limes
limesoriginated as a surveyor's term for the path that simultaneously marked the boundaries of plots of land and gave access between them. It came to be used in a military sense, first of the roads that penetrated into enemy territory (Tacitus Annales 1. 50; Frontinus Strategemata 1. 3. 10), and thence, as further conquest ceased, of the land boundaries that divided Roman territory from non-Roman (Scriptores Historiae Augustae Hadrian 12). At this stage a whole paraphernalia of border control grew up—frontier roads with intermittent watch-towers and forts and fortlets to house the provincial garrisons which moved up to the frontier line. The term limes comes to embrace the totality of the border area and its control system (but note the strictures of B. Isaac, Journal of Roman Studies 1988, 125–47 on this point). In Europe, where the frontiers faced onto habitable lands, and where they did not coincide with a river or...
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