Round houses, based on wooden uprights, leaning inwards, were the prehistoric norm, since this is the easiest way to make a shelter. The roof structure of an oblong or square building is more difficult, though once mastered there are advantages when it comes to division into rooms or fitting into rows to make streets. Rectangular buildings had long been standard in the Mediterranean. The Celts were now in transition between the two styles, though in Britain circular huts were dominant still: thatched and either all-timber or timber on low, dry-stone walls.
Another symptom of British conservatism was the use of war chariots, already obsolete on the Continent and long abandoned by the Romans (though still used for ceremony and racing). The idea of driving them through city streets, or of chariot-mounted generals leading the legions, is cinematic licence. The British chariots fascinated Caesar and he gave a detailed description of their tactics and the drivers’ acrobatics.63 Obviously they were worthless against forts and other substantial defences. Furthermore, they represented a fighting method based on individual prowess and difficult to subordinate to a battle plan. Their real value had been as a shock weapon, but by now they had become something of an heroic cliché; except in south-eastern Britain, where echoes of the Celtic dream-world still resounded and chariots were an aspect of its bravura.
Strabo, geographer of the Augustan period, draws together several impressions in the following passage:
In Rome I have myself seen British youths, six inches taller than the city’s tallest, though bowlegged and of a displeasing appearance generally. In habits they are not unlike Gauls, but simpler and more barbaric. In warfare they use chariots. Their cities are the forest, for they enclose large areas of it by felling trees, building huts and keeping cattle within. The climate is rainy rather than snowy. Sometimes, on days otherwise fine, the fog hangs about so long that the sun comes through only for three or four hours around noon. The deified Caesar visited the island twice but did not stay long and accomplished little.64
Such was southern Britain in the last years of her prehistory: defiant in isolation; in some ways advanced yet stranded psychologically in the heroic age; an apple ripe apparently for biting, though one which would prove unexpectedly sour.
Let us return to the young Colonel Vespasian, now in the heart of Thomas Hardy country, where resistance was most resolute, tradition longest and forts strongest. There is, of course, a limit to what we may make of one sentence in Suetonius. But archaeology assists with the exciting concordance between ancient pen and modern spade which emerged from Mortimer Wheeler’s 1930s excavation at Maiden Castle. Twenty-eight war graves were discovered near the east gate, containing skeletons with severe wounds of sword-thrust type, one with the head of a Roman ballista bolt lodged in the spine. The gateways had been slighted, the site evacuated and the inhabitants moved, perhaps to become the first residents of nearby Dorchester. Further, in the 1950s, Ian Richmond’s excavation inside the fort of Hod Hill (near Blandford Forum) found fifteen bolts in a cluster round the largest house. The rampart’s height, plus the hilltop situation, mean that fire must have been directed from a tall observation tower outside. After surrender the circumvallation was partially lowered and a Roman fort built into the north-west corner. A third hillfort thought to have received the artilleryman’s attention is Cadbury Castle, Somerset.
Two of Vespasian’s methods are now clear. The first was to drive the defenders away from an entrance with artillery fire, climaxing in an infantry rush. The timber gates would then yield to burning. Alternatively bombardment could be conclusive on its own, especially if observation of shot-fall were feasible and where defended areas were small enough to be within the field of fire, as in the case of Hod Hill. The oppidum would soon become a place of panic, with people and animals rushing about; and wherever they ran the guns could be directed to follow. So, of the ‘more than twenty oppida’ said to have fallen to Vespasian, we have evidence for two and the likelihood of three; a fair score when one considers the odds against finding a few pieces of roundshot or boltheads buried in those vast and numerous earthworks. It is also likely that Vespasian directed a sizeable resettlement operation: demolishing the stockades, with which the forts were crowned, reducing the ramparts and allocating lowland sites. It has been estimated that some 30,000 hilltop dwellers were in due course displaced in Hereford and Shropshire alone.65
It is probable that Vespasian found, in Exeter, a suitable site for a legionary base and cornerpost for his flank of the advance; as had Plautius, in Lincoln, for its eastern end. Joining them was the Fosse Way, later name for a prehistoric track following a discontinuous limestone ridge for over 200 miles from Devon to Lincolnshire. This would be the approximate halt-line of the Claudian invasion. It is not clear whether the location was preselected or the offensive ran out of steam; whether Claudius thought he could hold southern Britain and ignore the rest; or whether he had no diagnostic insight and simply left his field commanders to amputate as best they could.
Here we leave the army of Britain, about to deploy along its overstretched and not overstrong frontier, while Vespasian returned to Rome, a hero’s welcome and the governorship of Africa. Claudius died in AD 54, reputedly poisoned by his wife. No matter, Vespasian continued to enjoy favour under Nero; that is until the calamitous lyre recital, when a career of promise was shattered in the winking of an eye. Suetonius develops the story:
In Greece, as a member of the imperial entourage, he committed the most appalling faux pas, falling asleep during one of Nero’s recitals. The upshot was total disfavour and dismissal from court. He then fled to some obscure country town, where he went into hiding for fear of his life. But in the end he was offered a province and an army command.66
The province was Judaea. The command to crush the Jewish rebellion of AD 67. ‘In the end’ meant at the age of fifty-eight, twenty-three years after he had last seen service in Britain. Why this sudden recall; this amnesty, so seldom offered by the spiteful Nero; this reinstatement of which Ovid had vainly dreamed? It was because the Jews had gone on the rampage, murdered their procurator and destroyed a legion. Now, bold behind strong city walls, they defied Nero and all his works. Artillery was needed; a general who understood guns and knew how to use them against great fortresses. Then someone thought of that fellow, long rusticated, who bred mules; the one who had done so well against the Britons.
In Judaea, Vespasian’s first task was to reduce the Galilean stronghold of Jotapata.67 Here the Romans faced skilful and desperate defenders, led by the historian Josephus, one of the few eyewitnesses of the Roman army in action, whose descriptions throw light on the effects of artillery as a terror weapon:
Placing his 160 pieces in a ring facing the wall’s defenders, Vespasian commanded the bombardment to begin. A salvo followed, the scorpions shooting bolts, the ballistae hurling stones weighing over 100 lbs, plus flaming torches and a hail of arrows. All this not only cleared our men off the wall but also from a broad zone where the missiles were landing within; for the Arab archers, the javelin throwers, the slingers and the guns were all firing in unison.68 Such was the artillery’s power that a single bolt transfixed a row of men. The stones removed battlements, even dislodging the corners of towers. The formation does not exist that can stand against rocks like this which carve through rank after rank. A man beside me on the wall was decapitated, his head rolling three furlongs. Most frightening of all was the rushing sound as the missiles flew through the air and the sickening thump of impact. Added to this was the thud of bodies as they fell from the wall. Soon the sentry-walk could be reached simply by scrambling up the corpses. Inside was the wailing of women, outside the groans of the dying.69
The master had not lost his touch. Of the siege of Jerusalem, at which Vespasian’s elder son Titus later commanded, Josephus described how lookouts, seeing the ballista-shot on its way, shouted warnings in time for the defenders to take cover. In response, the gunners blackened the stones, making their flight almost invisible. Remi
niscent of Hod Hill, though using larger ordnance, catapult balls up to eighteen inches across have been found beneath the convent of the Sisters of Zion and at other Jerusalem locations.
The siege of Jotapata ended with the city’s fall and Josephus’ capture. Hearing his prisoner had the gift of prophecy, Vespasian requested that his own fortune be told. Anticipating Macbeth’s witches, the Jew assured the Roman that he would be emperor thereafter. The superstitious Vespasian was greatly impressed. Josephus was held under gentle duress and persuaded to act as interpreter and mediator, in which role he witnessed the six-month agony of Jerusalem from the Roman side. He would later become Vespasian’s friend, living as a pensioner in Rome and writing his history of the war.
Now Vespasian’s fortunes were about to take another extraordinary turn. The year after Jotapata, events in Rome caused the rebellion to be shelved, forgotten almost, and the rebels at least temporarily reprieved. Nero had been toppled. The Delphic oracle is said to have told Nero to beware the age of seventy-three. Only thirty-one, the emperor congratulated himself on having forty-two years to live. But already Galba, governor of Spain, aged seventy-three, was marching on Rome.70 Deserted by the Praetorians, disowned by the army, reviled by the Senate: time was running out for the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Hiding in a servant’s house on the city’s edge, Nero stabbed himself in the throat and expired, crying, ‘Jupiter, what an artist dies in me!’ This was June, AD 68. The following year, known as the Year of the Four Emperors, was one of Rome’s worst. ‘The vacancy of the throne’, as Gibbon commented darkly, ‘is a moment big with danger and mischief.’71
So it was that Vespasian, a highly successful and popular general, whose rocklike character had immense appeal after the caprices of Nero and Caligula, happened, at that perilous moment, to be far from the dangers of Rome and close to the protection of armies. The prefect of Egypt broke the ice by declaring in Vespasian’s favour. Emerging one morning from his tent, soldiers began to greet him as emperor, soon followed by the entire Judaean expeditionary force. Finally Syria, jewel of the eastern provinces, came out on his side. Now he could wait while the western claimants killed each other. When the time was right he would intervene as restitutor orbis, putter-to-rights of a Roman world gone wrong.
Toga muddied by Caligula, pelted with turnips in Africa, caught napping by Nero, hiding in hick towns, breeding mules: such was the improbable path to power of T. Flavius Vespasianus who, in the ten years remaining him, would do more than any emperor until that time to caulk Rome’s leaky frontiers and bring Rome’s insulation from the outside world a step closer to completion.
Four characters now enter the picture. First Vespasian’s sons, Titus and Domitian. Mindful of the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian insisted that the Senate accept them as his heirs. The elder, Titus, who completed his father’s work in Judaea, succeeded him in AD 79. His reign is memorable for the eruption of Vesuvius and the inauguration of the Colosseum. He was dashing, generous and popular. However, at the age of forty-two his health gave way and he died after little more than two years on the throne.
He was succeeded by Domitian, the shy and quiet younger brother, soon to reveal himself as a tyrant of Stalinesque suspicion, whose jealous eye lighted on all successful people. During his sixteen-year misrule, especially its sinister second half, the Roman state would be paralysed, its servants daring neither to fail nor succeed.
Then there is our principal recorder of events: the historian, Cornelius Tacitus, whose tortured personality may be understood as a product of terror, for his boyhood was passed under Nero and his manhood, from the ages of twenty-six to forty-one, under Domitian. He published nothing. Not only was he in danger of writing something which could give offence, it might be fatal just to write well.
Finally there is Julius Agricola, second soldier of this Episode, who served three times in Britain and whose name is forever associated with the country now called Scotland. Vespasian had been a genial, approachable and sound emperor, whose policies were of peaceful consolidation and thrift. Britain was the exception. There he had won his spurs and it pained him to see the enterprise languish. Accordingly he dispatched a series of Rome’s best men. With Agricola, history is helped by a remarkable coincidence in which Tacitus is linked to the battle for Britain. The connection was the youthful historian’s marriage to Agricola’s daughter. In due course the son-in-law would be the father-in-law’s biographer. Roman historical writing, fascinated by events at the centre, rarely mentions the margins, let alone the barbarian lands; and we are grateful to scavenge a sentence or two. In Tacitus’ Life of Julius Agricola we have an entire book about the empire’s edge. It is also a book about personalities and problems, in which a general’s duty is played against an emperor’s envy. Its subject is a province without a frontier, unable to find a territorial balance or to strike a durable bargain with the outsider; its context an empire no longer decisive about whether to take territory or to leave it. Though not an eyewitness account with the intense involvement of Ovid, it is the next best thing; casting a powerful beam into Europe’s farthest corner, where we would otherwise grope by archaeological candlelight.
Agricola was born in Forum Julii (Fréjus, Côte d’Azur) and educated in Marseilles. When Claudius invaded Britain he was three. At eighteen his first posting was as tribune (second lieutenant) attached to the staff of Britain’s fifth governor, G. Suetonius Paulinus.72 By now the Fosse Way had failed at its western end, largely because of the Welsh wasps’ nest, prodded by the fugitive prince, Caratacus, and buzzing still.
The second governor, P. Ostorius Scapula, had advanced his left to Gloucester and probably then to Chester. This was a crucial position, commanding the approach to North Wales and severing a possible alliance between Welsh and Pennine tribes. According to Tacitus, Scapula died of stress and exhaustion. Nevertheless he defeated and captured Caratacus, though the latter lived to ask his famous question of imperialism, whose artlessness disguised a sarcastic comment on Roman greed: ‘And what do you, who have so much, want with our wretched tents?’73
Moving on to Paulinus (with the young Agricola on his staff): here was a general who had earned himself a reputation for mountain warfare in Morocco as first to lead Roman soldiers across the Atlas. He now spent two years on the reduction of North Wales, finally isolating Anglesey, heart of nationalist hopes and Druidical dreams. Its capture would be an achievement to equal that of Nero’s general, Domitius Corbulo, in Armenia:
Britain’s new governor was Suetonius Paulinus, Corbulo’s rival both as a strategist and for public esteem. Could he produce victories to match the retaking of Armenia? He now decided on the capture of Mona (Anglesey) which had been a refuge for so many. Flat-bottomed boats were built to take the infantry across the treacherous shallows. The cavalry used fords, some troopers swimming beside their mounts. The armed enemy crowded the opposite shore. Among them were women, robed in black, hair wild like Furies, waving flaming firebrands. Nearby the Druid priests, with hands raised, called down terrible curses from heaven. This awful spectacle brought our soldiers up short. They stood as if frozen, until the general broke the spell by shouting how shameful it would be if they were halted by a gang of lunatic women. So the eagles surged forward, hemming in the enemy who was burned by his own torches. Paulinus occupied the island, felling the sacred groves dedicated to Anglesey’s vile rites; for it was among their beliefs that altars should run with captives’ blood and that prophecies should be made by examining human entrails.74
But Britain, a reluctant yielder of laurels, was not yet ready to let Paulinus win his. At this juncture there came news of rebellion, 250 miles to the rear. It involved the Icenians of Norfolk and the Trinovantians of Essex and Suffolk who had, for more than a decade, been simmering with resentment at the granting of their lands to Roman veterans. The late Icenian King, in the hope of saving some family influence, had willed his territory in part to his daughters and in part to Rome. It was like asking a pig to leave hal
f the trough. When his widow Boudicca (Boadicea) protested, she is reported to have been flogged by Roman officials and her daughters raped. Such was the flashpoint for the last great attempt to reverse the conquest of the Celtic world. Dio describes the queen as:
Boudouika [sic] a British woman of royal blood, with more brain than women usually have; tall, terrifying, with flashing eyes, menacing voice and a wild mass of yellowish hair falling to her waist; wearing a great, golden neck-torque, a many-coloured dress and thick cloak, fastened with a clasp. Spear in hand she harangued a gathering of armed men 120,000 strong.75
One should interpolate that what leaders said to armies, when no Roman was in earshot, was largely conjecture. Indeed it was an ancient convention to put speeches into the mouths of commanders; following Thucydides, who confessed that, since verbatim reporting was seldom possible, he would write what he thought the occasion demanded! Nevertheless such speeches rarely lack information. Here Dio makes the interesting logistical comment through Boudicca (already quoted): ‘While we are able to subsist on wild plants and water, they depend on bread, wine and olive oil; and if one of these should fail them, they are finished.’76 Grain was indeed essential; and while it was an exaggeration to claim that the eagle would not fly without wine and oil, sour wine in which to dip the bread and oil as the universal cooking medium were the soldiers’ normal expectation.
Much of Boudicca’s tirade is of course predictable: northern liberty contrasted with oriental servitude, British hardihood versus Roman decadence:
I am queen not of toiling Egyptians or money-grovelling Assyrians.77 I beseech heaven for victory against these insolent and insatiable men – if those who take warm baths, eat sweetmeats, drink wine unwatered, smear themselves with scent and lie with boys on soft couches, deserve the name of men! They who are lackeys to a lyre player – and a bloody awful one at that!78
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