The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
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difficult doubtless than that of the war proper was the organisation of the new territory; the more especially as considerations of internal policy exerted to some extent a very disturbing influence on it. Since, as things stood, the preponderance of military power might not be located in Italy, the government had to take care that the great military commands were removed as far as possible from its immediate vicinity; indeed one of the motives that conduced to the occupation of Raetia itself was the desire to remove the command, which probably up to this time could not have been dispensed with in Upper Italy itself, definitively away from that region, as was thereupon actually done. It might most naturally have been expected that there would be created on the north slope of the Alps a great centre for the military posts indispensable in the newly acquired territory; but a course the very opposite of this was followed. Between Italy on the one hand, and the great commands on the Rhine and Danube on the other, there was drawn a girdle of small governorships, which were not merely all filled up by the emperor, but were also filled up throughout with men not belonging to the senate. Italy and the province of southern Gaul were separated by the three small military districts of the Maritime Alps (department of the Maritime Alps and the province of Cuneo), the Cottian Alps with Segusio (Susa) as its chief town, and probably the Graian Alps (East Savoy). Among these the second, administered by the already named cantonal prince, Cottius, and his descendants for a time under the form of clientship,4 was of most importance, but they all possessed a certain military power, and were primarily destined to maintain public safety in the territory concerned, and above all on the important imperial highways traversing it. The upper valley of the Rhone again—that is, the Valais, and the newly conquered Raetia—were placed under a commander of higher standing not in rank, but doubtless in power; a corps, relatively speaking, considerable was here for the time being indispensably requisite. In order, however, to provide for its being diminished as far as possible, Raetia was in great measure depopulated by the removal of its inhabitants. The circuit was closed by the similarly organised province of Noricum, embracing the largest part of what is now German Austria. This wide and fertile region had submitted without substantial resistance to the Roman rule, probably in the form of a dependent principality established in the first instance, but with its prince erelong giving place to the imperial procurator, from whom, for that matter, he did not essentially differ. Some, at all events, of the Rhenish and Danubian legions had their fixed quarters in the immediate neighbourhood, on the one hand of the Raetian frontier at Vindonissa, on the other of the Norican frontier at Poetovio, obviously to keep in check the adjoining province; but in that intermediate region as little were there armies of the first rank with legions under senatorial generals, as there were senatorial governors. The distrust towards the corporation governing the state alongside of the emperor finds very forcible expression in this arrangement.
Roads and colonies in the Alps.
Next to the protection of the peace of Italy the chief aim of this organisation was to secure its communications with the north, which were of not less urgent importance for traffic than in a military point of view. With special energy Augustus took up this task; and he doubtless deserved that his name should still live at the present day in those of Aosta and Augsburg, perhaps also in that of the Julian Alps. The old coast–road, which Augustus partly renewed, partly constructed, from the Ligurian coast through Gaul and Spain to the Atlantic Ocean, can only have served purposes of traffic. The road also over the Cottian Alps, already opened up by Pompeius (iv. 28)[iv. 27.], was finished under Augustus by the already mentioned prince of Susa, and named after him; in like manner a trading route, it connects Italy, by way of Turin and Susa, with the commercial capital of south Gaul, Arelate. But the military line proper—the direct connection between Italy and the camps on the Rhine—led through the valley of the Dora Baltea from Italy partly to Lyons the capital of Gaul, partly to the Rhine. While the republic had confined itself to bringing into its power the entrance of that valley by founding Eporedia (Ivrea), Augustus possessed himself of it entirely by not merely subjugating its inhabitants—the still restless Salassi, with whom he had already fought during the Dalmatian war—but extirpating them outright; 36,000 of them, including 8000 fighting men, were sold under the hammer into slavery in the market–place of Eporedia, and the purchasers were bound not to grant freedom to any of them within twenty years. The camp itself, from which his general Varro Murena had achieved their final defeat in 729[25.], became the fortress, which, occupied by 3000 settlers taken from the imperial guard, was to secure the communications—the town Augusta Praetoria, the modern Aosta, whose walls and gates then erected are still standing. It commanded subsequently two Alpine routes, as well that which led over the Graian Alps or Little St. Bernard, along the upper Isère and the Rhone to Lyons, as that which ran over the Poenine Alps, the Great St. Bernard, to the valley of the Rhone and to the Lake of Geneva, and thence into the valleys of the Aar and the Rhine. But it was for the first of these roads that the town was designed, as it originally had only gates leading east and west; nor could this be otherwise, for the fortress was built ten years before the occupation of Raetia; in those years, moreover, the later organisation of the camps on the Rhine was not yet in existence, and the direct connection between the capitals of Italy and Gaul was altogether of the foremost importance. In the direction of the Danube we have already mentioned the laying out of Emona on the upper Save, on the old trade–road from Aquileia over the Julian Alps into the Pannonian territory. This road was at the same time the chief artery for the military communication of Italy with the region of the Danube. Lastly, with the conquest of Raetia was connected the opening of the route which led from the last Italian town Tridentum (Trent), up the Adige valley, to the newly established Augusta in the land of the Vindelici, the modern Augsburg, and onward to the upper Danube. Subsequently, when the son of the general who had first opened up this region came to reign, this road received the name of the Claudian highway.5 It furnished the means of connection, indispensable from a military point of view, between Raetia and Italy; but in consequence of the comparatively small importance of the Raetian army, and doubtless also in consequence of the more difficult communication, it never had the same importance as the route of Aosta.
The Alpine passes and the north slope of the Alps were thus in secure possession of the Romans. Beyond the Alps there stretched to the east of the Rhine the land of the Germans; to the south of the Danube that of the Pannonians and the Moesians. Here, too, soon after the occupation of Raetia, the offensive was taken, and nearly contemporaneously in both directions. Let us look first at what occurred on the Danube.
Erection of Illyricum.
The Danubian region, to all appearance up to 727[27.] administered along with Upper Italy, became then, on the reorganisation of the empire, an independent administrative district, Illyricum, under a governor of its own. It consisted of Dalmatia, with the country behind it, as far as the Drin—while the coast farther to the south had for long belonged to the province of Macedonia—and of the Roman possessions in the land of the Pannonians on the Save. The region between the Haemus and the Danube as far as the Black Sea, which Crassus had shortly before brought into dependence on the empire, as well as Noricum and Raetia, stood in a relation of clientship to Rome, and so did not belong as such to this province, but withal were primarily dependent on the governor of Illyricum. Thrace, north of the Haemus, still by no means pacified, fell, from a military point of view, to the same district. It was a continued effect of the original organisation, and one which subsisted down to a late period, that the whole region of the Danube from Raetia to Moesia was comprehended as a customs–district under the name Illyricum in the wider sense. Legions were stationed only in Illyricum proper, in the other districts there were probably no imperial troops at all, or at the utmost small detachments; the chief command was held by the proconsul of the new province coming from the senate; while the soldiers and officers were, as a matter of course, imperial. It attests the serious character of the offensive beginning after the conquest of Raetia, that in the first instance the co–ruler Agrippa took over the command in the region of the Danube, to whom the proconsul of Illyricum had to become de iure subordinate; and then, when Agrippa’s sudden death in the spring of 742[12.] broke down this combination, Illyricum in the following year passed into imperial administration, and the imperial generals obtained the chief commands in it. Soon three military centres were here formed, which thereupon brought about the administrative division of the Danubian region into three parts. The small principalities in the territory conquered by Crassus gave place to the province of Moesia, the governor of which henceforth, in what