089 - Provincial Matters

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 89, Provincial Matters. During the reign of Antoninus Pius, Rome was at the height of its power. The empire was large, stable, and at relative peace both internally and externally. The age of military expansion had given way to an age of bureaucratic management, and with the exception of Trajan's last hurrah, the Romans had come to terms with the fact that their domains were what they were.

So, what were their domains? Today, I want to go on what will have to be a high-speed tour of the empire so we can, at a minimum, touch base with each of the 42-odd provinces that now make up the Roman Empire. I'm pretty sure that number is 42, but it's hard to get an exact count, as the emperors were forever fidgeting with the borders and divisions of their administrative districts and adding and subtracting from the list of what technically counted as a province, so maybe I should just say the now more than 40 provinces that make up the Roman Empire.

I think the best thing for us to do, so this doesn't become too complicated, is to roughly follow Hadrian's first tour of the empire. Start in Italy, travel north into Gaul and Britain, then south through Hispania, then go east across North Africa, north through the Mideast, and then back west across Anatolia, into Greece and the Balkans, and then back to Italy by way of the Alps. This full circuit will take us through the backyards of the roughly 65 million people living within the Roman Empire, and into the camps of the 30 legions stationed along the borders, protecting the Pax Romana.

Before we get started, I should remind everyone that in the age of the Antonines, the Augustan constitutional settlements of 27 and 23 BC were still in effect, and that the Roman Empire was divided between senatorial and imperial provinces. Barring a few exceptions, the former were composed of peaceful interior provinces, while the latter were composed of the more militant border provinces. The distinction between the two can also be made by looking at which provinces contained legions. Provinces with legions were almost always imperial, while un-garrisoned provinces were usually, but not always, senatorial.

The senatorial provinces, as the name suggests, were administered by the Senate, who, in theory at least, chose by lot from among their ex-praetors and ex-consuls who would be assigned as governor to what territory. In practice, though, the lots were usually predetermined and pre-approved by the emperor. Imperial provinces, on the other hand, needed no such lottery charade, as they were administered directly by the emperor. According to the settlement, the sitting princeps technically held pro-consular authority over all of his provinces, and was thus merely appointing men to govern in his name.

Within this system, the provinces were further divided into order of importance, between major pro-consular territories, minor pro-praetorial territories, and really minor pro-curatorial territories. Technically, these further distinctions required incoming governors to have served at a certain magisterial level before being granted a particular province. For example, you needed to have previously risen to the rank of consul if you wanted to govern Syria, but only to the rank of praetor if you wanted to govern Lusitania. But in practice, this only applied to the senatorial provinces, and not even always then. The emperor, meanwhile, could and did appoint whoever he wanted to govern whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

The remaining pro-curatorial provinces were all imperial, and were unique in that equites qualified to act as governor. These, as you can imagine, wound up being the really minor, really out-of-the-way provinces. Think Mauritania.

A sitting provincial governor, whatever his rank and status, was tasked with only a few basic responsibilities, as the Romans liked to govern with a light hand. If he was in an imperial province, chances are, his overriding concern was for the fitness of the legions and defense of the border. If all was well there, his next concern was for the orderly and efficient collection of taxes. In addition to this collection of revenue, a governor would further act as a sort of provincial auditor, who kept an eye on the books and made sure corruption and inefficiency did not unnecessarily weigh down his corner of the empire, unless he was corrupt, in which case his job was to make sure that he skimmed as much as possible without getting caught.

In between drilling the legions and cooking the books, governors also acted as the supreme judicial authority in their provinces, and would travel from district to district, hearing cases and parceling out justice. Being just one man, these basic responsibilities took up all of the governor's time, with the rest of the day-to-day operations of a province either delegated to local elites, or simply left to the great wheel of anonymous inertia.

Finally, before we get started, I want to mention that I have posted a link to a pretty sweet map of the empire from Wikipedia, so if you want to follow along at home, just go to thehistoryofrome.typepad.com and click on the link. I also want to mention that provincial names do not exactly roll off the tongue, so I apologize in advance for any mispronunciations.

Keeping all of these things in mind, let's get going on our tour, because as it turns out, this is a massive episode, and when recorded, will easily be the longest in the history of the History of Rome. I figure we'll blow past the as-of-yet uncracked 30 minute mark somewhere around the Hellespont, and still have Greece and the Balkans to go. So everyone ready? Ok, let's go.

The Italia of the Roman Empire more or less conformed to the borders of modern Italy itself. You'll recall that prior to the Second Triumvirate, the land north of the Rubicon River had been its own province, Cisalpine Gaul, or literally, Gaul on this side of the Alps. But that Octavian merged the territory with Italia proper, having witnessed the danger posed to Rome by rogue generals commanding troops on the near side of the Alps. Specifically, he was thinking of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

Following his triumph over Antony, the new emperor followed this up by stationing all the remaining legions in the provinces, leaving only the newly formed and personally loyal Praetorian Guard in Italy itself. Except during extreme emergencies, or after the breakout of a civil war, there would not be any legionary presence in Italy for the remainder of the empire, which was just fine by the local population. Native born Italians enjoyed the further perk of being more or less exempt from direct taxation, which was in part a holdover from the early days of the expanding Republic when Rome demanded soldiers from her new Italian allies rather than cash payments, but it was also a conscious policy to keep those closest to Rome happiest so as to avoid mass uprisings.

Except for the brief detour through Hadrian's very unpopular administrative reforms, Italians also enjoyed a great deal of local autonomy. Julius Caesar had broken the peninsula into seventeen districts, each centered around an urban center, and it was left to the councils of the individual districts to govern themselves. The emperor and the senate technically had jurisdiction, but the local elites took it very personally when either came snooping around in their business, and so Rome generally took a hands-off approach to her nearest neighbors.

In general, Italia was fat and happy during the imperial period, protected from invasion by the buffer of the provinces, blessed with abundant natural resources, rich soil, and benefiting from the lion's share of the emperor's generous largesse. If it was good to be a Roman citizen during the age of the Antonines, it was great to be an Italian one.

Off the coast of the peninsula were the first provinces outside of Italy to come under Roman control. The first was Sicily, claimed officially and undisputedly at the conclusion of the Punic Wars. The most important breadbasket of Rome, the rich soil of the island, provided the food that almost single-handedly fed the empire until Augustus claimed the even bigger breadbasket of Egypt for Rome. Despite its proximity to Italy and its early entrance into the empire, Sicily remained a rural backwater, dominated by the slave estates of a few wealthy senators, who cared little for anything but growing crops and selling them back to the state.

Conditions on the island were harsh, and two slave uprisings in the 100s BC were bad enough that Spartacus' war is classified as merely the Third Servile War.

North of Sicily were the sister islands of Corsica and Sardinia, claimed by the Romans in between the Punic Wars in 231 BC. The natives were hostile to Roman rule, and so, content to keep to their coastal settlements, the Romans mostly left the rugged interior to the locals, which was an agreement that seemed to work well for everyone. In general, Corsica and Sardinia had little political or economic impact on the greater empire, but for a time, they practically held the fate of the Mediterranean in their hands, as first Julius Caesar, and then Octavian, relied on the grain coming out of the two islands to feed their armies. Had anything happened to disrupt the food supply coming from those relatively unimportant islands, the history of the world may have been very different.

The first official territory outside Italy claimed by the Romans on the European mainland, not counting their still undefined holdings in Spain, had been Transalpine Gaul, or Gaul on the far side of the Alps, which was annexed in 121 BC. The territory stretched from the Alps in the east, along the Mediterranean coast, to the Pyrenees in the west. The Romans had previously entered into an agreement with the local Greek colony of Massilia to allow the Romans passage from Italy to Spain in exchange for Roman protection from the barbarian Gauls in the north. After the legion successfully campaigned against the northern Gauls in 123 BC, the territory was officially brought into the burgeoning Roman Empire.

The strip of land thereafter became known to the Romans affectionately as Our Province, a name which has stuck with the region over the years and the French know it today as Provence.

North of Our Province was the wild interior of Gallia Comita, or Long-Haired Gaul. Long the setting of many a Roman nightmare, Julius Caesar finally banished those particular demons in the 50s BC and brought everything east of the Rhine, south of the English Channel, and west of the Atlantic Ocean under Roman control. In 22 BC, Marcus Agrippa divided the country into three separate provinces, to better reflect economic and geographic divisions. Lugdunensis, the most important of the three, containing both the Roman capital of Lungdunum, hence the name, and a major imperial mint. Aquitania, which bordered Spain and wound up a minor propretorial province run by the Senate, and Belgica, which formed today's Low Countries and was the last and least Romanized of the three Gauls.

There never was a single Gallic race, and even Agrippa's rezoning did little to accurately reflect the realities of the multiple and rival Gallic tribes that lived in the country, each considering themselves independent of every other. Each year, though, all the kings and chieftains would meet in Lugdunum for a ceremony that formalized the one bitter reality they all shared—Rome was in charge, and the Emperor was their master.

It wasn't really that bad, though. Most of the truly independent-minded chiefs had been killed, leaving behind a tribal elite that had been quickly and thoroughly Romanized. Except for a few minor flare-ups, and one big transgression in 260 A.D. which we'll get to one of these days, the provinces of Gaul remained a loyal and stable corner of the Empire, providing from its rich land a variety of agricultural products, including by far the best cheese, and from its talented locals, high-quality glass, metal, and woodwork.

Most of the Gallic provinces were the military zones of Germania Inferior and Germania Superior. Until Domitian, the zones were technically a part of Belgica and Lungdonensis respectively, but in reality, the generals commanding the legions along the Rhine were autonomous, and so Domitian turned the two zones into true provinces to better reflect this reality in the 80s A.D.

The character of the German provinces was dominated by their strategic defensive position. Two legions were stationed on the lower Rhine, and two on the upper Rhine, making it one of the most militarized territories in the Empire. Until the focus of Roman war-making shifted to the Danube in the early 100s A.D., the Rhine legions were the most fearsome fighting force in the Roman world, and were tasked with fending off the menace of German invasion.

In addition to formalizing their provincial status, you'll recall that Domitian also spent a great deal of time and attention constructing the Lime Easter Maniches, which not only served as a defensive barrier, but was also a way to control trade coming in and going out of the Empire, specifically the highly lucrative trade in amber. One of the most valuable commodities in the ancient world, and found in abundance along the Baltic coast, it would be shipped down along the so-called Amber Road to Rome, with gold returning in kind. Domitian made sure that the Roman state got a piece of the action both ways by forcing traders through the gates of his well-armed limies.

Across the English Channel from mainland Europe was the foggy island of Britannia, which became an imperial pro-consular province following Claudius' invasion in 43 A.D. The island may have seemed an unimportant little piece of land, but the three legions stationed there tell a different story. Aside from Syria, no single province housed as many permanent legions as Britannia, which begs us to ask the question, why?

The answer is that Britain contained abundant natural resources that were inconveniently located beneath the feet of unruly, independent-minded locals. In addition to gold, silver, tin, iron, lead, and marble that could all be dug up in great heaps, Britain also provided the empire with wool, timber, animal skins, slaves, due to the persistent revolts, and, of course, the best hunting dogs money could buy. This combination of natural wealth and angry locals added up to one of the most militant provinces in the empire.

Hadrian settled the northern border of the province with the famous wall he ordered built in 122, though Antoninus built his own wall about a hundred miles north that became the new border of the empire for about twenty years, until it was abandoned for a variety of reasons in the 160s A.D. Despite its unruly natives, Britannia would remain a lucrative corner of the empire until it was abandoned in the 400s by a western Roman empire facing both internal division and external barbarian invasion.

South of Britannia and across the Pyrenees from Gaul lay the Iberian peninsula, which the Romans called Hispania. Long in the Roman orbit, it was actually one of the last territories in the empire to be truly pacified, holding out until Marcus Agrippa finally dealt the decisive blow against Spanish independence. The Roman foothold in Spain, originally restricted to the Mediterranean coast, had been won by Scipio Africanus during the Second Punic War, and was settled initially by his wounded veterans.

The territory along the coast Scipio had snatched from the Carthaginians was divided into Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior, or literally, further Spain and nearer Spain, which would remain the Roman administrative districts until 13 B.C. when, following Agrippa's final pacification efforts, Augustus divided the now wholly owned Iberian peninsula into Lusitania – basically modern Portugal, Baetica – modern Andalusia, and the largest of the three, Terraconensis.

Ironically, once the Spanish tribes were finally beaten down after 200 years of near-constant warfare, the peninsula only required a single legion stationed in Terraconensis to maintain order. Hispania was one of the richest and most important regions in the empire. Its gold and silver mines were the best in the known world, and the Romans developed complex hydraulic mining techniques to extract every last ounce of precious metal from the Spanish mines. But beyond the geologic resources, which included marble, tin, and lead, the fertile Spanish countryside made Hispania a center of olive oil and wine production. These two products alone, the liquid that kept the empire running, would have been enough even without the gold mines to make the province of Spain wealthy beyond measure.

As we've seen, by the age of the Antonines, the Roman-Spanish elite formed a powerful faction within the Senate, producing at the height of its power two of the best emperors the Romans ever had, Trajan and Hadrian.

Across the Strait of Gibraltar, which was either carved by or narrowed by Hercules, depending on who you ask, lay the twin provinces of Mauretania, Mauretania Tingitana and Mauretania Caesarianus, both of which were minor procuratorial provinces on the northwest African coast. Following the victory over Carthage, the territory was made a client kingdom dominated by its eastern neighbor Numidia, which was the preeminent Roman client state in West Africa at the time. In 40 AD, for no real reason at all, Caligula lured the loyal king of Mauretania into a trap and had him executed, claiming the leaderless kingdom as his own personal domain, hence the name Caesarianus. Revolt followed, but Claudius decided that what was done was done and formally annexed the kingdom in 43 AD.

Mauretania's primary contribution to the empire was wool and a high-quality, always-in-demand purple dye, though it was also known for providing the legions with excellent light cavalrymen. Eventually the province would become troubled by local Berbers, the dark-skinned North African natives who had resisted first Phoenician, then Carthaginian, then Roman encroachment. The Berbers of Mauretania became known as Moors, more Mauretania, get it?, and would eventually wreak havoc on the undermanned but incredibly rich province of Hispania, beginning during the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

East of Mauretania was the province of Africa proper. The heart of the old Carthaginian empire, Rome had claimed the territory after the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. The Romans were initially somewhat ambivalent about governing overseas territory, and their primary concern in Africa was simply to ensure that no other power established itself in Carthage's place. For the most part, though, the loyal client kingdom of Numidia was the one actually tasked with doing the heavy lifting of keeping Africa free from anti-Roman sentiment.

Once Rome finally embraced its international character, though, Africa became a key center of agricultural production, providing the empire with a huge array of olives, corn, beans, figs, grapes, textiles, marble, wine, timber, livestock, pottery, and wool. Coastal cities became highly developed and fully Romanized, becoming major trade centers as well as producing high quality crafts of their own, including their famous clay lamps, which became the class of the empire. After Augustus' final constitutional settlement, Africa had the unique distinction of being the only senatorial province that contained a legion, which was also, by the way, the only African legion stationed west of Egypt.

In between Africa and Egypt was the senatorial province of Cyrenaica, which was a minor agricultural province that was distinguished by its wide variety of native medicinal plants. Most Romans barely registered Cyrenaica's existence until the Third Jewish Revolt erupted from its borders in 132. The slaughter and counter-slaughter that accompanied the revolt left the province depopulated to the point of it becoming something of a ghost town, forcing Hadrian to concoct a colonization program to prevent the lights from going out completely.

To the east of obscure Cyrenaica was the incalculably important prefecture of Egypt. The rich Nile Valley was so critical that it wasn't even technically a province, and remained instead, from the time of Augustus, a country owned personally by the emperor. It was governed by an equestrian prefect, as Augustus and his successors felt that a senator could not be trusted with the task. Ruling in Alexandria was an easy stepping stone to ruling the entire world, and so no one of senatorial rank was even allowed to visit Egypt without express imperial permission. This was, you'll recall, possibly the reason why Tiberius had Germanicus killed.

Egypt was not only the breadbasket of the empire and the key transfer point of trade with India and the far east, but its capital of Alexandria was the center of culture, science, and the arts in the Greco-Roman world. Unfortunately for locals and Romans alike though, imperial control of Egypt, enforced by the two legions run out of Alexandria, was often heavy handed and arbitrary. Taxes were administered and collected heavily and randomly, leaving the locals resentful and the Romans hated, and from the late 130s on, Egypt was a constant source of anti-Roman agitation and revolt. But through it all, the ancient kingdom on the Nile River continued to pump out the grain that fed the empire.

West of Egypt was Arabia, comprising most of what we now call the Sinai peninsula. One of the last additions to the empire, Arabia was annexed by Trajan in 106, and was one of the few territories not abandoned by Hadrian when he came to power a decade later. Taken and held mostly so that the Romans could control all the trade routes into the Mediterranean, Arabia wound up a surprisingly stable province, and was a loyal and lucrative corner of the empire well into the Byzantine age. Its single legion was famous for refusing to back eastern pretenders to the throne like Avidius Cassius and Pescennius Niger, instead choosing to remain loyal to whoever ruled in Rome.

Polar opposite of loyal Arabia was its northwestern neighbor, the once vigorously rebellious Judea, but now the utterly depopulated and weak Palestinia. I kind of feel like we've already spent enough time on this rebellious little province that never seemed particularly rich enough or important enough to have been the source of so much trouble. Their primary exports wound up being slaves and refugees fleeing for their lives.

North of Judea-Palestinia was Syria, the key province of the Eastern Roman Empire. Conquered and organized by Pompey as he went east young man in the 60s BC, it housed three and sometimes four standing legions, and was the main staging point for all operations against the Parthians, which whom this critical territory shared a border. The provincial capital of Antioch became a hugely important urban center, and was the de facto capital of the Roman East. Complementing its rigid defense against incoming eastern armies, Syria simultaneously embraced all the incoming trade from the east, and became a decadent and wealthy middle man acting as the overland terminus of the famous Silk Road coming in from China.

Proper Romans, though, forever held Syria up as the example of everything that was wrong with exposing Rome to eastern temptations. The legions stationed there were constantly accused of showing lax discipline, and the soldiers castigated for constantly going native amidst a population more than willing to corrupt their supposed masters. But despite its reputation for loose morals, no one could deny that without Syria, the empire would have been far less rich and far less powerful than it had become. The imports and exports that passed through and originated from its borders generated the gold and supplies that allowed Roman power to explode exponentially following Pompey's annexation.

Round the bend from Syria were the provinces of Anatolia. Directly bordering Syria were Cilicia, which hugged the Mediterranean coast, and Cappadocia, which headed up into the Taurus Mountains. Cappadocia was an imperial province that, thanks to its shared border with Armenia and greater Mesopotamia, wound up housing two legions. The province that would become best known for its series of underground cities, is, to me anyway, best known as the province that always backed the wrong side in a war, yet still managed to escape major reprisals.

The Cappadocians backed first Antiochus against the Romans, then Mithridates against the Romans, then Pompey against Julius Caesar, then Brutus and Cassius against the Second Triumvirate, then Antony against Octavian. In every case they lost, and yet somehow managed to ingratiate themselves enough with the winner that they were ever after accepted as loyal allies of the victors. I would guess, though, that the two legions now stationed in their backyard was promise enough of their loyalty.

To the south was Cilicia, a senatorial province that needed no legions. Combined administratively with the island of Cyprus, Cilicia was most famous for its rugged western half being a haven for pirates, until Pompey burned all their ships and turned the erstwhile brigands into fouler-mouthed than average farmers. The eastern half of Cilicia was composed of rich flats that produced millet, olives, and sesame, in addition to providing excellent pasture land for substantial herds of goats and cattle.

West of Cilicia was Lycia-Pamphylia. It was also a Roman province.

West of Cappadocia and northwest of Cilicia was the unimpressive but still unique province of Galatia, which literally translates as Gaul of the East. It was known by this seemingly out-of-place name because the territory, mostly high plateau, had been settled by a group of migrating Gauls in the 280s BC. They retained their semi-nomadic pastoral lifestyle, and enriched themselves by launching periodic raids on the richer kingdoms surrounding them. The Galatians initially joined with Antiochus and then Mithridates as they attempted to resist Roman expansion, but by the end of Selva's eastern campaign, they had attached themselves firmly to the Roman cause, and remained a loyal and nominally independent client kingdom until the last Galatian king died in 25 BC, just as Augustus was defining the new imperial political order.

Galatia was annexed and claimed by the emperor as one of his new imperial provinces. Thereafter, it was a provincial backwater, best known for the fact that, because it was a provincial backwater, early Christianity was able to flourish there relatively unmolested by the Roman authorities.

North of Galatia and Cappadocia were the often-combined provinces of Bithynia and Pontus, which together ran the length of the southern Black Sea coast. The rich valleys of Pontus had been the home of some of Rome's fiercest enemies during the first and second centuries BC, but by the age of the Antonines, all such resistance was dead, and the locals contented themselves as tradesmen, farmers, and, as particularly good, iron and steel smiths. Their sister province of Bithynia had the good fortune of being located at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, leading its urban centers along the Sea of Marmara to become rich and important trading powers.

The Bithynian interior was rugged and forested, and the locals liked to boast that they were one of the few places on earth that Alexander had been unable to conquer outright. The Macedonian king had instead decided to simply keep moving when the fierce locals took to the mountains, rather than bog his army down in a protracted siege of the dense, steep countryside. The province, then a client kingdom, also wound up being a thorn in Julius Caesar's side, as he was dogged for years by rumors that he had gone to bed as the passive partner with the king of Bithynia. You'll recall that his enemies often scribbled graffiti on the walls of Rome calling Caesar the Queen of Bithynia.

Bithynia Pontus was also the corrupt and disorganized province that Trajan had sent Pliny the Younger to straighten out in the early 100s AD, a difficult task that at best produced mixed results.

The rest of the west coast of Anatolia was swallowed by the province of Asia, a senatorial province that had been brought into the empire following the death of King Atollus of Pergamum in 129 BC. His kingdom had been created as a buffer client state following the withdrawal of Antiochus in 190 BC, and, with no male heirs, Atollus simply left the kingdom to Rome in his will. This territorial windfall was a political windfall in particular for Gaius Gracchus, who argued forcefully, and then violently, that Asia ought to be carved up democratically rather than being handed over to a couple of rich patricians.

After years of indifferent Roman rule, Mithridates invaded and slaughtered every Roman he could find in the Asiatic Vespers of 88 BC, prompting Sulla to take revenge and reclaim the territory for Rome, in whose sphere of influence it remained until the fall of the Byzantine Empire.

Asia was characterized most especially by its decentralized political structure. Dozens of coastal Greek colonies, each more ancient in story than the last, vied with each other for prominence and refused to let any of the others gain the upper hand. In their race to secure the emperor's favor, Asia wound up being the first territory to really embrace the practice of worshipping the cult of the Caesars. And emperor worship became deeper and wider spread in Asia than just about anywhere else in the empire.

Across the Hellespont from Asia was Thracia, supposed homeland of everyone's favorite gladiator Spartacus. The land between Macedonia and the Sea of Marmara had been one of Rome's undefined holdings that was annexed officially by Claudius as he and his ministers attempted to make the empire run more rationally. The rugged country was known for its disparate local tribes, who seemed to hate each other more than they hated the Romans.

Down the road, the province will produce a number of notable soldier-emperors, including the beast Maximinius Thrax, whose assassination of Alexander Severus helped spark the crisis of the third century, and Constantine's great colleagues-slash-rivals Galerius and Licinius, whose demise helped close the door on that particular century of chaos.

North of Thracia was the province of Moesia, eventually divided by demission into upper and lower halves to make the whole territory more militarily agile, the superior and inferior in this case referring to the downhill path of the Danube rather than the Rhine. The country had been finally conquered by the grandson of Marcus Crassus around 29 BC, but it was not organized as a province until at least 6 AD. Situated on the south bank of the Danube, Moesia became one of the keys to the whole Roman defensive strategy, and four legions were stationed there permanently, two each in the upper and lower sections.

Its strategic military value was never in doubt, though its responsibilities were lightened somewhat by Trajan's conquest of Dacia in 105, which pushed the northern border across the Danube and left upper Moesia at least an interior province. Beyond its military value, Moesia also came equipped with gold fields in the west and excellent farmland in the east, and obviously its location along the Danube left it in control of most of the international trade coming down that great river, making Moesia rich, which was nice, but also leaving it the constant target of envious Germans on the north bank, which wasn't so nice. This was why the locals in Moesia were enthusiastic supporters of Trajan's Dacian conquest, and hoped for more where that came from.

They would be let down by Hadrian though, and Dacia would be the last major province added to the empire and the only Roman territory on the far side of the Danube. Its abundant mineral resources, especially in the gold and silver department, gave the Roman economy a much needed shot in the arm, though it proved to be a tenuously held territory at best. Hadrian had wanted to withdraw, but was compelled by economic and political necessity to retain what he considered an indefensible position. The money flowing in was nice though, and while it lasted, Dacia was a key cog in the imperial minting machine.

The province would eventually be split into upper and lower departments by Hadrian after he determined he could not just let go of the province altogether, and at some point, during either his reign or Antoninus', a third province was spun off, leading the Romans to call them all collectively the Three Dacias. Among the last territories added to the empire, Dacia was also one of the first to be abandoned, and it was left to its fate by Aurelian in 275 AD, though pointedly only after he had decisively beaten the Goths in battle and killed their leader.

South of Moesia was the cradle of Greek civilization, now called Macedonia and Achaea. Finally conquered by the Romans during the Third Macedonian War in 146 BC, the exhausted Greeks were forced to give up their independence and accept foreign rule. Out of respect for the great and ancient civilization they had just defeated, and which they admired so much, Rome pretty much left the cities of Greece free to govern themselves.

Macedonia was obviously harder hit by the last war than the cities around the Peloponnese, and for a while it limped along a depopulated mess, but with the construction of the Via Ignatia, a major Roman road from Dyrrhachium to the Hellespont, it was revitalized and rode its booming business in trade and travel back to prominence.

Achaea, meanwhile, less chastened by the Macedonian Wars, tried to hold on to its independence more forcefully than their northern neighbors. Believing themselves simply better than the barbarian Romans, the Greeks of Athens and Sparta treated their new overlords with barely concealed contempt. When Mithridates came calling in the 80s BC, promising to lead the whole of the east to freedom, the Greek elites readily agreed to help out. Sulla made them pay for their defiance and famously sacked Athens in brutal fashion in 87 BC.

Thereafter the chastened Greeks, while still feeling superior, were far less inclined to act on their contempt. For the next century, the once mighty Greek city-states languished as a fallen backwater. Athens retained its traditional status as a cultural center, but it had long been eclipsed by Alexandria as THE cultural center of the Mediterranean world. It wasn't really until Hadrian's active Greek revivalism that the cities of the Aegean began to return to prosperity and prominence.

The craftsmen of Greece, meanwhile, produced a number of high-quality household goods that were highly sought after in Rome, and the rugged country was a source of high-quality tin and copper. But by far, Greece's most important contribution to the Roman economy was its export of educated slaves, who, in time, came to run practically the whole empire. After being completely conquered, the Greeks had a bit of revenge by covertly running in many ways the empire they supposedly served.

West of Achaea, and for a long time simply a part of Macedonia, was the province of Epirus. Conquered along with the rest of Greece in the Macedonian Wars, and peeled off into its own province in 67 AD, this maritime territory was situated along the Ionian Sea, across from the boot of Italy. Originally, one of the Romans' first footholds in the East, remember that the Romans took possession of the coast in the mid-200s BC to prevent piracy, the culture and economy of Epirus was centered around its port towns servicing the trade lines from Italy to Greece proper, though it was also known for producing its own excellent cheese, wine, and oils.

West of Greece, and due west of Moesia, was the critical region known as Illyrium or Illyricum. First conquered by the Romans in the 160s BC, the region wasn't fully pacified until Octavian put the final stamp on things in the mid-30s BC. In the constitutional settlement of 27, Augustus claimed Illyricum as an imperial province, and eventually stationed four legions there.

Illyricum wound up being the backbone of the Roman Empire as it stood at the crossroads between East and West, North and South. It bordered both the Adriatic Sea and the Danube River, and depending on where you were coming from, it was the gateway to Italy, the gateway to Greece, the gateway to the Far East, while all the while acting as defender of the northern border.

At some point during the reign of Tiberius, Illyricum was split into the more peaceful and mineral-rich Dalmatia in the south, which is now the Croatian coast, and the more rugged and militant Pannonia in the north. Pannonia would then be divided further by Trajan into upper and lower Pannonia to make the territory, like Moesia, more agile and responsive to attacks.

Illyricum in general has been called the province that held the empire together, as its constantly under-armed population formed the bulk of the critical Danube legions and eventually produced the emperors that dragged Rome from the depths of the disastrous third century – Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, and then finally Diocletian.

Neighboring Pannonia to the west as Europe begins to climb up into the Alps was the imperial province of Noricum, composing most of modern Austria. Indebted independence by Julius Caesar for taking his side during the civil war, the Noric people were left alone until they made a fateful decision to join in a Pannonian uprising in 16 BC, that eventually, once put down, led to Noricum being called a province, even if it was not formally organized as such, until Claudius noted that they were still in off-the-books territory in 41 AD.

For years, Noricum was un-garrisoned, but Antoninus moved a legion into the country in order to shore up the northern border, perhaps anticipating the storm that he saw coming down from Germania. Lacking high-quality soil, Noricum was a classic iron and blood province, providing both high-quality steel and high-quality soldiers for the legions.

We wind up then finally, and, sorry, rather anticlimactically, in Raetia, an Alpine province composed of modern west-central Switzerland. Conquered during the joint campaign of Tiberius and Jerusalem, Raetia was a classic example of the Romans making a desert and calling it a peace. Though it had no permanent legionary presence, Raetia still wound up a key part of the extended Lymes Germanicus, holding down the eastern portion of the fortification network with a locally raised militia.

Relatively depopulated, the native Raetians produced cheeses, pitch, honey, and a particular brand of wine that Augustus declared was his favorite in the whole empire.

So there you have it. In making this circuit of the empire, I think the only thing I missed were the three tiny administrative districts in the Alps, organized in 14, 47, and 63 AD respectively, to protect communication lines and keep travel routes through the Alpine passes clear. By all means, though, if I missed something, please let me know.

I should probably at this point knock out a nice concluding paragraph that artfully condenses the many faces and many places of the Roman Empire, but the tour has left me exhausted. Next week is question time. See you then.