Straubing Roman Fort
About
Roman engineers took a Celtic river-crossing name and built a garrison fort on it in the second half of the 1st century AD, anchoring the Raetian Danube frontier at Straubing. The base ran for roughly 300 years, only getting proper stone walls under Antoninus Pius decades after Trajan's death. Soldiers, traders, and craftsmen built up a lively vicus around the ramparts, and archaeologists still turn up Roman coins and pottery across the modern town center. Straubing's museum today displays a hoard of Roman parade masks found nearby, among the finest ever recovered from the empire.
What happened here
Five hundred men, sometimes a thousand, recruited from a province rather than from citizens, and often stationed a long way from where they were raised. Cavalry units get a bigger fort and far more stabling; the smell tells you which kind you are in before the plan does. The layout copies a legionary fortress at a quarter of the size — headquarters, commander's house, granaries, barracks, a bath house usually built outside the walls because of the fire risk. Duties are patrolling, escorting, customs, and policing rather than pitched battle. After twenty-five years a man is discharged with citizenship for himself and his children, recorded on a bronze diploma he keeps for life. A village grows outside the gate within a decade.
Sources
Nearby
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