The German Frontier

I had not slept since David and I left Chicago the day before. I drove cautiously through the hills northwest from Frankfurt to the picturesque village of Bad Homburg. It was a beautiful sunny fall afternoon. The bucolic countryside looks so peaceful, I found it hard to invoke Germany’s centuries of turbulent history. We came to see where the army of Ancient Rome built a fort to protect its empire from hordes of Germans.

Roman soldiers in Germany? In the early centuries of our Christian era, England and Germany were on the frontiers of the Roman Empire. When Jesus was born – the Bible tells us Augustus was emperor – Rome controlled all the lands around the Mediterranean Sea, in a great circle from Spain across Southern Europe,. aching down through the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Holy Land, and continuing westward across all of North Africa.

When the Romans tried to expand northward into Germany, they were met with fierce resistance from tribes of “barbarians”. Initially the Romans expected to subdue these uncivilized wild people as easily as they had annihilated the tribes in Britain. Rome’s legions were the best trained and most disciplined fighting force the Ancient World had seen, and they were opposed by groups of uncivilized, unorganized tribes. Augustus’s successors sent armies into the woods of Germany only to have their legions be the ones who were wiped out.

The emperor ordered a whole string of forts, not a wall, like Congress prepossess to build along the Rio Grande, but strong fortifications to control the border along the Rhine River. If they could not conquer the Germans, they would keep them outside the empire. It did not work.

Franks swept past the forts and took over France. Saxons moved into England. The “long beards” settled in Northern Italy; in the area now called Lombardy. The legions were recalled to protect the city of Rome.

Roman was betrayed by its own citizens. The enormous Aurelian Walls, which still stand around the old center of Rome today, didn’t keep Goths and Vandals from sacking the city.

Our schools do not teach history. Our Congressmen don’t even know American History, else why would they make ridiculous claims about our Founding Fathers establishing a “Christian nation”? Or act as if we are still living on the frontier with every man needing guns to protect his homestead from murdering Indians? How can we expect them to know anything about the mistakes Roman emperors made trying to control people who refused to be conquered?

The fort at Bad Homburg was my first experience with the remains of Ancient Rome. In later trips to Europe I saw where archeologists dug up a Roman settlements from Portugal to Romania. We bombed Cologne in World War II and uncovered a trove of Roman artifacts, now housed in a museum where I marveled at the collection of Roman glass. In the city of Rome itself, Ancient Rome is buried under the modern city. Men still dig under streets and buildings and make new discoveries. In France I went to St. Remy to see the asylum where Van Gogh was a patient and discovered a triumphal arch the equal of anything I saw in Rome.

The Ancient Romans vanished like the Mohicans. Their ruins remind us to study history.