Note 22 — Chapter IV · A New Interpretation

The most important was certainly the fossa Drusiana which led from the Rhine to the North Sea, through a lake, probably that of Flevum (Tacitus, Ann., II, 8). This may very well be identical with the fossae Drusinae (Suetonius, Claud., 1). Drusus also did some work to regulate the course of the Rhine (Tacitus, Ann., XIII, 53, and Hist., V, 19). Whether he built corduroy roads (pontes longi) over the swampy land is not so certain, though Becker, Domaszewski, and Kornemann (the references in Kornemann, Klio, IX, p. 432 ff.) are probably correct when they interpret pontibus (Floras, II, 30, 26) in this sense. If this was actually a coast road connecting two naval bases, Borma, a short distance from the Rhine, with Gesoriacum-Bononia (Boulogne-sur-mer), as Kornemann very plausibly argues (p. 432, 435), then it really connected only such naval bases as were necessary to hold the mouth of the Rhine with the general military road system of Gaul. Of course both banks of a river at its mouth must be seized in order to insure certain control, but neither the establishment of Borma nor the construction of this particular bit of road can properly be regarded as measures which necessarily had the conquest of Germany in mind, nor would they have furthered very materially such a conquest, even if it had been intended. Professor Frank (Roman Imperialism, New York, 1914, p. 352) seems to make too much of this canal of Drusus as evidence “that serious measures were planned from the first”. The Romans unquestionably made preparations to march into Germany and to support armies upon such excursions; the critical consideration, however, is what they did after entering the country, not their preliminary preparations. If they constantly marched out again every fall, it is impossible to speak of permanent occupation. Nor is it satisfactory to restrict the attempts at conquest to the campaigns of Drusus, 12-9 B. C., and of Tiberius, 4-5 A. D., alone. Domitius penetrated deeper into Germany than either of them, as he alone crossed the Elbe. If some invasions imply conquest then all should, or else Augustus was guilty of an incredibly shilly-shally policy. And if all the invasions aimed at conquest, then there is an absurd disparity between their number, scale, and extent and the utterly negligible results obtained. Kornemann’s view (p. 440 ff.) that Drusus constructed a coast road as far as the mouth of the Ems can hardly be established by the evidence which he presents. It does not appear how any number of campaigns along the coast could have accomplished the conquest of the remote interior. Even if the view be accepted, however, it could only show the importance of the control of the coast, a circumstance to which we shall revert later.