ABSTRACT
The creation of the principate meant the beginning of a new era for Noricum too: under Augustus the country was included in the Roman Empire. After the princeps had ended the civil wars and firmly established his power, he launched his active, expansionist foreign policy, which in Europe led eventually to the setting up of a long river-frontier from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Danube. Under Julius Octavianus Caesar Augustus the route across the Julian Alps was opened up, and, after all the Alpine peoples had been conquered, the Norican provinces also joined. There is no more likelihood that a military treaty of alliance between Rome and the regnum existed in the first century BC than that there had been one before. The boundary between Noricum and Italy ran along the southern crest of the Alps, in the Dolomites on the watershed between the valleys of the Rienz and Piave and east of Carnic Alps.
