By naming thirty sectors of the city after the
Sabine brides, who were celebrated in the festival of the Matronalia, Romans
ritualized the act of violence that made outsiders insiders and rendered the
territorial boundary between Rome and ‘non-Rome’ legally indistinct. 58
That is important for understanding Roman attitudes to frontiers. The
crossings into the territories of ‘non-Rome’ were a rite of passage that
required a ritual sacrifice to legitimize Roman power beyond the frontier.
On Trajan’s column the scene of the suovetaurilia sacrifice took place within
the camp walls before the next foray into unknown Dacia. On the column of
Marcus Aurelius sacrifice and lustration seem to be required at every river
crossing. 59 Once again territorial aggression, violence and sex are inextri-
cably intertwined in the metaphors.
Military service itself has often been regarded as a rite of passage, a ‘grad-
uation to manhood’, male bonding with a band of brothers in a society of
masculine, military values. 60 The early rite of passage in Rome, when a boy
put off his toga praetexta for the toga virilis (the toga of manhood), took place
in the Forum of Augustus, which was the locus par excellence for displays of
past military conquests and heroes of war. But masculine, military values are
often tinged with an element of homosexuality. A good example is in the
imagery of the cult of Mithras that enjoyed widespread popularity among
soldiers of the frontiers. Described as ‘a perfectly liminal space for perfectly
absurd journeys’, the rituals were defined by boundaries that deliberately
inverted traditional rites of passage, well suited to the topsy-turvy world
where women were excluded. 61 The autoerotic or homosexual context is
sometime explicit. One text tells us, ‘[Mithras] detested the race of women;
and so he masturbated upon a rock’. The images of females were systemati-
cally degraded as night witches or as hyenas, the latter significant as an
animal that could change its sex. One of the grades of initiates was that of
the Male Bride. The overtones need no comment. 62
If we now turn from symbolic representations to the realities of sex on the
frontiers, the studies of the recent wars in Bosnia and Kosovo have for the
first time in history seriously documented the horrors of rape and sexual
violence as deliberate weapons of war. 63 The inevitable question that arises is
to what extent the Roman army, too, used rape as an instrument of system-
atic terror. In the histories of most periods rape has been almost invisible,
since it was accepted without comment as an inevitable fact of war. 64 On the
other hand it would be the worst kind of historicism to project the high
incidence of rape that happens in countries such as the USA, or the atrocities
of the recent Balkan wars, onto all societies, present or past. 65 Rape by the
Vietcong army, for example, was almost unknown, whether due to the influ-
128
ence of Buddhist culture or because the army included many women
fighters. 66 The incidence of rape, therefore, may correlate with the broader
cultural influences at work in society or with the structure of the military
community.
Among such cultural influences, Porter searches for the essential feature
of recent Western history which might account for its distinctive sexual atti-
tudes. The answer he finds is conquest and imperialism which, he argues,
‘mirrored’ their encounters with women. 67 It also shaped the character of the
margins of the society on the frontiers. The British Empire presented endless
opportunities for such aggression, especially at its frontiers. On the margins
of society there was a greater opportunity to take advantage of what Grotius
called ‘the law of war, that everything which belongs to the enemy should be
at the disposal of the victor’. 68 At the end of the Afghan War in 1841, it was
said that British soldiers ‘fell upon the women of Kabul’ with such lust that
it caused lasting resentment. Stone goes so far as to suggest that the subli-
mation of sex at home may account for the military aggression of modern
Western man. 69 But analysts of mass rape in Bosnia have suggested that the
incidence of rape is higher in societies where male power is unstable and
when the boundaries between the sexes is blurred. 70
Can any of this be applied to imperial Rome? The danger in cultural
comparisons is that they become too facile. But sometimes they offer a way
into understanding events. To start with, it is safe to believe that rape in war
was under-reported, largely because it was taken for granted as the conse-
quence of defeat, but partly because we rarely hear the voices of the defeated.
A rare example is one of the most quoted passages of Latin literature, when
Calgacus, the British leader cried, ‘Robbery, butchery, rapine (rapere) they
falsely call empire … Our wives and sisters, even if they escape the lust of
the enemy, are defiled by them pretending to be guests and friends’. 71
Usually, however, references to wartime rape are scarce in the Empire when
set against those of the Republic. 72 That may be quite simply because few
writers of the Empire were as caustic as Tacitus. Or it may be because the
Roman legal definition of rape (that is, stuprum) was ‘status dependent’ and
could not be charged for violation of slaves or peregrines, and clearly not for
rape of foreign captives who automatically became slaves. 73
It is also obvious that Roman imperialism was a brutal affair and, like
later Western imperialism, probably produced a similar reservoir of phallic
aggression on the frontiers, where ‘women became conquests’ and ‘conquests
became female’. 74 Above all in frontier society, the culture was determined
ideologically by a veto on marriage for soldiers and by a repressive military
discipline. Consorting with women led to the neglect of military duty. That
was the point of the cautionary tale about Cerealis on the Rhine front. The
camp guards claimed they could not raise the alarm against a Batavian
attack because they feared to disturb the general who was bedded down with
a Gallic woman. 75
129
In terms of the status of male power and the relations between the sexes
in Roman society, it is not as easy to draw comparisons. It is true that, as
frontier culture presaged opportunities for manliness (virtus), the social order
at home had been disrupted since the late Republic by the revolution that
led to the Augustan autocracy. Marriage had grown less stable, chastity less
prized and women, especially those linked to the imperial households, had
become more powerful. Even poets were more passionate, perhaps, it has
been suggested, because of men’s ‘loss of social standing’ and because
‘virility became domesticated’, separated from real warfare. 76 Ovid, for
example, linked the centre and periphery, women’s liberty, rape and frontier
masculinity in an interesting, if extreme, articulation of the new culture of
Rome:
Maybe, in the days when Tatius ruled, the unkempt Sabine women
refused to be taken by more than one man. Now Mars tries men’s
souls in far off wars, and Venus rules in her city of Aeneas. The
lovely ladies are at play; the only chaste ones are those no one has
courted.’ 77
The repetition by Roman writers of rape stories to mark moments of histor-
ical change, and the constant theme of rape in the schools of rhetoric during
the Empire shows that no amount of bland, political justification of the fate
of the Sabine women could conceal the fact that ‘Roman men talked rape
constantly’. 78
The difficulty with an attempt to trace a shift or blurring of relations
between the sexes in Roman society is that almost all our information
inevitably concerns the metropolis, at the very time that Rome and Italy
became increasingly detached from the soldiers on the frontiers, who by the
early second century were largely recruited from the provinces. Even though
Roman provincials adopted Roman cultural values, it would be a bold
person who would claim that conservative, provincial societies acquired the
same sexual consciousness in every respect as that of the demilitarized
capital. But there is one decisive, cultural factor that makes it unlikely that
rape in Roman society, whether in the metropolis or in the provinces, can be
meaningfully compared with modern societies. That is domestic slavery.
Sexual opportunities for both homosexuals and heterosexuals was readily
available within the law for those who owned slaves. And for the poor who
could not afford a slave, cheap sex was offered by slave prostitutes. Roman
law created only limited restrictions against the exploitation of slaves for
prostitution, and even less protection against masters. 79 Martial says that if
he could not find a consenting, freeborn woman, there was always the slave
maid (ancilla), and he has left several poems about boy lovers which show
that homosexual relations were perfectly acceptable socially, provided the
freeborn man was not the passive partner. 80 In civil society, at least, there-
130
fore, if there were aggressive instincts in the conquest culture it was more
likely to be mirrored in the treatment of domestic slaves than in aggression
towards free women.
So, to return to the question I began by asking: what about the frontier
society itself ? Can we detect any suggestion of rape being used as a weapon
of war on a par with the appalling Balkan experience? In Kosovo, mass rapes
have been described as ‘not rare or isolated acts … but rather used deliber-
ately as an instrument to terrorize the civilian population, extort money
from families and push people to flee their homes’. In both Kosovo and
Bosnia most acts were in public, they were systematic and they were
intended to dehumanize women, so that they would be less marriageable or
bear ethnically mixed bastards. The rape cannot be explained by uncon-
trolled libido or senseless brutality; rather a ‘ritual procedure’ to prove the
masculinity of the aggressor and the weakness of the woman’s husband.
Often the women were killed after rape. And sometimes the men in the
prison camps were forced into homosexual acts with each other. 81
Naturally we have nothing of this detail in Roman writing. On the fron-
tiers, certainly, there were acts of brutality against the enemy, and under the
Republic the Romans were notorious for their intent to strike terror in the
enemy by their savagery. 82 But it is hard to find parallels in the warfare of
the Empire. I said earlier that the scenes of the Marcommanian Wars of the
late second century on the column of Marcus Aurelius, including those of
sexual assault on civilians, seem to show more violence than others. Perhaps
this was because the invasion by the Danube tribes in AD 170 had posed
such a serious threat to Italy that a war of terror and ethnic cleansing was
required. We are told that Marcus ‘wished to annihilate the Quadi
completely’, and that Roman soldiers even fought with their teeth in close
combat. 83 But there is not enough in the literary or iconographic evidence
to suggest the systematic, sexual violation of the civilian population on the
scale of Bosnia or Kosovo. Perhaps we simply do not have enough informa-
tion to make a comparison.
But there is a reason to believe that the wars beyond the frontiers were
not fought in this mode. It is significant that the most explicit descriptions
of mass rape that we possess come not from foreign campaigns but from civil
wars. In the Perusine War of 40 BC , when the Italian city of Perugia was
sacked, the scene is described by Cicero: ‘Fields were laid waste, villas
sacked, married women, maidens and freeborn boys were violently dragged
off and handed over to the soldiers”. 84
In the Year of the Four Emperors, AD 69–70, the Italian city of Cremona
was also devastated. Tacitus gives a graphic account:
Neither rank nor years protected anyone from rape (stuprum)
mingled with slaughter, and slaughter with rape. Old men and
women at the end of their lives were dragged off as booty and to
131
mock them. Whenever a blossoming maiden or a good-looking
youth fell into their hands, they were torn to pieces by the violence
of their rapists (rapientium). 85
Both scenes contain clear echoes of the reports of mass rape and humiliation
in the Balkan wars, which were, of course, also civil wars. But civil wars are
exceptions and rouse exceptionally bestial violence. They were wars, in the
Roman case, at least, where the sufferings of the victims, also exceptionally,
were graphically described, no doubt because the victims were citizens. The
Gallic panegyricists praised Constantine that during the wars of succession
married women of beauty were ‘not an incitement to licentiousness’, and
they lauded the fact that, when the army entered Milan in AD 312, ‘What
serenity there was for mothers and maidens (because) they feared no
licence’. 86 The implications are that rape was expected. For this was civil
war.
It is tempting to believe that the disciplina which figured high in the
ideological lexicon of the new Augustan army, and included a ban on mili-
tary marriages, was a deliberate attempt to channel a soldier’s testosterone
into rape of the womenfolk of the enemy. If so, the belief that women were
‘inimical to military discipline’ (as Herodian says) ought logically to have
excluded all females from the vicinity of the camp, if the ban was to be sexu-
ally effective. 87 As we shall see, even Augustus did not do that. There is
little reason, therefore, to think that rape was considered a strategic weapon
of war, even if everyone, like Calgacus, knew that war provided opportuni-
ties for rape.
Women in the camps brings me to the last building block in this study of
sex on the frontiers. How did soldiers in the frontier armies manage their
sexual urges? And with what consequences? There have been a large number
of studies of marriage of Roman soldiers – or rather of non-marriage, since
life in the camps was until the third century a matter of ‘copulation and
concubinage’, like that of subsequent European colonialism. 88 I have no
wish, therefore, to repeat everything that has been said, but only to high-
light certain features that lead me to believe that women on the frontiers
contributed as much as any other factor to the blurring of the concept of
frontiers as the barrier between Rome and the people beyond. Indeed, to
some extent the sexual history of soldiers replicated the history of frontiers
themselves.
Crudely put, the formation of the frontiers passed through three phases:
invasion, occupation and consolidation. This is, of course, only a schematic
way of examining the process, which in reality cannot be rigidly or even
chronologically separated out. The violence and aggression of invasion and
expansion in the first century often continued after the army had established
its initial positions as an occupying force, and extended even into the second
SEX ON THE FRONTIERS
132
and third centuries after the frontiers had been consolidated by permanent
camps and cantonments behind walls.
There is little to add about invasion and conquest, since most of what
has been said so far related to aggression against an outside enemy.
Slaughter of the fighting men and enslavement of women and children was
standard treatment for those who refused to submit. That is what Corbulo
did in AD 58 against the Armenian town of Volandum. 89 Rapine and
slaughter were what they called peace, which the icons of victory sanitized,
but did not conceal. Ideology maintained that on campaign was no place
for women or wives, since they subverted loyalty and masculinity. Tacitus
gives us the full blast of the rhetoric in his accounts of various wives at the
front where they should not have been found. Agrippina, wife of
Germanicus, in the camp at Cologne, was politically too ambitious by half:
‘There was nothing left for generals when a woman got in among the mani-
ples, attended the standards and attempted bribery.’ The wife of Calvisius
Sabinus in Germany was worse: ‘She entered the camp at night dressed as a
soldier, and with similar licence tested out the sentries and dared to forni-
cate right in the headquarters building.’ 90 The countless horrors of women
were rehearsed in the senate: extravagant in peacetime, timid in war and
too feeble on the march; once admitted to army life they were ferocious
plotters, ordering the officers about and attracting ‘every rascal in the
province’. 91 One might suppose from such a declamatory catalogue that the
law forbidding women from accompanying their husbands on foreign
service would have been rigorously enforced. But the very examples show
that it was regularly flouted.
What comes as a greater surprise is the number of women who were
available for the lower ranks. They fell within the generic names of lixae
and calones, which included all kinds of camp followers and servants –
traders, cooks, grooms, actors and the like, but among them women. The
best-known example of them accompanying soldiers on campaign comes
from Appian’s Republican history of the battle of Numantia in 134 BC ,
when Scipio expelled all camp followers from the camp, including the
women hetarai, a word signifying sexual companions. 92 But under the
Empire Augustus did not suppress their presence on campaign. Although
the number of women can only be guessed at, it was the shrieks of ‘not a
few women and children’ among ‘many other servants’ that betrayed the
Roman army as it was trying to escape in the dark, before the disastrous
massacre of Varus’ army in the Teutoburg forest in AD 9. 93 The lixae and
calones accompanying the ill-disciplined army of Vitellius in the civil wars
of AD 69–70 astonishingly outnumbered the 40–60,000 soldiers, according
to Tacitus. In the same war Fabius Valens was impeded in his march by ‘a
long and luxurious train of prostitutes and eunuchs’. 94 No doubt the exam-
ples were exaggerated for effect but the stories were told for those who
knew the basic reality.
133
Armies of occupation in the second phase of frontier formation brought
with them semi-permanent or permanent camps, in the East often in the
vicinity of cities, even though campaigns were still waged that entailed
frequent postings of individuals or whole legions. One of the problems of
postings, once a unit had put down its roots, was the female attachments
and the children that resulted. That was enough, we are told, to cause the
soldiers stationed in Syria to mutiny, when the rumour went round that they
were to be sent to Germany: ‘The provincials liked living with (contubernatio)
soldiers they knew, and many soldiers were tied to them by family ties and
relationships.’ The same problem arose in the Later Empire, when Gallic
units were threatened with transfer to the East. 95
The second example should make us wary of accepting the common
stereotype of the Eastern armies as being exceptionally ill-disciplined and
corrupted by soft, urban conditions. Egyptian documents show that the
soldiers there, too, were involved in a ‘web of connections’ with the local
community. 96 However, although there must have been many broken hearts
when the unit moved, inscriptions show a surprising number of women who
appear to have followed their men from one part of the Empire to the next:
an African woman with a Pannonian centurion in Britain, a Syrian ‘wife’
living with an auxiliary in Mauretania Tingitana, a British partner attached
to a centurion in Upper Germany, a German sister travelling with her
brother to Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, or a Batavian soldier with a Batavian
wife and daughters on the Danube. 97
Occupation, however, began the process of institutionalization of daily
life on the frontiers, sex for the troops included. Some of their desires would
have been satisfied by the prostitutes they brought with them. But evidence
of military brothels is hard to come by. At the camp in Dura Europos on the
Euphrates one of the houses has been identified as a possible example
because on the walls it displays pictures of a group of visiting performing
artists, including women, who appear to have been billeted there by a mili-
tary optio (or under-officer), to whom there is a reference in one graffito.
Normally there would not be any way of identifying a brothel archaeologi-
cally, unless a stone bed or an explicit graffito had survived, as in Pompeii.
In any case, we must assume that most prostitutes plied their trade in bars
and taverns, like the one found at Carnuntum near the legionary camp on
the Danube, which could not strictly be described as brothels.
Although the presence of the optio at Dura suggests the women were offi-
cial camp prostitutes, I am doubtful whether the army really did make
provision for such encouragement. 98 More probably they turned a blind eye.
‘Whoring, drinking and bathing’ became the rhetoric for lax control of the
soldiers, which is the point of the reference to the purge of the fancy eating
houses in the camp by Hadrian, who was a stickler for discipline. 99 This last
reference gives the impression that prostitutes sometimes set up shop inside
the camp. But the term ‘camp’ may be used loosely, since a reference in the
134
glossaries says that the purpurilla was ‘A place in the camp outside the
vallum where prostitutes exhibit themselves … since prostitutes used to use
purple clothing’. 100
But in the early days of occupation there was a good deal of abuse of the
native population, whose rights of redress as peregrines were minimal in law
and virtually non-existent in practice. We must assume that only the more
spectacular incidents attracted attention; cases like the rape of Boudicca’s
daughters in AD 60 that provoked a war; or the buggery of Batavian youths,
who were ‘treated as slaves’ when called to the camp on the pretext of
conscription, which also stoked a revolution in AD 70. The wives and
daughters of respectable provincials were not safe. 101 Jewish Talmudic
sources, one of the rare cases when provincials speak for themselves, assume
that women were more likely to be violated by Roman soldiers than by
bandits. 102 And we have the notorious episode in AD 378 when beautiful
Gothic women and grown lads were ‘hunted down for disgraceful purposes’
by army officers after they had been promised safe conduct across the fron-
tiers. 103
Such examples show that homosexual assault was one recourse for sex-
starved soldiers. The myth of Mithras, mentioned earlier, suggests that
masturbation was another. The extent of homoerotic relations with local
boys or subordinates by prominent Victorian colonials and military heroes is
now becoming fully realized, although for long concealed by official
prudery. 104 No doubt there was a similar reticence in the Roman sources,
although homosexuality was certainly practised. In the army it was socially
unacceptable for a Roman citizen to be a passive partner, and militarily bad
for discipline between soldiers of unequal ranks. 105 The point is vividly
illustrated by a declamatio written in the late first or early second century AD ,
although it refers to an anecdote in Marius’ army of 104 BC . The story relates
that an ordinary soldier was raped or seduced by a military tribune, whom
he then killed. But the soldier was acquitted on the plea that the rape would
have been an outrage against his manhood and his citizenship. It would have
reduced him to the status of a slave, whereas only a proper man could serve
as a soldier.
Again the eastern army became the butt of ancient writers, but there are
other examples to discount it as the exception. There is no need to believe
that Maximus was able to outlast 30 soldiers and 30 women in bed to recog-
nize a moderate sort of reality behind a typical scandal story. 106 But the
mention of slaves, as a comparison for the treatment of the Batavians or of
the miles Marianus, is instructive. As before, it seems probable that violation
of provincials and relations between citizens were less common as long as
slaves or male prostitutes (usually also slaves) were among the lixae. Tacitus
for the first century and Salvian for the Later Empire say as much. 107 There
was apparently no social stigma on the active partner nor legal impediment
if the passive partner was a slave (or captive). 108 But the several references to
135