from 13 - The West
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
THE ADVANCE TO THE DANUBE AND BEYOND, 43 B.C.–A.D. 6
‘Magnum est stare in Danubii ripa’ proclaimed the Younger Pliny to the emperor Trajan. An approach to the river, either dilated in the plains or surging awesomely in one of its several gorges, rarely fails to stir the imagination. The river Danube figures in some of Europe's oldest myths, some from remote prehistory, such as the tale of the returning Argonauts sailing upstream from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. Throughout history conquerors and their armies have exulted at gaining the river, though perhaps none more emphatically than the emperor Augustus who boasted in his Res Gestae of the advance, achieved by his stepson and legate Tiberius Nero, of the boundaries of Illyricum to the bank of the Danube. Not until the middle course of the Danube had been secured could Rome hold and exploit the overland route between Italy and her eastern territories. That remains today the principal land routebetween Europe and the Middle East, via Zagreb, Belgrade, Niš, and Sofia to Istanbul, or south from Niš via Skopje and Thessalonica to Athens. For nearly four centuries this highway was the principal military axis of the Roman empire, notably in the recurrent episodes of civil war, from the turmoil of A.D. 68–9 which followed the end of the Julio-Claudians to the great conflicts of the fourth century which troubled the dynasties of Constantine and Valentinian.
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