The Antonine Wall was the real final frontier of the Roman Empire | Hacker News Reader

The Antonine Wall was the real final frontier of the Roman Empire

bbc.com

57 pointsMiriamWeiner13 comments

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.

>...while the more famous Hadrian's wall was a fairly fixed frontier.

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).

> then the "final frontier" of the Roman Army was actually much further north than one would assume

In my backyard, Perthshire, it's difficult not to bump into the ruins of some fairly substantial Roman encampments. This is certainly a good bit north of the Antonine Wall. The Gask Ridge, just a couple of miles away from me, may contend as one of the earliest Roman "frontiers":

http://www.theromangaskproject.org/

Not sure if this is the case, but BBC has an annoying habit of changing headlines.

The wall systems the Romans built in Britain get all of the attention, but that era of emperors were building walls all over the place, including a much longer and more extensive section between the Rhine and Danube[1], and yet more across the other far-flung borders, in every quarter of the empire.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_Germanicus

I think it's maybe because of how remote, especially in Scotland, these wall systems were from the centre of power.

This was the last Roman Emperor who reached it -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septimius_Severus

Born in Libya, turned Rome into a military dictatorship then went north and ruled Rome from York and rebuilt Hadrian's Wall.

edit - This was after fortifying the Sahara. He was a busy guy.

Constantius I (father of the more famous Constantine) led an expedition into Scotland and probably made it North of the Antonine Wall, though Severus was the last Emperor to try and permanently fortify it.

Thanks for that. Is often true that the quickest way to find out something correct on the internet is to write something incorrect, with conviction. :)

[Henrik] Ibsen's ploy, although he had to do it in person.

Edward Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire is interesting on the walls in Britain and elsewhere. I am no historian and can't say what one would think of the book.

A wall in the north you say?

No, the south.

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