Secret Agents of Rome and the Performance of Justice

Secret Agents of Rome and the Performance of Justice

We can identify two sorts of secret agents within the Roman world, with some specialist groups alongside them. These are the frumentarii, created by Hadrian, and the agentes in rebus created by Diocletian and particularly active after AD357, when their purpose was modified by Constantius II. Among the agentes were an investigative branch, the curiosi.

Rome had no police force and no prisons for most of the classical period. When L. Sergius Catilina was arrested and charged with treason, in 63BC, he was lodged in a private house of a friend, a sort of bail bond. The lawyers for and against him no doubt used whatever means they could to secure information. We have Cicero’s speeches In Catilinam, but of course not the defence side. The whole process was handled by magistrates. Rome had only two cells, used for lodging accused persons who didn’t have the benefit of rich friends.

Since imprisonment was not used as a punishment, only to hold prisoners before trial, all our information relates to holding, not punishment. For the most part, unless an accused person was cleared, probably due to a bribe, the outcome was a fine for minor offences, execution and exile (social death to anyone who lived in Rome where the right contacts made all the difference). The only quasi-imprisonment available was hard labour in the mines, which was a type of death sentence, since few survived such heavy, dangerous and often poisonous work, and such sentences were reserved for slaves and low-status citizens.

As republican law broke down, anyone could kill almost anyone else with impunity. Julius Caesar had forbidden people in Rome to carry weapons (Lex Julia de vi privata). But he was after all the one who had crossed the Rubicon under arms to conquer Rome in the first place. Under the second triumvirate, anybody could denounce anyone and have them put on the proscription list.

The ‘prison’ at Rome was the Tullianum, originally a spring house, later the site of the medieval Mamertine prison and sometimes referred to as the Carcer (hence ‘incarcerate’), which seems to have included an oubliette from which it was hard to escape and inconvenient captives could be quietly starved to death. There were quarries nearby used to pen prisoners and to one side a long staircase, the Gemonian Stairs (Scalae Gemoniae) down which captives were hurled to their deaths as a form of public execution. It is notable that the Tullianum was across the street from the Senate House and at the top was the Tabularium, where accounts were lodged, suggesting that this was a zone of punishment and death for political and financial crimes.

The Carcer or Tullianum at the foot of the Capitoline Hill

Frumentarii were also used by Balbinus and Pupienus to warn cities across the empire not to support Maximinus Thrax (Hist Aug ‘Balbinus’ 10) 

Maximinus Thrax, emperor AD235- 238

and Gallienus to pick up rumours against him (‘Claudius’ (Gothicus) 17). These had originated as grain buyers for the army, hence the name. Everyone needs to eat, so what could be less conspicuous than a grain merchant? Since the poor of Rome lived for centuries on grain handouts, the frumentarii were a good way to pick up news and gossip.

The system of spies was clearly not very successful, since in the third century many emperors faced rebellions and conspiracies, with the average reign of an emperor being 2 years and 6 months. It is reasonable to assume that everyone knew who the legion’s frumentarius was and to feed him false information.

Diocletian of course reformed much else, so the invention of a system of agentes in rebus would be a priority for him to retain his throne unchallenged. 

Diocletian

In border regions there seems also to have been a system of double agents; these are known from two sources from Britain. The first is a reference in Vindolanda Tablet 162 to a ‘Miles Arcanus’, a secret soldier. As Vindolanda was abandoned before the creation of Hadrian’s Wall, the system of secret soldiers may have been replaced by the frumentarii, or merely supplemented by it. The idea of a secret soldier is, we assume, to remain secret.


During these outstanding events the areani, who had gradually become corrupt, were removed by him [Count Theodosius, father of the later emperor] from their positions. This was an organization founded in early times, of which I have already said something in the history of Constans [Note: that reference did not survive]. It was clearly proved against them that they had been bribed with quantities of plunder, or promises of it, to reveal to the enemy from time to time what was happening on our side. Their official duty was to range backwards and forwards over long distances with information for our generals about disturbances among neighbouring nations (Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 28.3.8)

Since Latin has no definite article and was not punctuated by commas, it might be that the Latin means ‘areani who had gradually become corrupt’. Areani may be a misreading in the surviving MSS for ‘arcani’; the two seem too alike.

In certain places law and order were maintained by urban cohorts (cohortes urbanae), under the control of the urban prefect, the mayor. Only three places in the western empire seem to have received them, and perhaps they were the ones that needed them: Rome itself, with three cohorts, Carthage and Lyon. Since there were no such bodies in Spain or Britain, it is possible that Carthage (the leading city of Roman North Africa) and Lyon (the capital of Gaul) were headquarters for the Praetorian Prefect and that they relied on the security systems handled by the various frumentarii, later agentes in rebus, the curiosi and arcani, which taken together were probably deemed to be sufficient.

We do not know if the three urban cohorts in Rome were organised by area, by function, or both. There would need to be some idea of ‘the patch’ in which cohort operated, as it would need a building; the urban cohorts were considered to be soldiers and would need to store arms and captives, and possibly recovered loot. The urban prefect would allocate tasks at the highest level and make sure each of the three cohorts knew the others were conducting operations which might cross into the others’ patches.

Operationally, the functions would be catching thieves, stopping disorder and attempted coups, as well as dealing with internal matters such as fraud and unauthorised murder. The one thing they didn’t do was patrol the streets, which was the job of the vigiles, the ‘vigilant ones’, who doubled as nightwatchmen and a fire brigade. Presumably paid fire fighters with a financial incentive to be loyal were preferred to amateurs; Trajan forbade Pliny the Younger from allowing the citizens of Nikopolis (in Bithynia-Pontus) from starting a volunteer firemen’s department on the grounds that such things led to uprisings (Letters of the Younger Pliny, Book 10). 

Trajan

At that time (early second century AD) control over such groups was maintained by the provincial governor, but after Septimius Severus or Caracalla stopped governors having operational control over the army, presumably the same applied to all such groups and the vigiles were controlled by the local army commander.

Local jails did exist; St Paul was arrested and locked up in one on Malta (See Acts 27 and 28; also for his shipwrecks 2 Corinthians 25, which also speaks of him being beaten with iron rods). Acts 28.21 has the Roman authorities say to him ‘We neither received letters out of Judæa concerning thee, neither any of the brethren that came shewed or spake any harm of thee’. This suggests that a system existed for people to condemn criminals discreetly, either by direct testimony or by letter.

This has been a brief exposition of the role of secret agents in the Roman world. I would welcome any comments.

Where was Valentia?

Roman Britain was a single province from AD43 to sometime after Septimius Severus won control of it from Clodius Albinus, that is about AD198. Then two provinces were created: Britannia Superior (capital London) and Britannia Inferior (capital York). The use of the ranking adjective was also used for Germania and Libya. In Germania it referred to the relative height of the land, and we still use the terms High German and Low German.

However, the north of England is not lower than its south, but the reverse, so we can only suppose that the terms meant ‘better Britain’ and ‘worse Britain’. Had the terms meant ‘hither’ and ‘further’ (from Rome) they would have been citerior and ulterior. But they weren’t.

We know nothing about the boundary of the two provinces, other than each capital must have lain within its territory. It is customary to divide Britannia at the Mersey-Humber line (which runs from Liverpool on the West to Kingston upon Hull in the east), but there is no evidence to support that.

Another possibility is the approximate line of the Severn-Humber economic divide (SHED), a much more significant and ancient division. This is clear from Later Pre-Roman Iron Age (LPIRA) contrasts and remains potent to this day, as seen in the work of the Social and Spatial Inequalities Group (SASI Group) (see www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/maps/nsdivide/) at the University of Sheffield. For anyone not familiar with the geography, the Severn Estuary runs into the Bristol Channel, a wide tidal piece of sea which

In the LPRIA period, coins were used south and east of the SHED line (the Lowland Zone, or LZ) and not north and west of it (the Highland Zone, HZ). Similarly various types of pottery were made and distributed  in the LZ, and no pottery has been found in the HZ. It is also the divider for LPRIA forts versus no forts, with all forts again found in the LZ south and east of the line (Millett, 1992, various pp). Todd notes that certain architectural features such as souterrains exist only in the HZ, north west of the SHED line (Todd, 2008, p.20) North and west of the SHED line agriculture is to this day dominated by stock rearing, as opposed to the mainly agrarian nature of south and east.

The SHED line was also the line of the Fosse Way, for a generation the effective border of the Roman Empire in Britain, so the earliest Roman province was the LZ, or a part of it.. Naturally it formed the tribal borders of a number of Brythonic political units. Consequently it also forms an isogloss, because the people to the north and west of that line would operate in different discourse communities to those south and east of it. They would not talk of minting coins, how to make or sell ceramics, or techniques for building or rebuilding earthworks.

The line itself runs approximately along the Jurassic Ridge, which is a watershed for local rivers. It may have had a negative impact on settlements, as here is the highest level of the natural radioactive gas Boron. This runs along the SHED/ Jurassic Ridge line and it is likely that fewer settlements would be made along that line, since the gas permeates through floorboards and has a long-term adverse effect on health, even today. Gas, river access and proximity to potentially hostile neighbours would have reinforced the divide.

All of this leaves me in no doubt that this was the border between Britannia Inferior and Britannia Superior, as overseen by Septimius Severus after beating Clodius Albinus. He stripped the governors of the power to command armies and stripped the armies of the power to levy taxes, thus creating checks and balances.

At some point between AD198 and AD305, the term ‘Britannia’ came to be applied to Britannia Inferior only, and the LZ became known as ‘Caesariensis’. Birley suggests this may have coincided with the reception of the Caesar Constantius Chlorus in London in AD296 (Birley); at some point London was renamed Augusta and this may have followed the split. During the reign of the Tetrarchy Caesariensis was split into Flavia Caesariensis (FC, capital Lincoln) and Maxima Caesariensis (MC, capital London), while Britannia split into Britannia Prima (BP, capital Cirencester) and Britannia Secunda (BS, capital York). We can see this in operation at the Council of Arles, where there were bishops from London, York and Lincoln and clergy from Cirencester present; perhaps the bishop was too old or too ill to travel. It was normal for the church to have a bishop in every provincial capital and a metropolitan for every diocese, and London doubled as the seat of the vicarius, so perhaps the bishop of London was a metropolitan (Verona List).

Maxima Caesariensis was the only province of the four to be a consular province; such provinces were held by ex-consuls and were therefore a privileged set. It may be that its tax income was allocated to Maximian and that of FC to Flavius Constantius Chlorus, which is why it was clearly a lot smaller. Because there was a bishop at Lincoln, I would propose that the basic shape of Flavia Caesariensis was that of the medieval See of Lincoln. Since an Anglo-Saxon king could have multiple bishops, but a bishop could serve only one king, this large bishopric which runs from the Thames to the Humber to me represents the original Mercia of the Tribal Hidage and Flavia Caesariensis.

There is a mystery later in the fourth century, and that is Valentia. Its name suggests it cannot predate the reigns of Valentinian (imp. 363-375) and Valens (imp. 363-378). Ammianus Marcellinus says that the province was created after the suppression of the Barbarian Conspiracy (AD 367). We know that this is true because the province exists in the Notitia Dignitatum and (after the event) in the calendar of Polemius Silvius. It too is a consular province, indicating its importance. It is unlikely that a consular province would be a part removed from an ordinary province; more likely is that it would have been a part of Maxima Caesariensis. If MC is south-eastern Britain and FC is the area around Lincoln, I propose that the there is only rational place for Valentia.

I cannot see any reason why a new province would be established in the north west as a subdivision of Britannia Secunda. The provincial governor did not command troops, he only raised the funds to pay for them. A north-western province, roughly modern Cumbria, would have been quite poor and have no other function other than as a military base. Nor can I see an ex-consul traipsing up to Carlisle (Luguvallum) as a civilian leader in what Peter Heather would call the ‘middle of bloody nowhere’.

My argument is that Valentia was a reward, not an imposition. As such, I can only see it as a subdivision of Maxima Caesariensis. My best guess is that it comprised what are now Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Surrey and Middlesex, with a small area of what is now East Sussex. The coastal areas of this match the reach of the Count of the Saxon Shore. This was a special military command designed to ensure the orderly settlement of ‘Saxons’ in Britain following the events of AD367. I completely refute the idea that it was called the Saxon Shore (Litus Saxonum) because it was the shore from which the Saxons were forbidden, because they were generally forbidden to be on any shore!

The Governor of Valentia would have ruled the province from London, which was part of the tribal area of the Cantii; the four kings of Kent referred to by Caesar ruled were East Kent, West Kent, Surrey and Middlesex. The Saxon kingdom of Kent seems too to have held overlordship over Essex. It will have been noted that the governor of Maxima Caesariensis also worked in London, as did the vicarius who coordinated the whole island, plus, I would guess, officers who reported to the Praetorian Prefect of the Gauls. In addition, now that Britain had a metropolitan, an archbishop of London, he and his clergy would have worked there too.

London in the fourth century was rather different from the vigorous city of previous centuries. At some point it built a fourth wall along the river side, an area which had previously been open land lined with wharves, thus cutting the city off from its own riverfront and landing places, both military and civilian. This wall survived till Norman times, when it was demolished, trapping a coin of that time under its rubble. Late Roman London ought to have been a secure place, although it failed to stop Pictish ships from slipping past the watchtower at Shadwell and seizing the city.

At some point, as I have said above, London was renamed Augusta, the city of the Augustus. This was a singular honour, although it cannot have been taken as such too widely, because the name didn’t stick, unlike similar names in Gaul and Germany, for example (Autun was Augustodunum and Augsburg was Augusta Vindelicorum). I suggest that the reason for the change in name was first to assure the importance of the city to the Empire, and second because it was the base for the consular governors of two provinces, for the vicarius who reported directly to the emperor, for the bishop of London, for the staff of the Pretorian Prefect of the Gauls and probably the headquarters staff of the Count of the Saxon Shore. As there was a mint in London until after the reign of Magnus Maximus (d. 388), this may be associated with the enclosed site. The later location of the royal mint within the Tower of London may reflect an earlier industrial site in that area, as the Normans built the White Tower on top of the Roman citadel, clearing away the strata which had built up in the interim.

London’s soil was cleared of rubbish and relaid over older demolished buildings as ‘black earth’. This has sometimes been interpreted as rotted timber buildings, but if so, the residents of such buildings were so careful they never dropped a chicken bone or a small coin. I think that within the walls the normal inhabitants were moved out (to the extramural settlement later known as Lundunbyrig, perhaps) and an imperial-divine precinct created for the great and the good and their crews. They even built a very large church, probably a cathedral, dedicated it is believed to St Paul, which was discovered on Tower Hill in 1995. The church of Allhallows by the Tower dates from 675 and contains Roman material. It seems likely that St Martin in the Fields, now in Trafalgar Square was a Roman church, and if so its dedication must postdate St Martin of Tours (d. 8 November 397) and may predate AD410. Maybe that was for people displaced from Augusta. The dedication of St Pancras Old Church to an obscure Roman saint may suggest that, as legend insists, it was an old church just outside the walls for local residents, its its later boundaries were from Oxford Street to Highgate, suggesting that a local noble with a sizeable retinue patronised it.

It is notable that there were churches to St Pancras and St Martin at Canterbury when St Augustine arrived in AD597. Augustine brought relics of St Pancras with him to Britain, and since his task was to reopen the See of London (rather than starting a new one at Canterbury), he had presumably intended them for the extramural church near London.

In summary, I see Valentia as the fifth province usually cited, subdivided from Maxima Caesariensis to include the territories bounded by the Saxon Shore forts and run from an imperial precinct set within the walls of what had been London.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Ammianus Marcellinus

Notitia Dignitatum

Secondary Sources

Haselegrove, C. (2008) ‘Central and Atlantic Britain’ in Todd, M. (ed.) A Companion to Roman Britain, London: Wiley.

Hind, J. (1975) ‘The British 'Provinces' of Valentia and Orcades (Tacitean Echoes in Ammianus Marcellinus and Claudian)’ Historia Bd. 24, H. 1 (1st Qtr., 1975), pp. 101-111.

Millett, M (1992) The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation, Cambridge: CUP.

A Refuge in the Roman Empire (Part 2)

Moving forward to the early second century AD; Trajan fought and defeated the Dacians (101-106 AD), following an earlier campaign by Domitian, and raised a column about it in 109AD. This was the last expansion of the Empire, and proved a war too far. Immediately north of the Dacians were the Goths, who had moved upriver on the Vistula and found themselves at the Carpathians. They expanded into the northern parts of Dacia. By around 250AD this had become a threat to Rome, and its new emperor, Decius, led an army into Dacia to repel the Goths.

It didn’t work. Decius was killed in the marshes on the north bank of the Danube. The Goths went on to raid various parts of the empire, even crossing into Asia Minor and abducting Roman citizens in Cappadocia as slaves. Rome had removed a buffer state when they’d have been better advised to strengthen it.

Amongst the captives from Cappadocia were Christians, and whilst they had started as slaves of the Goths, their offspring gradually became Goths (while still able to speak Greek and Latin). About a hundred years after being abducted, one of those new Goths, Wulfilaz, turned up in Constantinople. His name is recorded variously as Ulphilas or Wulfila, and he was a Christian priest. We will catch up with him later on.

When Constantine took control of the eastern empire, he established a treaty (foedus) with the Danubian Goths, the group later known as the Visigoths. This was something very much to their advantage; the right to trade with Roman Moesia at any point along the Danube; the ability to absorb all and any young men the Goths could spare into the Roman Army, where they would spend twenty years as a soldier; if they came back it would be as  men in their late 30s or above, and if they chose not to return there was the offer of a cash sum, Roman citizenship and the ability to marry a Roman citizen girlfriend and settle as a burgher of the town. The third advantage of the foedus was a regular ‘gift’ of high quality Roman pottery and metalware, of which the king would keep some and give the rest to his higher nobles and so on down the line, securing loyalty in this way.

This pact served both Romans and Goths well. The Romans had to pay for the ‘gifts’ (i.e. bribes) to the Goths, but that was a lot cheaper than fighting them. The real damage was to Roman egotism. The bribes also provided a structure of chieftain generosity and reciprocal service typical of a Germanic war band.

 The Emperor Decius

Wulfilaz appeared in Constantinople in 340, and was allowed to create a translation of the Bible into Gothic, using a mix of Latin and Greek letters with some Gothic runes. By his own admission, he omitted the Book of Kings in the Old Testament because the Goths were warlike enough without encouragement. He returned to Gothland under the protection of Fritigern, but later took a community of Gothic Christians back within the empire in about AD347/8 under the protection of Constantius II; who was an Arian, and so Wulfilaz’s group adopted Arianism, which was legitimised at the Church Council of Rimini; it was probably close to the Christianity they’d practised in Cappadocia when it was still underground.

The Goths ran into difficulty because they were drawn into a dispute over who should be eastern emperor; Valens, the brother of Valentinian, who had been picked by his brother, who had been appointed and acclaimed by the army, rubberstamped by an obliging Senate, was unpopular with Procopius, a cousin of the former emperor Justin. Somehow Procopius persuaded the Gothic leadership that he was the rightful emperor.

Procopius (also claimed as Valens, but probably too young to be him)

In the Germanic system of royal inheritance, Procopius might have succeeded, because that system established a royal pedigree, and anyone within the royal lineage could seek to be king. The principal targets were stability and legitimacy. It was obviously necessary to avoid children, the ill, mad and illegitimate inheriting, and (as was later shown) women were best placed as ‘peaceweavers’. The next one down the age range was usually best, so brothers and cousins often inherited ahead of sons, particularly ones of dubious mental health, which is why Hamlet was sidelined for Claudius in the myth Shakespeare took from Saxo Grammaticus.

Procopius put his case to the Tervingi Goths, under their leader Athanaric, in terms they used and understood, but which was never used by the Romans once the Julio-Claudians had exterminated themselves.

It would have been smart for Valens to have told the Goths to do what their foedus required and rewarded their renewed loyalty, but he was exceptionally dumb, so he punished them, ending the open trading along the Danube, cutting it to one place, and closing the army to Gothic recruits, thereby trapping youths of fighting age in Gothland kicking their heels resentfully. By doing this he impoverished the Gothic farmers and built up a reservoir of young men who blamed their rulers. By ending the bribes, Valens was able to cut taxes in the Eastern Empire, the first emperor to do so in a century, and was praised for it by the orator Themistius, although he may not have known about it, since Themistius spoke Greek by no Latin and Valens the reverse, so they probably smiled politely at each other as the Empire destroyed itself.

The struggles of Christian Goths and the adverse reaction of the ‘pagan’ Athanaric towards Rome is seen in the martyrdom of Sabbaz (St Saba) in AD374 by drowning. Within two years, this 38 year old Arian Goth had been made a Roman saint, another cause of war with the Arian emperor Valens. An official hagiography The Passion of St Saba has been discussed by Peter Heather in his book The Goths in the Fourth Century (1991). No doubt such murders by Athanaric eased the decision of Fritigern’s Goths to emigrate to the Roman Empire in AD376, less than two years later, at just the moment that Bishop Basil of Caesarea in Moesia. We can see some similar push factors to the murders by ISIS of Christians and Yazidis in recent times in Syria and Iraq.

Unknown to Valens, the Huns had parked themselves to the north of Gothland, having found a way across the Pripet Marshes at the mouth of the Volga. The Goths had a new power to crawl to, so some of them, under Athanaric, asserted that they no longer needed the Romans, now they could get what they wanted by offering services to the Huns. Other Goths – those nearer to the Danube, possibly no further than 30 miles from the river – thought if they offered themselves as even more dogged than before in devotion to Rome, they might receive their old favoured position once more.

Those southern Goths were led by Fritigern, and they sought refuge within the Roman Empire.  It sounded reasonable, but it was the beginning of the end.

They petitioned Valens to let them enter the empire, and this was permitted. The numbers – perhaps 50,000 – were rather more than had been intended, These were however not all men of fighting age, and included women, children, the elderly and the sick. In that respect, they resembled the sort of migrants fleeing conflict seen in the movements of 2014.

Valens allowed them to be placed in transit camps, where they were ripped off and half-starved for some time by the local governors, Lupicinus and Maximus, who sold them food at high prices, claiming there was a famine. They led their menfolk out to acquire illegally what they could not legitimately obtain. They hoped to get to Adrianople (modern Edirne on the Turkish-Greek border), where some Goths had already settled (echoed by modern migrants desire to get to Britain or Germany because they have relatives there). But Valens had already killed their relatives in the city. With some irony, as I write, the Turks are stopping astern migrants at Edirne from entering Greece.

On 9 August 378, Valens led Roman troops against the local Goths and lost, possibly burning to death in an agricultural worker’s hut as he fled the battlefield. Fritigern lived on for some time, and over time, the successful Goths were settled in Thrace and many of the young men joined the Roman army, helping Theodosius I win the Battle of the Frigidus on 8 September 394; by doing so, they showed the Western Imperial Army could be beaten, as the army of Valens had been.

Most of those who followed Alaric in the early fifth century were born within the empire and were therefore full Roman citizens. We have no evidence to say that any of those ‘Visigoths’ spoke a word of anything except Latin and Greek. They had been absorbed and transmitted their energy to the Romans.

A Refuge in the Roman Empire (Part 1)

A Refuge in the Roman Empire

The large-scale movement of people into the European Union reflects movements in past eras; numbers were smaller, but so were the numbers of people on earth.

The Romans were never like the Greeks in the classical period. The Citizenship Law of Pericles, approved in Athens in 451BC, required that an Athenian citizen had to be the son of an Athenian citizen and of a woman who was the daughter of an Athenian citizen; women did not have citizenship, but could convey it to a son. Scorn was placed on Thebes, whose kings it was claimed were from Asia Minor. Herodotus speculates that the Spartans were part Egyptian, but then Herodotus had a mother with a Persian name. Alexander I, king of Macedon (ancestor of Alexander the Great) took a delegation of Macedonians to the Olympic Games, but while he was admitted, because he could prove he was a Greek, the others were turned away because they couldn’t. Any Athenian resident of non-Athenian ancestry who did not match up was categorised as a ‘metic’, and any Athenian man who had not completed the course as an ephebe was excluded from citienship, as were men who owed certain debts, or whose ancestor had. They still had to pay taxes, however.

Rome was always different; they believed that they were descended from a group of Trojan refugees, and had themselves been founded by immigrants. Being a Roman citizen was always a juridcal matter, not one of birth. They were told that Romulus had offered to protect on the Capitolium any man who would follow his rule; Emma Dench of Harvard calls it ‘Romulus’ Asylum’. The earliest Rome featured thre different groups with differing languages – including a bunch of Sabines who spoke Oscan, not Latin; Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, was a Sabine, and of course the incomers had already married Sabine wives. Later, not only was Attius Clausus Romanised as Appius Claudius, he was made a patrician and a senator.

The secession of the Plebians in 494BC to the Mons Sacer (Sacred Hill) three miles away in protest again debt imprisonment and bondage showed even at the early date how people were prepared to quit Rome if the conditions weren’t right. It took Rome a long times to achieve suitable conditions, for there were secessions in 449BC, 445, 342 and as late as 287BC, when they moved to the Janiculum. Removing the labour of the lower orders could remove agricultural production and manufactures.

The settlement of Germanic and other groups within the empire is known by two contradictory names in different languages: the French refer to les invasions barbares, the barbarian invasions, whilst the Germans call the process the Völkerwanderungen, the wandering of the people. Such titles are modern and reflect political differences centuries after the events. But the movements were now new, even in the fourth century.

The first settlement clash was with Germanic tribes who were moving south. This resembles the sort of movement we see today when a modern calamity strikes a particular region. In the case of the Cimbri and Teutones, it was a tsunami which hit northern Jutland around 130-120 BC. We know this because one of them gave an eye-witness description to Posidonius, a Greek geographer (fl.100BC), who was told that the sea retreated and then the tide came in faster than a horse could run. That’s clearly a tsunami, for all that Strabo poo-pooed the idea, because Mediterranean tides aren’t so powerful (Strabo 7.2.1).

The reason for the tsunami is unknown, but might have been due to a shift in the rocks on the bed of the North Sea, known as the Storegga Slide. It flooded nothern Jutland and broke of the northern tip into islands, flooding good farm land with salt water. The loss of their land seems to have set the Cimbri and their neighbours the Teutones on the move. It is unlikely that they marched all the way down the peninsula; perhaps they were transported by boat (by the Aviones, the ancestors of the Saxons) to the mouths of the Rhine. At the foot of the Jutland peninsula was (and is) the Danwerk, a large earthwork which it would not have been possible to cross without permission, so that route is unlikely.

The Cimbri and Teutones probably walked up the Rhine towards its source and then down the Danube. Given the confused accounts of Cimbri turning up in wht are now central France and Spain, it is feasible that all movement of unknown people was counted as them. The Romans had never encountered Germans before. They thought they were Gauls, and compared them to the attack on Rome by Gauls in the early fourth century. Given that Gauls had taken over northern Italy c.500BC, the displacement probably affected the Roman kingdom.

As the Cimbri made their way up the Rhine, they seem to have left some members behind: the Atuatuci, who lived in the Meuse valley near Namur, claimed to descend from those Cimbri and Teutones who stopped there. Since what is now southern Germany was populated by Gaulish speakers first, there were probably many such stopovers which turned out to be permanent.

Did the Cimbri and associated groups even know who the Romans were? They must have heard tales about a big and rich land down south, and severely misjudged what that meant. For them, a big country was viewed in Iron Age terms, maybe twenty miles across. They would have no idea that a realm could be hundreds of miles across. This is similar to the viewpoint attributed to Prince Jugurtha, the north Asfrican price who said he would never have attacked the Roman Republic had he known how big it was.

The Roman involvement began in 113BC, when the wandering Cimbri made it down the Danube as far as Vindobona, modern Vienna, where the king of Noricum, a Celtic kingdom in the eastern Alps, roughly modern Austria, called on his allies, Rome, and were forced to retreat, but turned and defeated a Roman army that had underestimated them. A further attempt to reach the Mediterranean by means of the Rhone must have involved retreating to western Switzerland, where the sources of Rhine Danube and Rhone are very close.

This must have taken years to complete, because they next met a badly-led Roman army at Arausio (modern Orange in the middle Rhone) in 105BC; the Romans commanders could not agree on tactics and the Romans were defeated. A battle against Germnaic people at Burdigala (Bordeaux) in 107BC was probably a quite separate group, but assigned to the Cimbri.

In 103BC, the Romans defeated the Cimbri at the Isère in Gaul and captured their king, Teutobod. The rest of the Cimbri entered Gallia Cisalpina, where in 101 they were completely defeated at Vercellae and those who survived were enslaved.

As a result of several bad decisions and drastic underestimation, the Romans had been defeated by ‘barbarians’ in their own neck of the woods for the first time since Hannibal. Henceforth all northern invaders – if that’s what they were – were to be regarded as hostile.

The Cimbri seem to have attracted incomers – possibly given inferior rank below that of the warrior elite which can only have developed as they encountered obstacles. Young men inspired by a spirit of adventure and young women fancying available Cimbri will have joined them as they moved across the land, taking what they wanted. The destruction of their heimat (homelad) would have meant the Cimbri had nowhere to return to.

This was a Völkerwanderung in the true sense. They did not set out to attack the Roman world, and probably had little or no awareness that it existed, but had nothing to lose by pressing forward. A lesson should have been learnt that inbound settlers will fight when they have to, but if given a reason not to could be turned into settlers, eventually into taxpayers.

One reason for Roman weakness here could have been the fact that the armies were loyal to their general providing he won and they could earnt a living out of it. There was nothing to be made by fighting off armed settlers, so there was nothing to motivate the soldiers.

Seeing Rome defeated and no income deriving from them backing Rome would have been a good motivation for the Social War; indeed, Pompeius Trogus reported that the removal of the Socii led to an outbreak of Cimbric raising in Gallia Cisalpina. The rise of Marius and Sulla to supreme power as a result of both wars helped see off the last democratic parts of the Roman Republic.