In sections 4.80 and 4.81 of the Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder describes the peoples living beyond the Danube River in his own day in the later first century c.e.:Footnote 1
(4.80) ab eo in plenum quidem omnes Scytharum sunt gentes, uariae tamen litori adposita tenuere, alias Getae, Daci Romanis dicti, alias Sarmatae, Graecis Sauromatae, eorumque Hamaxobii aut Aorsi, alias Scythae degeneres et a seruis orti aut Trogodytae, mox Alani et Rhoxolani; superiora autem inter Danuuium et Hercynium saltum usque ad Pannonica hiberna Carnunti Germanorumque ibi confinium, campos et plana Iazyges Sarmatae, montes uero et saltus pulsi ab iis Daci ad Pathissum amnem. (4.81) a Maro, siue Duria est a Suebis regnoque Vanniano dirimens eos, auersa Basternae tenent aliique inde Germani. […] Scytharum nomen usquequaque transiit in Sarmatas atque Germanos. nec aliis prisca illa durauit appellatio quam qui extremi gentium harum, ignoti prope ceteris mortalibus, degunt.Footnote 2
The standard English (Loeb) edition of these sections renders them as follows:
(4.80) From this point [at the Danube] all the races in general are Scythian, though various sections have occupied the lands adjacent to the coast, in one place the Getae, called by the Romans Dacians, at another the Sarmatae, called by the Greeks Sauromatae, and the section of them called Waggon-dwellers or Aorsi, at another the base-born Scythians, descended from slaves, or else the Cave-dwellers, and then the Alani and Rhoxolani. The higher parts between the Danube and the Hercynian Forest as far as the winter quarters of Pannonia at Carnuntum and the plains and level country of the German frontiers there are occupied by the Sarmatian Iazyges, while the Dacians whom they have driven out hold the mountains and forests as far as the river Theiss. (4.81) From the river Maros, or else the Dora if it is that which separates them from the Suebi and the Kingdom of Vannius, the opposite side of the country is occupied by the Basternae and then other German tribes. […] The name of Scythians has spread in every direction, as far as the Sarmatae and the Germans, but this old designation has not continued for any except the most outlying sections of these races, living almost unknown to the rest of mankind.Footnote 3
On this reading, Pliny's ethnography appears to be bookended by contradictory statements regarding the Scythians. Pliny begins 4.80 with a bold claim: beyond the Danube, in plenum quidem omnes Scytharum sunt gentes. In the author's day, there were no Scythians in the traditional Herodotean sense,Footnote 4 and yet his opening statement appears unequivocal. Looking to the other end of the passage, translators have generally read the final two sentences as a confused comment on this opening statement.Footnote 5 The sense of Pliny's final clause (nec aliis prisca illa durauit appellatio quam qui extremi gentium harum, ignoti prope ceteris mortalibus, degunt) has been correctly rendered in the major translations of the last century: only the most distant peoples were actually called Scythians in the first century c.e. However, the penultimate clause (Scytharum nomen usquequaque transiit in Sarmatas atque Germanos) has been repeatedly mistranslated. In Rackham's edition, echoed by most other translators, the geographer makes the seemingly paradoxical claim in 4.81 that the Scythian ethnic label has both ‘spread in every direction, as far as the Sarmatae and the Germans’, and at the same time ‘not continued for any except the most outlying sections of these races’. The confusion here stems from translation, not from Pliny's Latin or from understanding his topic. Rather, taken within the context of the evolving political world of the first-century Carpathian Basin, Pliny's ethnography can be correctly seen as reflecting a coherent world-view then emerging in support of Rome's military frontier along the river's course.
As I shall argue, reading transiit in Sarmatas atque Germanos as a claim of spatial expansion (that is, ‘the Scythian name has extended in every direction as far as …’) is incorrect, neither reflecting Pliny's usage of transire in elsewhere in the Historia Naturalis, nor making sense within the logic of the passage and the larger ethnographic world-view of Pliny's Transdanubian exegesis. Instead, we must read the passage as a statement about the history of ethnographic knowledge beyond the Danube frontier:
The collective name of the Scythians has everywhere changed into ‘Sarmatians’ and ‘Germans’, nor has the archaic designation endured for any but the most distant of these [Scythian] peoples, living almost unknown to the rest of humankind.
Pliny is here acknowledging that, while the manner in which the Romans referred to the peoples living beyond the Danube had changed since the establishment of a military frontier along the river's bank, the underlying macro-level ethnographic divisions had not. Regardless of what they might call themselves, or what terms the troops on the ground might employ, in Pliny's view, the Transdanubian peoples remained, at their core, Scythians.
Looking at the text, the crucial element is the verb transire plus the preposition in. The English, French and Italian translators have all advanced readings that make a spatial claim, and while rendering transire in as ‘to spread as far as’ is a valid translation in the abstract, it is not a feature of Pliny's Latin.Footnote 6 At his most literal, Pliny uses transire in to describe movement from one position to another, such as when Alexander's loyal steed Bucephalus prevents the conqueror from changing to another horse: [Bucephalus] Thebarum oppugnatione uulneratus in alium transire Alexandrum non passus (8.154).Footnote 7 Such an interpretation of 4.81 (that is, ‘The name of the Scythians has everywhere passed into [the lands of] the Sarmatians and the Germans’) would reflect actual Plinian usage, but none the less presents an inversion of what the author is actually trying to say.Footnote 8 Usage of the Scythian label had not spread to new areas, as Pliny makes clear in the final clause. Rather, it had done the opposite, changing to something else in all but the most remote areas of ‘Scythia’, on the edges of the Roman knowledge-horizon.
Rather than reading transire in as a statement of spatial extent or movement between physical position, we should read the phrase as indicating a change from one state to another. This usage is also common within the Historia Naturalis:
A. (14.30) sed et austera [uua] transit in dulcem uetustatem, et quae dulcis fuit in austeritatem.
But even a bitter grape turns sweet when aged, and one that was sweet becomes bitter.
B. (17.242) mutantur arbores et colore fiuntque ex nigris candidae, non semper prodigio, sed eae maxime, quae ex semine nascuntur. et populus alba in nigram transit.
Trees are also changed in colour, and from black become white, not always by miraculous means, but most often those which are grown from seed. Also, the white poplar changes into a black one.
C. (19.61) sed cucumis cartilagine et carne constat, cucurbita cortice et cartilagine; cortex huic uni maturitate transit in lignum.
But the cucumber consists of cartilage and flesh, while the gourd consists of rind and cartilage; the rind of which [the gourd] alone changes into wood upon maturity.
D. (29.13) mox a saeuitia secandi urendique transisse nomen in carnificem.
Soon, on account of the savagery of his surgery and cautery, [Archagathus’] name changed to ‘the butcher’.
In examples A through C, above, we see Pliny using transire in to make concrete statements about physical transformations, and given the content of the Historia Naturalis, the frequency of purely physical uses should not surprise us. Although the transformation in 4.81 occurs within the realm of language rather than the physical world, it represents the same linguistic usage—transformation from one state into another—and is directly paralleled by Archagathus’ change of title in example D.Footnote 9
Our revised reading of 4.81 is further justified when considered within the larger political and intellectual contexts of the mid first century c.e. Pliny composed his encyclopedia during the reign of Vespasian,Footnote 10 about a generation after Rome finished consolidating its military frontier along the Danube river, but before the Transdanubian Wars of Domitian and the annexations of Trajan. This was a period of ethnographic realignment as the Romans changed the way in which they thought about the peoples of the Carpathian Basin to fit the new realities of a Danubian borderland divided in half along the course of the river. We can see these changes most clearly by briefly considering how the geographer Strabo described the same region a generation earlier. Writing at approximately the moment of Roman political consolidation (c.30 c.e.), Strabo's ethnographic survey of the Danubian world focussed on the Getic/Thracian nature of its population, painting a very different picture of the lands beyond the river (7.3.1):
εἶτ᾿ εὐθὺς ἡ τῶν Γετῶν συνάπτει γῆ, κατ᾿ ἀρχὰς μὲν στενή, παρατεταμένη τῷ Ἴστρῳ κατὰ τὸ νότιον μέρος, κατὰ δὲ τοὐναντίον τῇ παρωρείᾳ τοῦ Ἑρκυνίου δρυμοῦ, μέρος τι τῶν ὀρῶν καὶ αὐτὴ κατέχουσα, εἶτα πλατύνεται πρὸς τὰς ἄρκτους μέχρι Τυρεγετῶν· τοὺς δὲ ἀκριβεῖς ὅρους οὐκ ἔχομεν φράζειν.
Abutting [Germania] is the land of the Getae, which, although narrow at its beginnings [in the west], following the Danube on its southern side and on the opposite side along the mountains of the Hercynian forest (for ‘Getia’ also includes a portion of the mountains), afterwards widens towards the north as far as the land of the Tyregetae; but I cannot tell the exact boundaries.Footnote 11
Scythians and Sarmatians appear in this landscape, but they are peripheral figures, either dwelling in the north beyond the Euxine Sea or representing transient nomadic communities, which, although disruptive, could not fundamentally upset the author's picture of Getic cultural hegemony.Footnote 12
Speaking of both the Getae-proper and their kindred, the Dacians, Strabo repeats the general Greek consensus that they were a subset of Thracians since they spoke dialects of the same language.Footnote 13 Furthermore, Strabo considers the Getae to be identical to the Mysians/Moesians living just south of the Danube, and explains that communities of each group existed on both sides of the Danube (7.3.2):
οἱ τοίνυν Ἕλληνες τοὺς Γέτας Θρᾷκας ὑπελάμβανον· ᾤκουν δ᾿ ἐφ᾿ ἑκάτερα τοῦ Ἴστρου καὶ οὗτοι καὶ οἱ Μυσοί, Θρᾷκες ὄντες καὶ αὐτοί, καὶ οὓς νῦν Μοισοὺς καλοῦσιν.
Previous Greeks identified the Getae as Thracians and noted that they lived on both sides of the Ister, together with the Mysians, who are also Thracians and identical to the people now called Moesians.
The blurry boundaries between Getae, Dacians, Moesians and Thracians apparently continued down to Strabo's own day when ‘the migrations [the Getae] make to either side of the Ister are continuous, and they are intermingled with the Thracians and the Moesians’.Footnote 14 This is an extremely important observation. Sometime after Herodotus, for whom the Danube was seen as the outer boundary of the knowable world, the river came to be seen not as marking the boundary between discrete worlds but rather as running through the middle of a greater Thracian world which was, by Strabo's own admission, characterized by great mobility and no small degree of ethnic confusion in his own day (7.3.2):
καὶ γὰρ νῦν ἀναμέμικται ταῦτα τὰ ἔθνη τοῖς Θρᾳξὶ καὶ τὰ Βασταρνικά, μᾶλλον μὲν τοῖς ἐκτὸς Ἴστρου, ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς ἐντός. τούτοις δὲ καὶ τὰ Κελτικά, οἵ τε Βόϊοι καὶ Σκορδίσκοι καὶ Ταυρίσκοι.
But currently, these tribes [the Sarmatae and the Scythians], as well as the Bastarnae, are mixed together with the Thracians, and more indeed with those beyond the Ister, but also with those inside. And some Celtic tribes—the Boii, the Scordisci and the Taurisci—are also mixed with them.
Strabo's Hellenistic conception of the Danubian world as essentially Thracian was, however, fundamentally incompatible with the Roman political order in the region because the res publica generally conceived of its rule as over cities and peoples (ciuitates, gentes) rather than as dominion over specific territory.Footnote 15 For the Romans, geographical features frequently served as markers of political boundaries, but only when they were thought to follow the border between different peoples.Footnote 16 Thus, the Nile, despite its great cultural and economic importance, is absent from Seneca's first-century list of natural political boundaries, because it flowed through an ethnically homogenous region.Footnote 17
For evidence that Roman officials of the mid first century did, indeed, view the Danube as a boundary between peoples, we can look beyond Pliny's opening statement in 4.80 to the relevant parts of the res gestae of a certain Ti. Plautius Silvanus Aelianus (ILS 986), who served as governor of Moesia during the reign of Nero (61–6 c.e.). Silvanus’ impressive military and diplomatic achievements beyond the Danube included checking the eastward aggression of the Sarmatian Iazyges (motum orientem Sarmatar. | compressit, lines 13–14), who were then in the process of pushing the Dacians out of the Hungarian Plain and into Transylvania, negotiating treaties with the Bastarnae, the Roxolani and the Dacians (regibus Bastarnarum et | Rhoxolanorum filios Dacorum fratrum | captos aut hostibus ereptos remisit; ab | aliquis eorum opsides accepit per quem pacem | prouinciae et confirmauit et protulit, lines 18–22), and discouraging a certain ‘king of the Scythians’ from his siege of Olbia on the Black Sea coast (Scytharum quoque rege{m}Footnote 18 a Cher[s]onensi | quae est ultra Borustenen opsidione summoto, lines 22–4).Footnote 19 Silvanus’ crowning accomplishment, however, was the settlement of ‘over 100,000’ transdanuuiani south of the river (Ti. Plautio M. f. Ani. | Siluano Aeliano […] [8] legat pro praet. Moesiae | in qua plura quam centum mill. | ex numero transdanuuianor. | ad praestanda tributa cum coniungib. | ac liberis et principibus aut regibus suis | transduxit, lines 1–2, 8–13).Footnote 20 Although Silvanus does not identify these refugees as Scythians, the group label he employs does, crucially, define them by their relationship to the Danube. The ideological importance of the river appears again in Silvanus’ treaty with the tribes, the central element of which involved the barbarians paying homage to the Roman military standards on the bank of the great river (ignotos ante aut infensos p[opulo] R[omano] reges signa | Romana adoraturos in ripam quam tuebatur perduxit, lines 16–18).
Despite cutting through the middle of Strabo's pre-Roman Getic world, the Danube was too useful as a military highway for Rome to establish its frontier anywhere else. Such a division of the Carpathian Basin, however, could only be justified if it could be seen as matching natural divisions between peoples. Silvanus illustrated Rome's changing perceptions of the Carpathian Basin by labelling people from outside Rome's zone of control by their physical relationship to the river, and by using the river as a potent symbol of Roman power during diplomatic negotiations. In the same historical moment, Pliny the Elder accomplished an identical rhetorical task in his Carpathian ethnography by hearkening back to the world-view of Herodotus: a world where, beyond the river, in plenum quidem omnes Scytharum sunt gentes. At the same time, the reality on the ground, again illustrated clearly by the Silvanus inscription, was that the Romans knew a lot about the tribes beyond the river with whom they had military, diplomatic and economic relations. Expert opinion identified them as Roxolani, Iazyges, Bastarnae and Dacians, that is, tribes of Sarmatians, Germans and, tacitly, Thracians. Within this context, our reading of 4.81 represents the only correct translation. In the lands beyond the Danube, the traditional Greek Scythian label had given way to newer, specific designations, but in a world where the Danube was actively being forced to stand as a divider between peoples, Pliny offered reassurance that, at their cores, all the Transdanubian barbarians remained Scythians: the eternal Other, unworthy of incorporation within the Roman Empire.
Even after Trajan's Dacian Wars and the establishment of provinces beyond the Danube, Pliny's generalization that, for the most part, the peoples beyond the river were Scythians remained true for later authors writing about Danubian matters. In the early third century, Cassius Dio could casually refer to the affairs of Rome's entire Danubian theatre during the Marcomannic Wars as τὰ Σκυθικά,Footnote 21 while simultaneously relying on recent military intelligence to describe the actual events of the conflict. Less than a century later, Herennius Dexippus employed the Scythian label when chronicling the events of the late third-century Gothic troubles.Footnote 22 Themistius in the fourth century,Footnote 23 and Priscus in the fifth,Footnote 24 continued the trend, and the pattern of labelling the people beyond the Danube as Scythians would endure far into the Middle Ages.Footnote 25 In every instance, use of the archaic group label was designed to slot specific contemporary barbarians into the correct category within the inflexible pantheon of Graeco-Roman ethnographic thought. While Herodotus’ original topographic and ethnographic divisions stand at the ultimate head of this long intellectual tradition, a correct reading of Pliny's Carpathian exegesis (4.80–1) provides us with the first clear articulation of the world-view after the establishment of Rome's Danubian limes. His notion that all the people beyond the Danube were, at their heart, Scythians, despite what other names they might possess, reflects a conservative Roman outlook which must be considered in any analysis of Roman political, military and economic actions within the Carpathian Basin.
