Over the past few decades, there has been a significant amount of research on the Roman Lower Danube frontier by international teams focusing on individual forts or broader landscape survey work; collectively, this volume represents the best of this collaboration with the aim of elevating the Lower Danube within broader Roman frontier scholarship.

Imperial policy on the western frontier of the Roman Empire was the means by which the government controlled the frontier residents. This book takes a topical approach to this study of the frontier: subjects covered include the army, farming, commerce, manufacturing, religion and Romanization.

With its succinct analysis of the overriding issues and detailed case-studies based on the latest archaeological research, this social and economic study of Roman Imperial frontiers is essential reading. Too often the frontier has been represented as a simple linear boundary. The reality, argues Dr Elton, was rather a fuzzy set of interlocking zones - political, military, judicial and financial. After discussion of frontier theory and types of frontier, the author analyses the acquisition of an empire and the ways in which it was ruled. He addresses the vexed question of how to define the edges of provinces, and covers the relationship with allied kingdoms. Regional variation and different rates of change are seen as significant - as is illustrated by Civilis' revolt on the Rhine in AD 69. He uses another case-study - Dura-Europos - to exemplify the role of the army on the frontier, especially its relations with the population on both sides of the border. The central importance of trade is highlighted by special consideration of Palmyra.

The imperial Roman advance to and entrenchment along the Danube from the times of Augustus to Aurelian, mirrored by the slow development of various Germanic peoples beyond the 1,700-mile river’s northern bank, set the stage for a series of climactic engagements between the late Roman Empire and their various barbarous neighbors along what had quickly become the Empire’s most important and unstable frontier. The immigration and settlement of Goths from the Pontic Steppe, fleeing the Huns as they emerged from Central Asia, within the Roman Balkans undermined the Danube frontier, eviscerated the Eastern Roman field army, and enabled Alaric’s role as a destabilizing free radical between the estranged imperial Roman courts at Rome and Constantinople from 395 to 410. At the same time, the Huns, colliding with the Roman frontiers on the Middle and Lower Danube, began to amass on the Pannonian and Romanian Plains, and exerted a steadily increasing pressure on the Roman frontier. After having buckled several times, particularly in Roman Pannonia on the increasingly isolated Middle Danube, from the 410s to the 430s, Attila led two major invasions of the Eastern Roman Empire in 441-442 and 447. Recognizing the importance of the Danube frontier to safeguarding imperial security, Attila forced the Eastern Romans to completely abandon the Middle and Lower Danube, evacuating all military posts and major populations at least a five-days march south of the river, thereby destroying the Roman Danube frontier as the weakening Empire advanced into late fifth century.

Beyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome presents the Danube frontier of the Roman empire as the central stage for many of the most important political and military events of Roman history, from Trajan’s invasion of Dacia and the Marcomannic Wars, to the humbling of the Roman state power at the hands of the Goths and Huns. Hart delves into the cultural and political impacts of Rome’s interactions with Transdanubian peoples, emphasizing the Sarmatians of the Hungarian Plain, whose long encounter with the Roman Empire, he argues, created a problematic template for later dealings with Goths and Huns based on misapplied ethnographic and ecological tropes. Beyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome explores how Roman stereotypical perceptions of specific Danubian peoples directly influenced some of the most politically significant events of Roman antiquity. Drawing on textual, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence, Hart illustrates how Roman ethnic and ecological stereotypes were employed in the Danubian borderland to support the imperial frontier edifice fundamentally at odds with the region’s natural topography. Distorted Roman perceptions of these Danubian neighbors resulted in disastrous mismanagement of border wars and migrant crises throughout the first five centuries CE. Beyond the River demonstrates how state-supported stereotypes, when coupled with Roman military and economic power, exerted strong influences on the social structures and evolving group identities of the peoples dwelling in the borderland.

In Pannonia and Upper Moesia, first published 1974, András Mócsy surveys the Middle Danube Provinces from the latest pre-Roman Iron Age up to the beginning of the Great Migrations. His primary concern is to develop a general synthesis of the archaeological and historical researches in the Danube Basin, which lead to a more detailed knowledge of the Roman culture of the area. The economic and social development, town and country life, culture and religion in the Provinces are all investigated, and the local background of the so-called Illyrian Predominance during the third century crisis of the Roman Empire is explained, as is the eventual breakdown of Danubian Romanisation. This volume will appeal to students and teachers of archaeology alike, as well as to those interested in the Roman Empire – not only the history of Rome itself, but also of the far-flung areas which together comprised the Empire’s frontier for centuries.