Romans and Barbarians: Four Views from the Empire's Edge, 1st Century AD

In 9 B.C. the Roman general Drusus, brother of Tiberius and stepson of the emperor Augustus, encountered a towering German priestess who "cursed him and prophesied doom." Months later Drusus met that doom, dying of an infected wound in a remote outpost on the Elbe River "on a night of shooting stars, to the howling of forest wolves." His fate was shared by many Romans who marched north to encounter the Germanic and Celtic peoples of northern Europe, shadowy presences on the Roman frontier, the elusive and dangerous other. Derek Williams, an English journalist and historian, does a fine job of reconstructing Roman attitudes toward those people of the far frontier, basing his narrative on literary descriptions from the poet Ovid, the historian Tacitus, and other contemporary Roman chroniclers. (He recognizes the limitations of this one-sided literature, for the barbarians had no system of writing by which they could leave behind their view of the matter of Rome.) Among the high points of Williams's well-written discussion is an analysis of Trajan's Column, the monument in the Roman Forum that details, frieze by frieze, the Roman conquest of Dacia, or what is now Romania; Williams compares the column with German monuments, most from the 19th century, and with other testimonials to Trajan's campaigns. This is a vigorous, imaginative, and nicely evenhanded reading of ancient history. --Gregory McNamee