Perhaps the last name is familiar to you: Balbo. The name of an important Cadiz family in the times of Caesar and Augustus. Well, one of the members of this house, Lucius Cornelius Balbus the Lesser, led the first Roman expedition that dared to challenge the dangers of the Sahara Desert in the west of the African continent. An epic march through a hostile climate narrated by Pliny the Elder in Natural History.
Appointed proconsul of Africa in the year 19 BC. C., our Balbus took command of the III Augusta Legion, a military force that operated in northern West Africa since 27 BC. C. and which had, in its best times, twenty-five thousand troops. That army would remain permanently deployed in the region for four hundred years, and had its first base of operations in Ammaedara, today Haïdra, in Tunisia. In Balbo's time, it is likely that the majority of the III's recruits were of Gaulish origin, following that august custom of soldiers serving far from their places of origin.
Those men were Balbo's tool against a fearsome threat, the Garamantes. A people settled in Libya, in the region of Fezzan, which Lucian of Samosata defined as an “agile, lightly dressed tribe, tent-dwellers, who subsist primarily on hunting.”
Today, thanks to the work of archaeologists, we know that this description of the Garamantes was born from prejudice towards an enemy that put the borders of Rome in check, since, in reality, this was a sedentary people, who lived in stable settlements and who arrived to have a relatively powerful agricultural economy, supported by a complex irrigation system. They even had a capital, Garama, a developed city where ten thousand residents lived together.
The Garamantes became a problem when, at the end of the 1st century BC. C., Roman merchants wanted to skip their commercial intermediation fees with other towns located further south, which ended up degenerating into a series of assaults and robberies carried out by the Garamantes that Rome could not allow.
To combat this mess, Balbo and a troop of about ten thousand troops advanced from the north of the province of Africa, what today would be Tunisia, crossing present-day Libya until they reached Garama. A trip of almost 650 kilometers through the desert that says a lot about the organizational capabilities of Balbo, who probably spent several months preparing an expedition in which maintaining supply lines was as vital as information about the unknown terrain that had to go.
In just one year, Balbo applied a fierce corrective to the Garamantes, entered their capital and secured a victory. The first awarded to someone not born on the Italian peninsula. Furthermore, thanks to his victory, she achieved, in the words of Pliny the Elder, the “right of the quirites”, Roman citizenship, which was also extended to his uncle, Balbus the Elder. A plaque preserved in the Capitoline Museums in Rome confirms Pliny's story, as it includes the name of Balbus among a long list of generals who earned a triumph.
As for his African expedition, he managed, at the very least, to secure a route to the Garamantes that until then had been very dangerous, as it was controlled by groups of robbers dedicated to theft and blocking up water wells, so necessary for traders. But Balbo's departure also generated some confusion about the extent of his army's route, leading to speculation that the proconsul sent a group of soldiers beyond the Ahaggar Mountains in Algeria.
Diving into the writings of Pliny the Elder, we find a detailed list of the regions over which Balbus would have carried the standards of Rome. And we read that it reached “Mount Niger”, which does not imply that it reached the river of the same name, and other territories that have an equally legendary halo, such as the region of Dedtris, “watered by a fountain of waters that boil from midday.” until midnight and that they are frozen for the same number of hours until noon.”
Furthermore, Pliny mentions the names of mysterious nations subjected by Balbo, such as Niteris, Bubeyo or Vicera, as well as rivers difficult to identify, such as the Dasibari, or mountains such as the Giris, from which “some gems came” that Balbo collected in his journey.
This account by Pliny the Elder, so exhaustive in mentioning the names of places unknown to the Romans, caused it to be considered that the scope of Balbo's trip had been much greater, leading him to even penetrate sub-Saharan regions that, most likely, , neither he nor any of the legionaries under his command ever touched it.
But this does not diminish the importance of the first great Roman journey into the interiors of the African continent. What happened in 19 a. C. was the first and essential chapter of other marches, such as those of Blaesus and Cornelius Dolabella, who continued to fight the Garamantes thanks to the path opened by Balbo. With their annoying policy towards Rome, that town became a magnet for the legions for a century, driving them further and further south.
This text is part of an article published in number 672 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
