Tweet12-11-2009 om 22:57 by Sueli Brodin

My earliest memory of history class at school is a graph of a cross section of a Roman road. I was seven years old and the new school year had just started at the French Lycée in Tokyo. Our lesson dealt with the romanisation process of Gaul after its conquest by the armies of the Roman general Julius Caesar.

Looking at a slideshow my teacher projected of Roman remains that have endured time and can still be seen across Europe today, I was impressed by the vast network of roads laid out by the Romans throughout their empire.

One image in particular, that of a cross section of a Roman road, was especially revealing to me because it made me understand the secret behind the solidity of its construction.



Underneath the large square flat stones covering the surface of the road, and invisible to the eye, was an ingenious layered structure of smaller stones, gravel, and sometimes sand.

Many years later, the graph of this cross section caused me to make many detours to see Roman roads and other Roman remains in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

When my husband and I first came to Maastricht in 1994, I was struck to find out that the city was a former Roman military post near the Roman road from Boulogne to Cologne and that a Roman bridge used to stand over the Meuse River.



It is not implausible that these historical elements, perhaps even unconsciously, contributed to my wish to stay and settle down in this region… as if the knowledge of living close to an ancient Roman road would somehow keep me connected at all times with a large part of the rest of Europe and the Mediterranean world.



In the past few years, the Maastricht Region seems to have developed a renewed interest for its Roman heritage: the new municipal offices in Maastricht are housed in an architectural complex called Mosae Forum; the shopping centre in the nearby city of Heerlen is named after the city’s ancient Roman denomination of Coriovallum, and the slogan of the renovated Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongres, the former Atuatuca Tungrorum, is “I came, I saw and I was blown away”, a wink at Julius Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici”.

When we drove to Tongres last week, we could clearly see that the modern road faithfully followed the Via Belgica, the name given nowadays to the ancient Roman road stretching from Boulogne to Cologne.

Even though I’m aware that Roman roads were originally built for military purposes, what fascinates me about them is that they also greatly contributed to the development of trade and the exchange of cultures between the various peoples of Europe. This process was facilitated by the fact that the Romans also brought a common currency and a common language to their newly conquered territories.



The curators of the Roman Baths museum in Heerlen must have had this in mind when they wrote the explanatory panel for their collection of Roman coins, and they also drew a clear parallel with the construction of the European Union: “A united Europe with one single currency makes trade simpler and cheaper. This was also the case at the time of the Romans.”

“How interesting,” I thought when I read it, “what a straightforward pro-European political statement.”



And what a remarkable coincidence that it was precisely in Maastricht that the Euro was born in February 1992. The Maastricht Treaty’s adoption of a common European currency certainly marked a decisive milestone in the European construction.

But we’re not there yet. The competition between national versus European interests and the definition of what it means to be a European citizen are still feeding heated debates in Europe today.

In this respect, an information panel that I read at the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongres about the tribe of the Eburones, who lived here at the time of the Roman conquest, provided some food for thought: “We may never know whether the peoples who inhabited this region had any sense of being “Eburone”, or even admitted to the name “Eburone”. In time, however, the Eburones did mint their own coins and in time started circulating shared myths about their origins. Common coinage and myths of origin possibly strengthened the feeling of being part of the group.”



Even if the European construction sometimes seems to be dragging on, an important and positive difference with the Roman Empire is that it is not being built by military force but by consensus and democratic means.

In the meantime, my reconnaissance of Roman remains will continue in the region: I read this morning that the successful reconstruction a Roman wooden bridge in the village of Tungelroy in North Limburg has been awarded a prestigious archaeological prize and that two short hiking trails have been laid out around the bridge. This to me sounds like a very tempting idea for an afternoon walk with the children.

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