Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge

by Derek Williams

  The island is triangular. One side, some 500 miles long, faces Gaul. A second faces westward, toward Spain. In this direction lies Ireland, thought to be half Britain’s size. Between Ireland and Britain is the Isle of Man; and it is believed there are also a number of smaller islands where some writers have described a total winter darkness lasting thirty days. This western side, according to the natives, is 700 miles long. The third faces north. There is no land opposite this, though its eastern corner faces Germany. Its length is reckoned as 800 miles.

  By far the most civilized of the Britons live in Kent,16 where life resembles that of Gaul. Most interior tribes do not grow cereals but live on meat and milk and wear skins. All Britons dye themselves with woad, giving a blue colour and a savage appearance in battle. Hair is worn long; the entire body shaven except the moustache. Wives are held in common among groups of ten or twelve men, usually the males of the same family.17

  This island had also fascinated Claudius’ predecessor, Caligula. Suetonius described the farcical events of AD 40, when the legions mutinied rather than embark. In a bizarre ceremony on the beach near Boulogne, Caligula declared Britain annexed, as it were, in absentia. The campaign would be sold to the Roman public as a victory against Ocean.

  He deployed the army in line of battle facing the sea, with the artillery in readiness. Everyone was wondering what it all meant when suddenly Caligula shouted ‘Gather sea-shells!’ By this he meant ‘spoils of ocean’, as an offering at the Roman Capitol. So the soldiers had to fill their helmets and kilts with shells. Then he promised a bounty of four gold pieces per man. The triremes used in the Channel on this occasion were transported to Rome, largely overland; and he wrote ahead, ordering a Triumph more spectacular than any yet seen.18

  There can be no doubt that seasoned soldiers quailed at the sight of open sea. It was not that the Channel is rougher than the Mediterranean or Black Seas. The fear arose from a world picture consisting of three continents moated by a dark and savage deep, within which were sea monsters and beyond which was nothing. There were also superstitions regarding Britain herself: for example, the eerie story that she was the abode of the dead and that souls were rowed across in unmanned boats, which left the coast of Gaul at nightfall and returned before dawn. Thanet,19 the name of Kent’s north-eastern extremity, may originate in this legend.

  It is therefore not surprising that the Claudian version of the same project should have started in much the same way. Again there was near mutiny when the soldiers realized they were to go ‘beyond the known world’.20 On this occasion there was present one Narcissus, an imperial civil servant and former slave of the punctilious type Claudius liked to employ as his secretaries. This man, who we may suspect was empowered to offer an inducement, now mounted the general’s rostrum and attempted to calm the lads. Some wag then shouted ‘Io Saturnalia!’ (hurrah for the feast of Saturn) a greeting roughly equivalent to ‘merry Christmas’. For just as it is some armies’ custom that on Christmas Day the officers wait on the men, so for the holiday period beginning on 17 December, Roman masters and slaves traditionally swapped roles. The shout was thus a sarcastic reference to the indignity that an ex-slave should address the army in the emperor’s place. Taken up by others the whole parade was soon convulsed with laughter, easing the tension to such an extent that the soldiers forgot their fear and obeyed the order to embark.

  For the campaign which followed, our principal source is Cassius Dio, writing 130 years later. By contrast Suetonius is brief and dismissive: ‘Claudius’ only campaign was of little importance. The Senate had already voted him an honorary Triumph but this he refused, lighting on Britain as the place to seek the real thing. Her conquest was a project which had lain dormant since Caesar’s day.’21

  Four legions were mustered, one from the Danube and three from the Rhine, which had fallen unexpectedly quiet since the Varian Disaster. Aulus Plautius, ‘a distinguished senator’22 was appointed to command, with the youthful Vespasian leading the legion II Augusta. In essence the thrust would follow that of Caesar. Dio specifies embarkation in three groups, at least one of which sailed westwards from Boulogne,23 raising the possibility that a diversionary force beached in Chichester Harbour. Nevertheless, it remains likely that the main force landed unopposed at Richborough, Kent. Plautius then advanced to a river, too wide to be bridged, presumably the lower Medway. Here the crossing was strongly contested. In an action, probably near the future Rochester, Vespasian sprang to prominence, both because of his spirited attack and as the first senior officer across. The Britons fell back on the Thames and Plautius advanced to a position facing one of the fords: at Southwark, Westminster, or Battersea. Here, in temporary camps somewhere under today’s South London, the army settled to a long wait while a prearranged plan was set in motion. Claudius sailed from the Tiber to Marseilles, then probably up the Rhone and overland to the Channel, arriving in Britain with a large entourage of VIPs, guardsmen and elephants. All this involved a delay of six to eight weeks. The weather had been bad and on three occasions the imperial flotilla was almost shipwrecked.

  At last Claudius joined the legions waiting by the Thames. Assuming command, he crossed the river, ‘defeated the barbarians’ and took the capital of the late king, Cynobellinus (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline) at Colchester. However, the real leader, Prince Caratacus, a stout fighter and clever tactician, fled to south Wales, where he would live to lead again. It seems unlikely that Claudius met much resistance. Suetonius states bluntly that ‘he fought no battles and took no casualties’.24 Nothing is heard of the elephants. Doubtless their main contribution was in Claudius’ victory parade where their effect would be stunning, lumbering through the streets of a Colchester only days removed from prehistory.

  Elsewhere elephants had proved a dubious asset. Their trial against the Celtiberians at Numantia25 had been a débâcle, when the drivers lost control and the trumpeting animals ran amok. It is strange that while we spend hours in zoos or make expensive trips to Africa to look at elephants, the ancients tended to regard them with revulsion. In warfare there was a real risk that they would frighten the enemy less than the side which was using them. Thus Ammian: ‘With them came a striking sight: ponderous lines of soldier-laden elephants, bodies repulsively wrinkled; the most hideous of all forms of horror, as I have always maintained.’26

  Having cracked champagne against the hull of the new province, the emperor returned the command to Plautius with instructions ‘to subjugate the remaining districts’, and retired to Rome. In all he had spent sixteen days in Britain. So much for the victory. What of the territory? What to take and what reject, where to terminate the conquest and how to round it off? These were quite other matters and Claudius may have been content to leave them to his generals.

  We do not know at what point Vespasian’s legion was detached from the main force and sent on the separate mission which would win him fame as perhaps the greatest gunnery officer the ancient world produced.27 Suetonius mentions that officers decorated in Britain marched in the Triumph, suggesting Vespasian returned to Rome for this purpose and the conquest was not resumed till the following spring. Then, as the ponderous Plautius moved north, Vespasian swung west. For his part in the war one must be content with a single sentence in Suetonius, though a good one: ‘He went to Britain, where he fought thirty battles, subjugated two tribes and took more than twenty oppida, the Isle of Wight besides.’28 In fact Vespasian overran the south and south-west of England at least as far as Exeter, ending perhaps with a sweep to the lower Severn. His offensive resembles that of 1944 when Patton, pivoting on the slower-moving Montgomery, sped across France. Vespasian does not lose from the comparison, for here was a commander who seized three quarters of the ground with a quarter of the army. What is more, he faced, in Wessex,29 one of the most formidable concentrations of forts in the ancient world. His answer to these citadels of soil was artillery.

  Roman guns were based on the idea of twisting a rope until tension was cre
ated, then releasing it; which is why they are sometimes known as ‘torsion artillery’. Hemp, horse, even women’s hair was used, but animal sinew had the greatest elasticity, though there was a problem in keeping it dry.30 Guns were of two basic models. The scorpio (whose firing arm resembled the upreared tail of the scorpion) was based on a grounded chassis of heavy timber, across which was strung a thick skein of sinew into which the slinging arm was rooted. This was pulled back and the ropes wound by handles until the required tension was created. When released and the arm had reached the near-vertical, its rush was stopped by a padded beam, creating a jerk which projected the missile. The scorpio was later known by other names, illustrating the inventiveness of army slang: ‘The machine is called tormentum (the rack) as the tension is created by twisting; and scorpio because of the raised sting. More recently it has been called onager (jackass) since, when wild donkeys flee from pursuers they kick stones backwards, so cracking skulls or shattering ribcages.’31 A crew of five is given for this machine (four winders and a loader-firer), a missile weighing fifty pounds and a range of 450 yards,32 though 700 yards is also recorded. Unlike modern pieces, designed so that parts will interchange and with calibre matched precisely to ammunition, the scorpio could be made to almost any specification; so it is not surprising that various missile sizes, ranges, mounting and haulage arrangements are claimed.

  The ballista had a different appearance. It was in effect a large, stand-mounted crossbow, except that the bow consisted of two halves, each embedded in a sinew coil. This was a highly effective weapon at a hundred yards. Again, larger versions were available. A 4th-century source tells of a ballista able to shoot across the Danube.33

  Both scorpiones and ballistae could be adapted to stone shot or iron bolt. Ammian describes fire-darts, with reeds bound around a hollow, wooden centre into which glowing embers were placed.34 All had devices for sighting, tilting and traversing, so that a target could be pounded once its range had been found. Accuracy called for standard missiles, though random rocks were best for anti-personnel bombardment, since the sound of a jagged object in flight is more terrifying. Various grades of ammunition must therefore have been carried on campaign. Added to this was the weight of the guns themselves. A full-scale scorpio model has been found to weigh over two tons.

  It cannot be argued that artillery was a decisive arm in warfare generally. It was cumbersome, weather dependent, of little value in rough country and useless in forest. None the less it was highly effective in sieges. Stone walls could be shaken loose. Defenders could be driven from palisades, opening the way for infantry attack. Though ineffectual against the mighty hillforts, stones and firedarts could be lobbed across their outer mounds and ditches to fall among the thatched huts within. From wooden towers erected outside the defensive ring, observers could guide the shotfall onto selected targets; subjecting the defenders to an ordeal of whirring missiles crashing among them from guns they could not see.

  Vespasian was quick to grasp artillery’s strengths and Wessex’s weaknesses and to see that these were complementary. Mighty earthworks were being used to protect flimsy, fire-prone villages, without internal shelters or warproofing of any kind. Furthermore the forts had become overblown. As with nuclear stockpiling, the rivalries which promoted their proliferation had become obsessional and scale had outrun ability to defend.

  It is difficult to guess the number of artillery pieces allocated to Vespasian. Vegetius, a late-period writer, describes fifty-five ballistae and ten onagri per legion, drawn by mules or oxen and having crews of seven. As well as ammunition, Vespasian would be moving with equipment of other kinds: prefabricated towers and battering rams, as well as boats and planks for river crossing. Naval squadrons must have been operating in support up rivers like the Test, Wiltshire Avon and Frome, as well as in the assault on the Isle of Wight. With logistics like these we cannot assume lightning war. Indeed Vespasian’s temperament inclined him to the more deliberate school of generalship which, though for a time eclipsed by the showier styles of Caesar and Pompey, was in fact the Roman norm. Nevertheless the siege operations, once begun, were probably concluded with a speed which paralysed the enemy. The sudden surrender of ‘impregnable’ positions can have grave consequences for morale and when they crashed so quickly in the face of this unprecedented weapon it must have seemed, to tribes which awaited their turn, like the knock of doom. The remains of several Roman artillery pieces have been found and reconstructed versions may be seen at the Saalburg Museum, ten miles north-west of Frankfurt, and a half-scale scorpio at the Lunt Fort, Baginton, near Coventry, England.

  Before pursuing Vespasian’s campaign, some account should be given of late Iron Age Britain as distinct from ‘Celtica’ generally. Terms like the latter are seldom used lest they imply unity in the Celtic camp. Of this there was little. Nor was there ever a Celtic empire. Separatism is, it seems, the enduring characteristic of a cultural group at loggerheads from that day to this; from whose differences the English would so frequently profit. In Britain’s case, the accepted picture of envelopment in a wider Celtic world must be qualified by a stark (and, to many, an unpalatable) fact. Except in the extreme south-east (and an enclave to the north of the Humber) archaeology has failed to reveal changes of sufficient magnitude to demonstrate migration into the British Isles.35 This puts a rock into the river of prehistoric studies around which emotional currents are certain to swirl; for it implies that most of Britain was not peopled by incomers at all, but by a miscellany of native tribes surviving from the Bronze Age. Hence it would follow that British Celticism is a fraud; indeed that a pan-Celtic ancestry, knitting Europe’s Atlantic fringes into a cultural whole, is a modern idea, invented as a counterweight to the dominance of the English language and Anglo-Saxon institutions. It is of course true that no classical author used the word ‘Celt’ in a British context. Nor does ‘Celtic’ become familiar in this sense till the 18th century. However, a solitary word is not the sole issue. Opponents of a Celtic Britain must answer major questions posed by languages like Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Manx, related both to each other and to what we know of ancient Celtic. For instance, in his monumental The Celtic Place-names of Scotland (Edinburgh and London, 1926) W. J. Watson offers some 50,000 examples from that quarter alone. More broadly there is a common background of names for places and natural features, of which everyone will be aware: from Boulogne to Bologna, Trent to Trento, Severn to Seine, Ouse to Oise, Shannon to Saône, Mersey to Meuse, Don to Danube, Arun to Arno and Irun. From the Pennines of Northumbria to the Appennines of north Umbria, Western Europe is bound by eloquent strains of remembrance. Of what do they tell? Of Celtic invasions or merely of Celtic influences? Might this onomastic luggage have travelled without the passengers? It is a likelihood many will question. On the other hand, indigenous building methods, pottery and, to some extent, artistic styles, are among the evidence which continues to deny invasion. The controversy is complex and unresolved. It may nevertheless be accepted that the description ‘Celtic’ – albeit with modified meaning – retains at least partial validity and will continue to be employed by students of ancient Britain, if only because no untarnished alternative presents itself. Pro-Celtic propaganda (if such it is) has handed a resplendent past to northwestern Europe’s peripheral peoples. They will be reluctant to hand it back.

  What is the difference between the terms Celtic and Gallic? Names like Gaul, Galle,36 Galatia, Galicia, Gaelic, Galway, Galloway, Donegal, Portugal and so on, remind us how the Celtic peoples, then as now, described themselves. As we have said, the two words are largely interchangeable,37 except that in Latin, Gaul became associated with what is now France and posterity tends to honour the distinction. All were, however, one loose grouping which by late prehistory had colonized, absorbed or suffused western Europe from the Atlantic to Germany and from the north of Scotland to northern Italy, with an offshoot through the Alps into the Balkans and even an outlying pocket in Asia Minor.38 Nevertheless, varying degr
ees of Celtic and pre-Celtic mixture, as well as centuries in various terrains and climates, created a wide range of development.

  How did Celtic attainment compare with Roman? The traditional criterion of literacy as the difference between historic and prehistoric societies applies in this case. Though the arrival of Mediterranean influences had recently begun to provoke writing, using Greek and Roman alphabets, an illiterate majority may still be assumed and nothing resembling a Celtic literature had yet appeared. More recently the test of comparative technology has found favour; and in this sense achievement was close to Roman. Even so, common sense requires other insights; for Rome, after all, prevailed. At least one prehistorian suggests the real differences lay in social structure, civil order and organization: ‘between stability and the complex conduct of affairs of state, on the one hand, and the impermanence and emotion-charged atmosphere of the clan or tribe on the other’.39 This seems closer to the truth, owing partly to developmental level but also to the ‘Celtic temperament’. In references to the lost account of Posidonius, in other classical authors, in the surviving Irish epics, even in echoes from the 18th-century Scottish Highlands, one has an impression of touchy pride, feud, argumentativeness and bombast, plus a life dominated by hunting, feasting and war. The sobriquet of the Irish hero, Conn of the Hundred Battles,40 suggests this mood. Many such battles were doubtless mere cattle rustling. Others were over land and water claims, booty, revenge, or to repay some slight. Strabo went so far as to assert that ‘the whole Celtic world is war-mad’. This emphasis on warriorship would have tragic consequences in the prolonged clash with Rome, when honour would oblige the Gallic people to stand and fight where harrying tactics, on German lines, would often have served better. Celtic thinking on matters like peace and war, law and order, taxation and absorption into an alien regime was incompatible with Roman. Most of all, an aristocracy based on privilege and military prowess felt compelled to answer a challenge to either. These entrenched differences meant that incorporation into the empire would be painfully accomplished.