Don't blame Hadrian for Bush's wall.

President Bush has a strange enthusiasm for walls (strange, because that mother of walls in Berlin isn’t exactly regarded as a stunning success). He would like to put, if not a wall, then at least a barbed wire fence along the almost 3,500 kilometer frontier between the USA and Mexico. And, unless Nouri al-Maliki manages to put the brakes on, there will soon be concrete walls between Sunni and Shia areas of Baghdad, to keep car-bombers out (or in).

Bush isn’t the only one, of course. Israel is busy constructing its West Bank barrier, parts of which are 8 meters high, in concrete. Less well known is a wall put up in Padua in north Italy, as a “crime fighting measure”, around the high-rise Anelli estate. In fact the Guardian last week came up with almost thirty modern security walls, either built or under construction. One, the electric fence between South Africa and Mozambique has apparently killed more people than were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall.

The Great Wall of China may be one ancestor here. But the usual western approach is to point the finger back, way beyond Berlin, to the emperor Hadrian. Regret these awful barriers though we do, is the line, there is a fine classical precedent in the second century AD with Hadrian’s attempt to keep the nasty barbarians out of the Roman empire. That is, “Hadrian’s Wall”.

Another misuse of the classical past I’m afraid.

Sure, the popular image of Hadrian’s Wall is just that: cold, wet, Roman squaddies constantly patrolling the bastions, and periodically attacked by the native hordes trying to penetrate the homeland – unsuccessfully, of course, as the Wall was such an effective barrier.

It can’t, in fact, have been anything like that, and archaeologists have been debating for decades exactly what Hadrian’s Wall was for. The one relevant reference in classical literature (“he was the first to build a wall to separate Romans and barbarians”) may look as if it supports the popular line. But it’s written by a flagrantly unreliable late Roman biographer of Hadrian, who probably had no better idea than we do of what was going on in the second century AD.

And there are all kinds of problems with that approach. For a start, the Wall isn’t anything like as powerful a defensive line as we tend to imagine. There are one or two spots where it looks very impressive (and those are where the publicity photos are usually taken). But when it was first built most of the western part was not that great masonry structure, but a simple turf rampart, which wouldn’t have deterred most self-respecting barbarians. Besides there are an improbably large number of gates (80) for a serious defensive barrier.

Some modern archaeologists think that we are dealing with a mechanism of surveillance,  or with a means to control movement between territories rather than an attempt to prevent incursions (maybe there was a cash levy on goods crossing the line . . .?). Others think that it was more a way of establishing a line of communications from East to West, rather than blocking invasions from the North. Still others think that the main purpose was symbolic: Hadrian was one of those unwarlike Roman emperors, who needed some military street-cred; what better than a few miles of military masonry in the rugged province of Britannia?

But the bottom line is the way the Romans generally thought about frontiers and frontier regions. Despite the impression given by Hadrian’s Wall (and by a few other places largely in Germany) that they saw a linear divide between the empire and the barbarian world, the Roman image of the frontier was usually much more subtly nuanced. The empire shaded into “foreign” territory across many kilometres that were melting pot of cultural difference and often a hot-spot of trading and commercial activity. It was a question of frontier zones, rather than frontiers – governed partly by Rome, partly by a whole variety of non-Roman powers. Hadrian’s Wall, whatever its function, was an exception.

President Bush and our other wall-crazy political leaders might learn from that.

Comments

[Phil M]

Your historical take on Hadrian's Wall is interesting, but there are many faults in your political analogy to the modern Mexican border fence proposal.

First, the purposes you attribute to Hadrian's Wall - customs collection, control of border crossing, administration of provinces, and security surveilance - are far more similar to the Mexican border fence proposal than a massive castle-like stone barrier. The Mexican fence isn't intended to block any invading army - it's intended to channel immigration and international trade into dozens of controlled access points (perhaps similar to the many gates on Hadrian's wall). If anything, you've inadvertently strengthened the analogy between Hadrian's wall and the Mexican border fence proposal!

Second, while the smaller turf and mud sections of Hadrian's wall may not have withstood a barbarian assault on their own, this does not prove an absence of a defensive military function. To suggest otherwise actually displays an ignorance of the line in basic military strategy. In most cases it is numerically impossible to field enough soldiers to hold a contiguous line across hundreds of miles of borderland - it spreads the army too thin and leaves the whole line vulnerable. So instead, you build a string of forts in defensive geographic positions and place a garrison there to cover an assigned territory in between...which is exactly what Hadrian's Wall is - a network of forts.

Third, the defensive uses of Hadrian's Wall are also clearly demonstrated in archaelogical evidence from the later Antonine Wall to its north. Excavations there have revealed hundreds of pit traps along the wall, which in Roman times would have held wooden stakes intended to impale any attacker as he approached the barrier.

Fourth, that Hadrian's wall served its purpose of border control is attested to by the border warfare that dominated the period between the Roman withdrawal and the Norman conquest.

[Urnammu]

On April,23,leaflets were distributed by al-Qaeda terrorists in the streets of Adhamiya calling on residents to protest the building of the wall.If al-Qeda is disturbed by the building of the wall,this is an evident sign that the wall should be built,sooner than later.

[Robert]

Having grown up on the border of Mexico, I can attest to what a grey zone it really is. The Spanish word for border is "frontiera" and it is just that - a liminal space, not a hard-and-fast boundary. That is because US agriculture depends on Mexcian labor, and so the porosity of that boundary is largely an economic function. I wonder if in the likewise agrarian Roman society if the relationship to barbarians did not also involve political posturing as a smoke screen to economic realities - if Hadrian's wall might have also represented a kind of enforced "us/them" mentality when, in fact, both cultures were more inextricably twined than either would like to admit.

[Philippa]

A short satire on Hadrian's Wall myth can be found at http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~pms45/MyStories/Hadrian's%20Wall.doc

I'll let you decide whether you think it's a clever satirical comedy or just another piece of RomBritLit to be ridiculed!

[Jackie]

Tony Francis got there first!It has always seemed that the most dangerous soldier (to his own side!) is the one with time on his hands, so there is nothing new. My son served for eight years in the Signals, and spent quite a lot of his time in Germany doing things 'for the sake of it', to keep his mind and his body occupied. Another view is the one given to me by an archaeologist I met the first time I visited Hadrian's Wall. I asked what the Wall was built for, and, as she disappeared out of the door of the museum, replied with one word -'Taxes!'

[Xjy]

I'd go for a phrase like "conspicuous demarcation". Mary mentioned a lot of uses, and Tony adds the "devil-finds-work-for-idle-hands" one, but of course the reason for all the soldiers being there in the first place is to demonstrate the presence of enormous numbers of troops available just to garrison a god-forsaken corner of the world like this. Hinting at thousands more to be mustered when needed.

The wall's no good at stopping marauding bands who want to kill and burn and loot small stuff, but how many cattle rustlers would want to lift the beeves back over the wall to get home again? And once they're in the Imperial precincts, don't they realize that scouts can locate them and monitor their movements so an appropriate bit of the war machine can meet them on their return? Enough of a risk to deter all but the most determined.

[Tony Keen]

If the purpose of Hadrian's Wall was at least as much symbolic as practical (and I think there's a strong case for that), then it is a precedent for Bush's fence along the Mexican border, which is surely as much about being seen to be Doing Something as actually having any practical effect.

[Tony Francis]

A few years ago I saw a program on the History Channel about Hadrian's Wall. They suggested the idea that Rome had all those soldiers up there in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do. Someone came up with the idea: Why not build a wall? - just to keep them busy. After all, the Romans were always building something. Apparently there have been a lot of great archeologic discoveries in those old Roman camps. At least that is what the History Channel indicated.