‘Far beneath us we now glimpsed the Euphrates in its narrow gorge, the river that the mightiest Roman emperors envisaged as the natural frontier of their immeasurable empire. The whole environment is so wild, the further river bank so bereft of cultivation, and the mountains so trackless, that one can imagine that they mark the end of the world’ (H. von Moltke, Briefe über die Zustände und Gegebenheiten in der Türkei (1841), 213). These sentences from a letter written in 1838 by the Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke, military adviser to the Ottoman Sultan, evoke the whole content of Timothy Mitford's colossal work, the product of half a century of research and exploration devoted to the discovery of Rome's north-eastern frontier along the upper Euphrates river, extending across the Pontic mountains into Georgia and the Caucasus passes. M. started in 1963 as an Oxford DPhil candidate and a scholar of the British Institute at Ankara. The thesis was submitted in 1972, but the exploration of the frontier, largely on foot, continued until 2006 throughout his career as a British naval officer and work for the Ministry of Defence, extending into a final period for which the description ‘active retirement’ would be a spectacular understatement. Since then the preparation of these volumes, which fully match the heroic scale and scope of the field work, has been hardly less arduous. They are a unique record of the most inaccessible and least-known section of the Roman limes, ‘five times the length and more than seven times the height of Hadrian's Wall’. Normal evaluative criteria hardly apply to an undertaking that has been ground-breaking in the literal sense, concluding a lifetime of research which can never be done again, as much of the region is now underwater or inaccessible to exploration and study. There will doubtless be many future studies of the eastern Roman frontier, but none will replace M.’s work.
As M. says, this is not an archaeological book — certainly not the contemporary discipline of archaeology — but is about the exploration of one of the few genuinely remote and inaccessible parts of Eurasia. Even today most of the ground covered by M. is inaccessible to wheeled traffic. This is therefore one of the monuments of modern travel literature: solo exploration of new territory in challenging conditions, facing both physical challenges and man-made dangers. The region's political insecurity and the sensitivities of the Turkish authorities came close to derailing the grand design, but M.’s courage, persistence and patience have been rewarded with ultimate success, and we have this book.
After the preface, a gripping but discreetly understated account of the difficulties and challenges faced by M. in gaining access to the region, three chapters fill the first volume: climate and geography, historical outline, and — the heart of the matter — over 300 pages tracing ‘the course of the Limes’. Volume Two has three more chapters, on the garrison (virtually comprising regimental histories of the legions, alae and cohorts of the Cappadocian and Pontic garrisons), coin finds and inscriptions, followed by five weighty appendixes and a bibliography. The indexes extend over more than a hundred pages. The colour plates of Volume One are matched by the magnificent detailed maps of Volume Two, prepared in collaboration with Sean Goddard of Exeter University. M. uses long footnotes at the end of paragraphs to document the main text. The notes to ch. 3, which draw on the accounts of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travellers and on M.’s own first-hand experiences, provide rich and highly evocative information about the life of this frontier region, and this is amplified in Appendix 4 on provisions, transport and population in late Ottoman times.
M.’s own style and approach is modelled on that of the nineteenth-century pioneers: distances are measured in miles and heights in feet, although the spot heights on the maps, based on Turkish 1: 200,000 sheets, are metrical. Neither the maps nor the geographical descriptions contain latitude and longitude references (still less GPS observations), so orientation depends on M.’s own eloquent descriptive prose, correlated at every point to the maps, as he leads his readers step by step over the formidable terrain. What may be lost in precision is a literary gain. The account is constantly absorbing and multi-dimensional, flooding the landscape with historical and geographical colour, and no little emotion. The figures combine M.’s own photographs with sketch maps, plans and photographs taken from scarcely accessible earlier publications about the region, and a generous selection of military scenes from the columns of Trajan and Marcus.
This description of the contents may also serve as a guide to what M. does not discuss. The frontier for his purposes is a material thing, not an abstract concept. The tactical decision-making of military officers which led to the choice of sites for fortresses and forts, guard-posts, bridges, signalling stations and other features, takes precedence in M.’s analysis over the Empire's grand strategic and diplomatic designs. There is no agonised discussion of whether the establishment of a fixed frontier represented an expression of Rome's imperial strength or an implicit acknowledgement of its limitations.
The most informative ancient sources about the upper Euphrates frontier are topographical: the Antonine Itinerary and the Peutinger Table, supplemented by Ptolemy and the Notitia Dignitatum (see Appendix 1). M. computes the total distance between the legionary fortress of Samosata in the south and Trabzon on the Black Sea as between 466 and 477 miles (Ant. It.) and 511 miles (Peut.), remarkably close to a modern estimate of 470 miles. Whereas Yorke and Hogarth, who covered the frontier from south to north in five weeks in 1894, could recognise no remains of any Roman frontier road, M. has identified traces in all sections, corresponding to the ancient itineraries, which often offered a choice between high ridgeways for summer travel, and alternative routes in the lower valleys through difficult broken terrain which avoided winter snow blockages. Preserved road surfaces and bridges are the most important clues to identification. Milestones are very rare and absent entirely from the roads that linked the frontier forts with one another. Only seven inscribed examples have been recorded throughout the entire area that M. has surveyed: two near Malatya (Mitford nos 17 and 24); one at Satala (Mitford no. 61); a milestone of a.d. 76 from Melik-Şerif, the epigraphic keystone for reconstructing the early history of the Flavian frontier (Mitford no. 57); two milestones of a.d. 129 respectively on roads leading east from Nicopolis (Mitford no. 34) and south-west from Satala (Mitford no. 55); and a milestone of a.d. 367 from the road between Nicopolis and Satala (Mitford no. 52). Only one of these texts, recorded by the Italian excavators of Arslantepe near Melitene, survived after 1960 to be recorded either by Mitford or by David French, the other recent explorer of the frontier road system (French's texts are now in the online version of his Asia Minor milestone corpus, Roman Roads and Milestones of Asia Minor 3.3, https://biaa.ac.uk/publications/item/name/electronic-monographs (2012)). The survival rate is lower than in any other part of Turkey (12 per cent; compare the figures compiled by French, RRMAM 3.8 (2015), 192, which range from 29 per cent surviving in the Tres Eparchiae to 53 per cent in Galatia).
Unsurprisingly, inscriptions play only a modest role in these volumes. No civic inscriptions have ever been recorded from Samosata and Melitene, where the legionary fortresses were collocated with cities, and the settlement at the northern fortress of Satala appears not to have acquired city status before Late Antiquity. Greek was not the first language of the rural population: hagiographic sources indicate that Armenian was widely used in Armenia Minor in Late Antiquity; the spoken language of rural eastern Cappadocia is not known. M.’s ch. 6 is not a full corpus of texts from the region. He omits, for instance, most of the sixth-century Christian gravestones from Satala that he assembled in ZPE 115 (1997), 137–67, does not record all secondary publications in AE or SEG, and has chosen to illustrate only a few of the stones with photographs. It is a matter for regret that the few available photographs of military epitaphs from the frontier forts and fortresses have not been included. These include four handsome Latin gravestones from Satala, unearthed in the late 1970s, and published independently of one another by Mitford in ZPE 71 (1988), 167–78 and by D. French and J. R. Summerly, AS 47 (1987), 17–22 (see AE 1988, 1042–45), which document the first generation of soldiers from legio XV Apollinaris, previously stationed at Carnuntum, which probably transferred to Armenia Minor around a.d. 119 (detailed discussion by E. L. Wheeler in Y. Le Bohec (ed.), Les légions de Rome sous le Haut-Empire (2000), 259–308). Stone-carvers presumably accompanied the transfer of the legion.
The archaeological record of the frontier has been badly degraded in recent years. M. himself documents the disappearance of many items recorded by him in the 1960s but now irretrievably lost. Of the three legionary fortresses, Samosata is now flooded by the waters of the Atatürk Dam, with very little information about Roman military occupation recovered despite nine seasons of sparsely reported rescue excavation (Vol. I, 91 n. 20). What remains of Melitene's legionary fortress appears now to be buried under at least 4 m of overburden. Its counterpart at Satala, which was recognised by Biliotti's excavation of 1874 (re-published by Mitford, AS 24 (1974), 221–44), was surveyed again by C. S. Lightfoot in 1989. M.’s summary does a little less than justice to the preliminary reports, and one may still hope that a final publication of the survey may appear (Lightfoot, AS 40 (1990), 13–16; 41 (1991), 15–17; 8 AST (1990), 299–309; 9 AST (1991), 289–302; and in R. Matthews (ed.), Ancient Anatolia (1998), 273–84). The site plan provided to M. by the short-lived Swiss project of 2004 (Vol. I, 335, fig. 207) is in fact that prepared by the Turkish archaeologist and surveyor Sabri Aydal for Lighfoot. M.’s report of hostility and non-cooperation in the village encountered in 1996 and 2004, when both the village and the ancient site were shadows of their former selves, make for one of the book's most dismaying footnotes (Vol. I, 338–9 n. 33). The smaller forts along the Euphrates have fared even worse than the legionary strongholds. There is no recognisable architectural trace of the military sites at Charmodara, Heba, Barzalo, Claudiopolis and Metita between Samosata and Melitene, while a likely site for Corne at Cafer Kale, commanding the Tomisa river crossing between Cappadocia and Sophene, was drowned by dam waters in 1987. Between Melitene and Satala, the forts of Sabus at Çit Harabe and probably Suissa at Erzincan Kale can be archaeologically identified. There is nothing left of Ciaca, Dascusa, Zimara, Analiba, Sinervas and Arauraka. The 1968–1971 rescue excavation of the late Roman fort at Pağnik, by Richard Harper, also remains unpublished. The picture is equally bleak in the tangled triangle of routes between Nicopolis, Satala and the upper Euphrates from Erzincan to Kemaliye, and on the crossings of the Pontic mountains to Trabzon. Only in the Byzantine period, thanks to the work of Anthony Bryer, David Winfield (The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos, 2 vols (1985)) and James Crow, has some picture of the settlements of the eastern Pontus begun to emerge. We can compare the almost complete disappearance of the Roman fort of Eski Hisar in Osrhoene, between the Euphrates crossing and Edessa, that occurred between 1911 and 1979 (J. Wagner in S. Mitchell (ed.), Armies and Frontiers in Roman and Byzantine Asia Minor (1983), 103–23). M.’s contribution is an extraordinary tribute to his exploration of the terrain and his reading of the historical topography, but there is little archaeology here in the usual sense of the word.
It has not been M.’s objective to analyse the nature of the Roman limes at a conceptual level. The frontier that he has traced is defined by hard geographical realities, and his working hypothesis, encouraged by the topographical sources and especially the record of Notitia Dignitatum Or. 38 (the command of the dux Armeniae), is that, mutatis mutandis, military structures on the upper Euphrates frontier resembled those of the Danube, the Rhine or Britain. The missing archaeological and epigraphic detail, when contrasted with the infinitely richer record of other frontier areas of the Roman Empire, led M.’s predecessor Yorke to another conclusion: ‘It seems that very slight Roman remains of the frontier … exist at the present day, and even though further evidence may be forthcoming in the future, it seems certain that the lines on the eastern frontier were not laid out on nearly the same scale as on the other Roman frontiers’ (Geographical Journal 8 (1896), 453–72). In explanation, Yorke speculated that the different scale of military works lay in the general absence of hostilities between Armenia to the east and Rome throughout most of the imperial period, the outcome of the diplomatic solution to the eastern frontier achieved under Nero. M.’s lifetime of exploration, presented with extraordinary generosity between the covers of this Jahrhundertbuch, has produced as full a record as we are ever likely to possess of the remains of this hidden frontier, but still leaves questions about its nature and purpose open to further debate.
