TL;DR
A border is never simply a line splitting 'us' from 'them' — it always does two opposite things at once, separating people and connecting them.
Plenty of news lately about building walls, leaving unions and 're-bordering'. People who study borders have dug up a 1,900-year-old wall as a case study: Hadrian's Wall.
It never kept the Scots out
Treated as the edge of civilisation, the wall was neither the England–Scotland line nor the northernmost point of Roman Britain. The real northern frontier was another wall a hundred miles up, the Antonine Wall.
Hadrian's Wall came out of the emperor's tour of the provinces and its stonework began in 122 CE. Grand as the name sounds, archaeologists found the plans were changed mid-build and some gates were later sealed shut. Even Hadrian may not have known quite what it was for.
What lived underneath was ordinary life
Around the wall lay not a dead line but a broad militarised zone. Once it went up, how villages were laid out and fields were farmed changed on both sides.
The people either side of it guarded against each other and also traded, married and lived alongside each other. As the author puts it, that borderland squeeze of exclusion and accommodation has the same recipe at the US–Mexico border today.
Brexit and Scottish independence debates both drag the wall out as a prop, usually by mistake.
In one line
Rome defined the frontier and the frontier defined Rome: a border divides people and stirs them back together at the same time.
Why it matters
Read a border as a line and policy collapses into 'build it higher or tear it down'; read it as a strip where people actually live and the questions become what sustains them and how they depend on each other. Rome never finished that question, and neither have we.
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