Old Europe: The Young Ones

And now for a short photoessay about life today.

1.

Atmosphere is next to Fuel. It is around the corner from Tractor, which isn't far from Wind. Atmosphere used to be called Coast Mountain, when it wasn't far from the Mountain Equipment Co-op, which was where hippies bought their camping gear, when there were hippies. It is a good place to buy kayaks, which you need if you want to go kayaking.

2.

Anyone want to take on a 28 hour full time  minimum wage job? Anyone? Yes, we know that you can't pay rent in this neighbourhood at that wage, but that's the going rate. It's not like we can afford to pay more. Anyone? I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that people who take these jobs will have to give up on their kayaking-related activities, and perhaps shop at stores that do not have one-word noun names. 

In 269 or in 271, or perhaps in both years, since surviving fragments of Publius Herennius Dexippus clearly identify a "return" to Italy, the Emperor Aurelian encountered the army of a German nation called the "Juthungi," and allies who may or may not have included Swabians, Marcomanni, Alamanni, Vandals and/or Goths, on the loose in northern Italy. Either in both years or in only one, he chased them around the Pianura Padana (I'm opting for the Italian to shake readers out of using "Po Valley" to label a more complex geography, and specifically to highlight the northeastern extension into Friuli that is also typical river valley terrain but which has no association with the Po). Perhaps on the first occasion he overawed the Juthungi with a spectacular embassy, or, perhaps it was in the second invasion, after he defeated them in three battles, chasing them as far as a crossing of the Danube, or of the Po. It could be either. In any case, he conscripted 40,000 cavalry and 80,000 infantry from the Juthungi, whom he then took east to defeat Zenobia. Or, possibly, which he assembled at Aquiliea in anticipation of the Persian war he never fought. It depends on timing. 

It is the same confused story when Galerius, son of legendary Valerian, pursued and defeated "Alamanni" barbarians near Milan. The story of this incursion is continued in a Roman inscription recovered at Augsburg in 1992, which tells us that Marcus Simplicinius Genialis defeated these same "Juthungi" on the north slope of the Alps in April of 261. Probably. Argument continues about whether this happened before, after, or at the same time that Valerian, his army, and his court were captured by the Persians.

Okay. Wait a minute. Dates have meaning. War in April? Now, that link is not going to mean very much to you if you haven't seen Little Big Man. If you have, you know what comes next. Sheridan's Winter Campaign was a more traditional winter campaign than the one that it is implied here, fought in December on the last standing forage. An army that takes the field in late winter or early spring does so out of magazines, usually aiming to besiege and take a particularly exposed or ill-defended place. Only the most powerful and overbearing state can take the field when there is no grass, and even then  it is a reckless thing to do unless a quick end is guaranteed. Suddenly the Juthungi appear to us in a more desperate light, as victims rather than as perpetrators, however the Roman historians wish to spin this.

"Juthungi" has a number of suggested etymologies. As should by now be clear, I am going with the argument that the word references a "youth sodality." Or, to put it more bluntly, it means "The Young Ones." By which I do not mean these guys.

I mean this.

Little Joe the wrangler he'll wrangle never more
His days with the remuda they're all done
It was long about last April he rode into our camp
Just a little Texas stray and all alone

....Said he'd try to do the best he could if we'd only give him work
Though he didn't know straight up about a cow
So the boss he cut him out a mount and kinda put him on
And we knew he liked our little stray somehow
Well he taught him how to heard the horses and learned to know 'em all
And to get 'em in by daylight if he could
And to follow the chuck wagon and to always hitch the team
And to help the carsonaro rustle wood

We had driven to Red River and the weather it was fine
We were camped down on the south side of the bend
When a Norther started blowin' we called the extra guard
Cause it took all hands to hold the cattle in
Now little Joe the wrangler was called out like the rest

Between the streaks of lightnin' we could see a horse ahead
It was little Joe the wrangler in the lead
He was riding old Blue Rocket with a slicker o'er his head
And he's trying to check the leaders in their speed.
We finally got'em millin' and they sort of quieted down
The extra guard back to the camp did go
But one of them was missing and we all knew at a glance
Twas our little Texas strayboy wrangler Joe.

"Cowboy historian" Don Edwards manages to make a long song even more prolix, and the bowdlerisation of  Hispanicisisms in the Marty Robbins version is suggestive of subtexts in a song that is, ultimately, the same old story of a desperate kid dying in an industrial accident while trying to do the best he could in a job that he knew he was very lucky to get. 

Our sources for Roman history from the late 250s to the early 280s are incredibly weak. Dexippus was apparently a first rank Greek historian, but his history  is only available to us in fragments prepared in Istanbul in the late Ninth Century. (I call it that because the locals like it better that way.)  What is more surprising is that even though early medieval schoolmasters were clearly doing  their best to preserve a continuous chain of narrative history back to Herodotus, the longest fragment of Dexippus is an extract about one of Aurelian's embassies from a how-to manual. While Photios extracted a number of otherwise lost texts, Dexippus is one of the major losses in the chain of historical reproduction, all the more extraordinary given that he was deemed a Greek stylist on a par with Thucydides. I think that the safe inference to take away is that while  other texts were winnowed out by the lacuna in copying during the "Byzantine Dark Ages" after 630, copies of Dexippus were scarce from the beginning. Clifford Ando offers an even more stark observation. The "Crisis of the Third Century" is usually taken to extend from the murder of Severus Alexander in the late winter of 235 at the legionary camp at Mainz for the crime of bribing the Alamanni and for attempting to take the Rhine legions away from their families to the Persian front. Yet even the supposedly brutal and common Maximian who succeeded Severus continued to issue numerous Imperial rescripts. The number of imperial rescripts cited in the Code of Justinian does not really fall off until the 260s, but when it does, it falls off precipitiously. The feckless child emperor Gordian III issued over 50 during his reign, but Aurelian, vigorous and effective as he was, managed only 6. Notice that we do not know precisely when Valerian's disaster occurred. That's a pretty big lacuna.   

It has frequently been suggested that the Empire was falling apart from the inside. One of our sources for Aurelian's reign tells us that he had to repress a rising by the moneyers of Rome, and the scale of the resulting urban warfare is illustrated by the loss of 6000 soldiers in the fighting. Hendrik Dey reconstructs the chronnology as the repression of a late winter social rising, the kind that ancien regime societies used to suffer in bad years. A few years later, Diocletian sent Maximinus to deal with the Bagaudae, or perhaps Bacaudae in the region around Lyons. (That is, the centre of gravity of Roman Gaul). The Bagaudae certainly sound like social revolutionaries. The Panegyric of 290 is certainly open to be read in the spirit of Mao on war: "the plowman imitated the infantryman, the shepherd the cavalryman, the rustic harvester of his own crops the barbarian enemy." The passage comes next to practically the only historic reference to the Heruli, who would thus be known as a Swabian grouping were it not that Dexippus is supposed to have raised an Athenian citizen militia against an incursion of Heruli. Squaring what we have from these and other sources, the popular reproduction has the Heruli hopping the short distance from Baden-Wurtemberg or perhaps Bavaria to the coast of the Black Sea, to there take ship, launching a general campaign of Mediterranean piracy before reconstituting themselves as an army in the field capable of looting Athens, Ephesus and Sparta before being intercepted several times marching home through the Balkans by various emperors. 

This kind of thing seems less than entirely geographically plausible to me, and, as Alvar Ellegard points out the alternative of "Heluri" is perfectly defensible. We have even less idea about who the Heluri might be than the Heruli (perhaps a Hellinist can comment on Heluri/Helot?), but at least the substituton allows us to stop drawing implausible arrows on the map and requiring that barbarian fleets manage to run the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles on multiple occasions. 

My crazy theory that Aurelian inadvertently revitalised the Roman Empire by building a wall on the customs circuit of Rome and collecting excise taxes due may be familiar to blog readers. I start here, but have since discovered Hendrik Dey giving the idea a much more sophisticated treatment. Look! My wild speculation inadvertently anticipated an actual expert!  Obviously I'm quite chuffed, and everyone should buy Dey's The Aurelian Wall and the Refashioning of Imperial Rome. But at the moment I am more interested in this:

It was little Joe the wrangler in the lead

He was riding old Blue Rocket with a slicker o'er his head

And he's trying to check the leaders in their speed.

The issue here is that we tend to take our Romans in the spirit that the Renaissance revival, or, better yet, Macaulay's Lays,  give them to us to them. "What better a way for a man to die. . . .," (Cringe!) In my youth, I vaguely remember reading a military history, or perhaps a potboiler scifi, in which the story was laid out. The Romans were all about infantry, and also civic virtues. You see, the two go together. Discipline is required by legionary warfare, and all that discipline stuff is also required to live a republican life. 

So what happened? How did there come to be barbarian cavalry, and feudalism, and the Dark Ages? Clearly, no internal military explanation is possible. No true Scotsman legion can be broken by a cavalry charge. The age of cavalry is explained by a millennium long aberration in the progress of Western civilisation from Roman discipline to  the Scientific Revolution. 

On the other hand, it is quite clear that actual Romans were not marble statues. They were people. I am not going to be the guy defending equestrian sports to the end, because of the company I'd have to keep, but the fact remains that if you're going to move cattle long distances to market, the moment is going to come when the extra guard has to ride before the herd. Wild, courageous horsemanship doesn't have to be in defence of landed privilege. It can be proletarian. 

Now, we know that you cannot invade Italy from southwestern Germany without crossing the Alps. The Roman history of the central Alpine passes is unclear, although the paelobotanical evidence is for the widespread clearance of the high alpine pastures only in the sub-Roman, so the human use of the central passes changed in some way with the collapse of the Roman state. (As Lameen will point out, so did the human relation with the trans-Saharan routes, and as the Vikings will suggest, so did the human relationshipo with the pelagic routes into the Atlantic. We're getting to a the point of seeing a pattern here.) 

Yet the central passes were known. The most likely way for a group of "Youngn Ones" to get from the Pianura Padana to Bavaria with "thousands" of Roman citizens captive is via the Saint Gotthard, and the fact that our chronology requires a late-winter crossing suggests that the encampment destroyed by Cereialis was only associated with the group attacked near Milan by Galerius. That is, that there were indistinguishable Alamanni/Juthunig and "Roman citizens" at both ends of the Saint Gotthard.

What's up with that? What is moving on these passes? What is up with the change in pasture regimes?

Now, we know that the mountain roads thread the eastern Alps that have been carrying armies east for millennia are developed from the infrastructure that had emerged by the early Iron Age to move Hallstatt salt to the Alfold. There is no getting around it. If you wish to imagine a fragment of a Central Asian nation camping out on the Hungarian plain being all horse archer-y, and that is the dominant model for understanding Attila and his Huns, then there must have been a heavy eastward traffic of salt down the roads and trails to the Danube plain and its flocks. 

Now a this point we can do two things. We can follow Joseph de Guignes' intuition of the early Eighteenth Century and make the Huns an essentially alien presence in Roman Europe. In the extreme argument, the Huns are the Hsiung-nu of Chinese history, erupting out of the Han borderlands into a defenceless Europe in an extraordinary Volkerwanderung. Well, I say extraordinary in a somewhat ironic sense, since it does occur that as exotic as we find the idea, Guignes' generation was aware of a precedent, the Kalmyk migration I could then turn the Kalmyk example around and suggest that while a move across the Kazakh steppe  from the Dzhungarian Gates to the lower Volga makes sense in terms of pasture resources, the further westward movement does not. But I sure would not want to hang even  a blog post on such an ass pull, and will leave it at the observation that more complex models of ethnogenesis are now in favour. 

Or we can blow it out, and talk about what we do know. We have a great deal of toing-and fro-ing. We have an established trade in salt. We have the Roman annona, bringing huge amounts of grain into Rome. We have the very strong suspicion that entitled Romans would have been more interested in eating cattle fattened on that grain than bread and porridge. 

We have, in short, very strongly motivated the idea of Roman cowboys. Or, rather, German cowboys. Or Roman cowboys. Look, if the drovers/shepherds who herded the cattle to Rome were Little Joes, they did not have a nation. Nations are for people who have stakes, not people who are desperate to prove themselves to the straw bosses. They would call themselves "the young ones," and their identities would be fluid. State failure would collapse ethnic identities, and remudas would turn into rampaging armies of barbarian cavalry. On the other hand, what might happen if a Roman emperor tried to ride before the herd? Would he turn into Attila?