Timothy Bruce Mitford. 2018. East of Asia Minor: Rome's hidden frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-814874-6 (volume 1), 978-0-19-872516-9 (volume 2) £225.

Until the mid twentieth century, the study of Roman frontiers beyond continental Europe and Britain was largely the prerogative of military and colonial representatives. InAlgeria,Colonel Baradez (Fossatum Africae), R.G. Goodchild in Libya, and most spectacularly, Père Poidebard (La trace de Rome), the Jesuit father who mapped, with the assistance of the biplanes of the French-Syrian mandate, a palimpsest of Roman to Umayyad sites across the Syrian pre-desert. Poidebard’s map stops abruptly at the Turkish border and it has long been a desideratum of Roman frontier studies to map and study the traces of the Roman frontier on the Upper Euphrates. Timothy Bruce Mitford began his doctoral research on the Euphrates frontier initially under the supervision of Sir Ian Richmond in 1963. His fieldwork commenced at an opportune time since there were already plans to create a series of dams in the river’s vertiginous gorges. Indeed, less than a decade later, the first of these at Keban flooded the only excavated fort on the entire line at Pağnik Öreni, which was never fully published. Numerous articles by Mitford have followed over the years, mostly concerning epigraphy and history, but the full exposition of his researches has had to wait. For much of his career he was a serving naval officer, but with great tenacity he continued an involvement in frontier research, often with a permit and representative from the Turkish ministry of culture. The Cappadocian frontier was no ordinary Roman border. As with Syria, the Mediterranean superpower confronted Iran to the east, initially facing the Parthians and then, from the early third century AD, the Sasanians. In between was a patchwork of buffer states and client kingdoms, including Commagene with its great monument on Nemrut Dağ, and, most significantly, Armenia. Up to the mid first century, Roman control conforms to Luttwack’s model of a ‘hegemonic empire’ to be succeeded by the direct territorial presence of legions and other garrisons at Samosata (Commagene) and farther north at Melitene (Eski Malatya) and Satala (Sadak) and later Trapezous (Trabzon). Roads linked the major garrisons, but the river often did not offer a suitable route as it forced a passage through steep gorges across the high ranges of the Taurus and Armenian Taurus. North from Erzincan, the frontier road struck off towards the Pontic Alps and the Black Sea. Few Roman frontiers presented such challenges of topography and extremes of climate. Yet the political significance of its neighbours ensured that we have extensive written accounts of Roman campaigns including the rare insight of the expedition of a provincial army under its governor Fl. Arrianus.