Why would Rome want to conquer Germany?

Hecatee

Donor
Germany was considered to have rich lands for farming, providing huge amouts of grain able to feed the Rhine armies without importations. Also it was rather rich in minerals, especially lead that was used in various products at Rome : german lead ingots have been found in mediterannean shipwrecks. Also it did have a lot of wood which allowed for large scale pottery production.
All theses riches meant that the area had to be protected even from small scale raids and better access had to be provided to the natural ressources. Thus the invasion. The other factors (prestige etc.) were also probably important in the mind of some but I doubt it would have been the decisive factor for Augustus, who already had a lot of personnal prestige.
 
To quote George Mallory: Because its there.


Though that worked more for some areas than for others.

Thje only Roman rulers who put a big effort into conquering Barbarian lands were Julius Caesar (Gaul) and Augustus (the Danube valley). Before and after, they did relatively little of it. The Republic got a foothold in Spain about 200BC, but the job was still only half-finished when Augustus came along. Similarly, the Alps were left unconquered for many generations after the Itaklian and Gallic land on both sides was firmly Roman. They concentrated on the bits - Africa, Gerece, Asia Minor - which had something worth stealing.

After Augustus, the old pattern recurred. Claudius took Britain, Domitian a corner of SW Germany, Trajan Dacia, and a coastal strip of North Africa was acquired; but that was about it, and even some of those were abandoned later.Also, attempts to conquer barbarian land were always apt to get called off, notably Agricola's in Caledonia and Marcus Aurelius' north of the Danube, even when they were going reasonably well. There was no Teutoburg in either of those theatres, but they were abandoned anyway, as was the Antonine Wall.

I think the problem with Germany was that it was almost advanced enough to be worth conquering, but not quite. In purely economic terms, the place to stop was about halfway to the Elbe (as in Britain it was about halfway up the island) but in Germany there was no convenient place to put a Hadrian's Wall. So it was either stop at the Rhine or press on into a lot of land that wasn't worth having. In the event, Arminius helped them to make their minds up quicker, but they might have reached the same decision anyway.
 
The list of barbarian lands the Romans conquered is actually pretty lengthy. The moti9vation in almost all cases was internal, though, so it would also have to be in this case. There could be all manner of good things top be had, but that alone won't trigger the invasion. Rome could live well with neighbours that had things it wanted. they could trade. But a situation in which internal dynamics makes the conquest desireable will do it. the problem is, after Augustus, conquest really isn't worthwhile any more. You note that aggressive expansion afterwards is rare, not because it couldn't be done - for Germany, Mesopotamia and Arabia I'll give you Britain, Arabia, Mauretania, the Dodecaschoenos and Dacia as examples where it worked - but because it had great risks and few rewards. Felix didn't get suicided because he lost, he had to die because he almost won. The new reality simply hadn't caught up with his mindset yet. So a prolonged Late Republican crisis might do it, provided we can prevent the second round of civil wars from destroying the whole state. After all, Augustus stopped trying after a single deefeat because he could afford to. If he or Tiberius had been facing adversaries in a competitive senatorial aristocracy, they would probably have tried again, and quite plausibly succeeded. Or someone else with embition would have.

The problem, I think, is that we are also looking at Roman intention with hindsight. If there was ever a moment when Rome stopped considering Germany a viable target of conquest, that would be under Hadrian, not Augustus. There wasn't really a concept of 'here Roman, there barbarian wilderness' at that time. The Empire for a long time after the great waves of conquest in the first century BC remained conceptually a mosaic of states and statelets, territories and colonies. To a Roman in the reign of Tiberius or Caligula, the territory of the Batavi, Treveri or Ubii wsa not conceptually very different from that of the Frisones or Chatti. Vassalised barbarians, subject to Rome, all of them. Some answered directly to the authority of a promagistrate, others didn't, but the idea that a province was a designated territory and had a clear 'outside' needed a few more decades to really take root.

I'm pretty sure that if we stay close to OITL, the one thing that would have motivated Rome to conquer Germany was an easier time of it. It was just given up as not worth the trouble. If Rome had stuck to its old political dynamic longer, Germany would sooner or later have been invaded, too, because it was there and someone needed a triumph. Biut in that case there's also a good chance - better than even chance IMO - that Rome would have destroyed itself before that happened.
 
It's also "rather unfair" to view Carthage as an unmitigated source of evil with whom one could never co-exist and whom one must therefore destroy, and yet that's how the Romans saw them. I assumed that in a thread specifically asking why the Romans would want to do something, we would be best served from examining the question from the Roman point of view. They did not consider the Gauls, much less the Germans, to be "civilized". They viewed them both as barbarians, as a threat to national security, and as peoples who would be better off enslaved or Romanized.

Barbarian did not necessarily mean primitive. It was a term used by the Romans and Greeks for all foreign cultures that did not share the same values, or who were not living under their government. The Romans even refered to the Greeks as barbarians at one stage.
 
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