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by adrianratnapala
2580 days ago
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Interestingly, the headline on the BBC page is more accurate than the one I see on HN. BBC says: "Did the Romans Really Reach Scotland?". And even though it's a headline, the answer is "yes, duh." HN headline, "The Antonine Wall was the real final frontier of the Roman Empire" is misleading, and final is doing strange work there. The Antonine wall was only briefly defended a couple of times, while the more famous Hadrian's wall was a fairly fixed frontier. I find it interesting that the Antonine wall is entirely inside Scotland, while Hadrian's wall is entirely inside England. Somewhere between them lay the line where further imperial expansion became overreach. |
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Agreed. Hadrian's Wall has always been considered the last, defensible hard border of the Roman Empire. As even the article notes:
>But the story of Rome’s north-west frontier far from ends there, for it was the Antonine Wall that, albeit briefly, held the title of the wildest edge of the empire.
If the zone between the Antonine and Hadrian's would've been a buffered no-man's land, the likes of how international borders stand to this day, then the Antonine - if only the demarcation of the beginning of the no man's land - really wouldn't have been the final frontier.
I imagine the Roman Army, in all it's due dilligence, would've swept the area of around five to ten miles from the Antonine - to make sure they weren't going to get "surprise visitors" whilst they were building the Antonine.
Assuming this posit is true, then the "final frontier" of the Roman Army was actually much further north than one would assume (in the sense of frontiers being realms of exploration and not demarcated boundaries).