Tacitus leaves his hero with a phrase famous for its bitterness: perdomita Britannia et statim omissa119 (Britain, no sooner grasped than let slip). His meaning is that Mons Graupius clinched the conquest of Britain and the jealousy of Domitian threw it away. But the majority of the enemy had escaped from that battle and unpropitious country lay ahead. History does not judge Mons Graupius a Waterloo and questions whether Agricola’s depleted force could have won one. On the other hand, there is general truth in Tacitus’ judgement, for it had required a painstaking pyramid of effort to put an army into northern Scotland and it would not easily be constructed again. Soon it would begin to topple and the will to total conquest pass, perhaps for ever.
Agricola had made one of Rome’s longest advances, extended knowledge, established sixty forts and built some 1,300 miles of road.120 This may be compared with the 18th-century Highland road-building of Generals Wade and Caulfield: 860 miles in something over a million man/days. Agricola’s effort, nearly twice that mileage in a quarter of the time, has been estimated as 900,000 man/days,121 though allowance must be made for more modest specification.
All would be wasted. Agricola’s fate was not to be remembered in a Romanized north Britain, but in the dim earthworks of marching armies and on Tacitus’ bright page. At Richborough, Kent, marble splinters and cruciform foundations still recall the tetrapylon, or cross-arch, at Rome’s principal port of entry, thought to commemorate Agricola’s completion of a conquest begun from that spot by Claudius forty years earlier. But if there were a Richborough Monument its salute was unwarranted. Before long the frontier would be back on the Tyne-Solway line where Petilius Cerialis had left it a generation earlier.
The crumbling of Roman Scotland was not, however, instant. Tacitus’ adverb statim (straight away) is denied by archaeology, which shows Agricola’s successor guarding his gains with forts, though none is yet certain north of Stracathro.122 Agricola was recalled in 84 or 85. In about 87 came the abandonment of Perthshire and a shift in the army’s centre of gravity to southern Scotland. Around 100–105, in Trajan’s reign, this too would be abandoned. The step-by-step shrinkage of Roman North Britain echoed a larger shift in the continental fulcrum from Rhine to Danube. The fate of what we know as Scotland will be decided in the country now called Romania. Britain was a side-show, opened because Claudius needed a success and reopened because of Vespasian’s emotional attachment. Though Tacitus argues, ad hominem, of a constructive Agricola and a destructive Domitian, the reduction of the British legions may have been less a matter of Domitianic spite than of Rome’s weakness. She had declined from the strike-where-she-liked situation of the late Republic to one of rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul. The army was scattered around the frontiers and the emperors were too fearful of a military conspiracy to risk the establishment of a central pool or strategic reserve. To attack on one front meant borrowing from others. Domitian saw Scotland, as Hitler did North Africa, in terms of priorities. Indeed resemblances between Agricola and Rommel are too numerous to ignore: the steadfast soldier, the demonic master, the distant war-theatre, the stretched supply lines, the breathtaking advance, the surge of popularity at home, the prize almost within reach; then starvation of resources, frustrations of the start-stop kind; and finally recall, muted praise and death under suspicious circumstances. Both were perhaps happy to leave a darkening stage.123
Compared with the inner provinces, Roman Britain has little to show in the way of prestigious buildings, impressive urban sites or engineering marvels. Nevertheless, Agricola’s mark on the northern landscape is part of a larger legacy of military remains – especially in relation to active campaigning – of which we should learn to be proud. Most remarkable is the number of temporary camps. Four hundred have so far been identified; three quarters of them from the air since 1950. They vary in size from one to 165 acres and include winter camps, siege camps, construction camps, as well as some fifty ‘practice camps’, built by soldiers in training. Most, however, were marching camps. Britain is fortunate that warfare and military occupation were largely in remote or upland regions, little disturbed by later ages. This wealth in Wales, England’s North and Scotland is in strong contrast to continental Europe, where no more than a handful of upstanding camps survive and relatively few are known, even from the air. The south of England is also poor. In Wessex, where Vespasian is said to have fought his thirty battles, few have been found. Heavy and prolonged ploughing is usually given as the reason, but we may ask why other faint markings, like Iron Age fields, are discernable; and why there is so little imprint on the chalk downs, where ploughing was slight and Vespasian active. We can only assume him to have been lax regarding the drill of nightly camp-making; or unusually thorough in their destruction. More probably he bivouacked within friendly oppida and captured forts. Perhaps we should not be asking why lowland camps are few but why upland are many. Here we must not discount the obvious: the mood of moorland Britain, then largely cloaked in forest and even more sombre than now; to say nothing of the truculence of the remoter tribes.
In Rome of the mid 90s the boil of terror ached for the lancet. The empress Domitia, believing her own arrest imminent, finally found courage to do what all Rome had vainly hoped of her father, Domitius Corbulo. He it was who had conquered Armenia, only to die on the whim of Nero. Now his daughter would give tyranny their joint reply. At 5 a.m. on 18 September 96, despite his palace walls being clad in mirrors and the dagger beneath his pillow, Domitian was attacked in his sleep and succumbed to eight stab wounds, inflicted by a slave acting for the empress and her co-conspirators, who included the praetorian prefect. As the news broke that morning senators hurried to the Chamber, jostling to make jeering speeches and to push through a motion damnatio memoriae124 (in condemnation of his memory). This execration carried with it the annulment of the late emperor’s laws, suppression of his titles, removal of his portraits or emblems, and erasure of his name from every inscription in the empire. The Younger Pliny described the destruction of his golden statues:
The pleasure in being present as those proudest of faces bit the dust, of hacking and chopping them with sword and axe, as if each blow were piling on the pain. All got a kick from seeing these likenesses mutilated and dismembered; that hateful, fearful face cast into the furnace and the thought that from this melting down of menace and terror something useful and enjoyable might be made.125
Like the 1991 toppling of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinski, founder of the KGB, it was feeble recompense for so much suffered so meekly for so long.
Thus ended Domitian in the sixteenth year of his reign at the age of forty-four, whose father was the genial Vespasian and whose brother had been the darling of the Roman crowd. His memory was treasured solely by the soldiers, demonstrating the army’s disinterest in liberty and devotion to dynasties. Of these there had been two since Augustus established the Principate: the Julio-Claudian and the Flavian, the latter ending on Domitian’s death without issue.
For a final comment on the loss of Scotland one may perhaps defer to the authority of Edward Gibbon:
The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climate of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians.126
EPISODE FOUR
The Artist
IN MATTERS RELATING TO THE empire’s defence, it is misleading to see Rome solely as a Mediterranean power. Such a view shows Italy at the centre, double-wrapped by the inner and outer provinces. Macedon and Carthage have long been eliminated and the nearest rival, Parthia (Iran) is far away. If, on the other hand, we look more closely, seeing Rome in a European context, her safety seems less certain and the outside world less distant.
The Celts had been a formidable enemy. Occupation of their lands brought Rome up against the Germans, resulting in an imperial frontier on the Rhine and upper Danube, only 250 miles from Italy. Th
e middle Danube was more dangerous still. Its course is a similar distance from north-eastern Italy, but the Drava and Sava rivers offered corridors straight toward the empire’s centre, while the passes through the Julian Alps, behind Trieste, are the lowest in the Alpine arc. Add to this the extent and backwardness of the Eastern European and Eurasian barbarians, plus their tendency to migrate westwards, and we see why Rome’s critical frontiers were not the remote Euphrates, the Syrian desert or the far Sahara, but the not-so-distant Rhine and Danube.
Fortunately, grave or multiple dangers had been slow to arise along this 1,700-mile European boundary. Following Augustus’ German War a long lull settled on the Rhine, allowing Claudius to turn toward Britain. But before this tiresome entanglement could be resolved, rumblings across the Danube began to remind the Roman leadership that there were good reasons to consider the river’s middle and lower reaches as the most endangered sectors of the entire imperial rim. Accordingly Domitian’s reign saw a decisive shift in deployment from the German to the Balkan front. It was the terrain beyond its far bank which made the Danube a less favourable defensive line than the Rhine. For substantial stretches Rome’s Danubian provinces faced mountain, favouring the attacker and covering his retreat. The late-1st-century disturbances arose from such regions, especially today’s Romania, where the southern Carparthians loom darkly beyond the Danubian Plain.
A wider view shows the Carpathians as part of an almost complete mountain circle, two hundred miles across, with peaks over 7,000 feet. Within lies Transylvania, home of the Dacians, a former steppe people of Sarmatian origin, related to Ovid’s Getans. Their capital, as well as Dacia’s most populous region (today’s Hunedoara) lay in Transylvania’s south-western corner, dangerously close to Belgrade and the Drava-Sava mouths. Southwards Dacia was less than 250 miles from the Aegean and barely a hundred from the Black Sea. Here was a natural fortress of exceptional strength, looming over the Danubian frontier; as well as a strategic hinge, hurtful to Rome in the wrong hands.
In earlier episodes we have glimpsed the barbarian lands by courtesy of Roman authors. Regrettably their light penetrates the Carpathian ring but faintly. The Dacian Wars are described only by Cassius Dio of Nicaea, the 3rd-century Greek whose account of this period survives in the much truncated form of a précis by John Xiphilinus, a Byzantine cleric, made at about the time of the Norman conquest of England. His few pages provide general background but little about Dacia and its people. Lack of information about the frontier lands is, of course, normal. The Roman army was late to arrive on these reaches of the Danube. The river bank and its hinterlands were places of army camps, half-drained bog, part-built roads and barely assimilated natives. We may assume that civilian visitors, especially of the tourist kind, were seldom seen. Beyond lived the wild tribes. Unless strongly escorted on military or diplomatic business, or carrying merchandise destined for barbarian chieftains, crossing the river was an act of last resort. As mentioned in Episode One, an archaic custom had allowed those condemned to death a grace period within which to flee Roman territory; the sanctuary seeming to offer little more than the sentence. This exemplified the Barbaricum’s reputation; and neither it, nor the frontier in the stricter sense, nor even the outer provinces, were conducive to authors whose tastes, like their readers’, tended to flower in more civilized vicinities. Rather than complain at the sparseness of the record, one should perhaps be grateful that Ovid, Dio and Tacitus contributed at all. However, Ovid is long gone and though Tacitus, freed at last from fear, is now writing at full flood, he stands at the stern of his age and his work covers nothing later than Agricola’s death in AD 93. From that date, to the commencement of Hadrian’s reign in 117, written history runs thin. And yet there is, at the heart of Rome, a major source of quite another kind: a Bayeux Tapestry in marble, dedicated to the emperor Trajan and devoted almost entirely to his adventures across the Danube.
Of Trajan it may briefly be said that he was Rome’s first non-Italian emperor. Born in 53 at Italica, near Seville, of good Roman family, his father had commanded the Xth legion when Vespasian’s guns were battering the Judaean cities. He served as a tribune in Syria when his father was its governor. Under Domitian he himself governed Spain; and he was probably present at the two Danubian war theatres, Marcomannia (Czechoslovakia) and Dacia.1 At the time of his adoption by Nerva he was governor of Upper Germany, where he stayed till that emperor’s death. Modernity would probably call him a liberal, though in view of his survival in high office under Domitian the cynic might question his sincerity as a champion of freedom. History is not short of soldiers who plead duty in support of tyranny.
Though neither unduly intelligent, subtle nor learned, Trajan was, it seems, one of those rare men able to wear all hats and please all people. As emperor his answers to the twin ills of unemployment and public boredom anticipate the baby-kissing politics of our own day: ‘In popularity few have been his equal, for he knew that the Roman people’s affections are engaged by two things: the corn dole and the spectacles; and that in successful government jollity looms as large as polity.’2
He was serenely self-confident, with the gift of imperturbability and the ability to shrug off criticism. He was a relaxed and affable man, and perhaps also a modest one, though with a weakness for claiming credit for building work.3 According to one source, ‘his name was on so many buildings that they nicknamed him Ivy.’4 Dio accuses him of being a drinker and a paederast: ‘We know of course of his inclinations toward boys and wine. But despite this his reputation remained high, for though he drank hard he stayed sober and his relationships with boys harmed no one.’5 His popularity with the army was beyond question and this was soon matched by popularity in Rome: with the lower classes for his bread and circuses and with the upper for his decisive rejection of all things Domitianic:
He envied no one. He killed no one. He favoured all good men and feared none. He ignored slanders. He refrained from anger. He was not tempted by others’ money. He had no murders on his conscience. He spent hugely on war and the works of peace. He was approachable and a good mixer. He would share his carriage with others, visit the houses of ordinary citizens and relax there.6
The dismantling of terror, begun by the elderly caretaker emperor Nerva (AD 96–8), was accelerated in all spheres of public life. Informers and denouncers were outlawed. Publication of the Senate Transactions7 (the Roman Hansard) was resumed. The Younger Pliny speaks of heady ideas such as imperial accountability and equality under law: ‘An emperor must deal fairly with his empire, accounting for expenditure and not spending what he might be ashamed to admit … There is a notion in the air which I hear and understand for the first time: not that the First Citizen is above the law but that the law is above the First Citizen.’8 This was the man on whom the Senate would vote the title for which he would be most remembered: optimus princeps (best emperor of all): ‘As the word “august” reminds us of the one on whom it was first bestowed, so the word “best” will not live in mankind’s vocabulary without memory of you.’9
Turning to the future emperor Hadrian, twenty-three years Trajan’s junior and a distant relative from the same provincial town: the boy’s father died when he was ten and Trajan became his guardian. In due course his mother sent him to Rome, where he was laughed at for his provincial accent, lost his head at the sight of so much glamour, overspent his allowance and incurred his guardian’s displeasure. But fortune would smile in his direction when Nerva nominated him to carry the news to Mainz of his guardian’s adoption. Then, on Nerva’s death (after only a sixteen-month reign) he was again despatched to Germany to tell Trajan that the purple toga was his. To bring this, the greatest of all news, was seen as supremely auspicious. In Trajan’s eyes, however, he would remain a messenger boy.
Trajan’s Column, index of a trans-Danubian epic, stands alone in Trajan’s Forum. It is remarkable in all respects but in none more than its preservation: a marble mast, intact amid the forum’s shipwreck. And while St Peter1
0 has replaced the emperor at the masthead, the shaft on which he stands (though chipped by eighteen centuries and gnawed by the petro-chemistry of our own) has eluded major ravage and spoliation. Even its base largely escaped injury by the Vandals and their more recent namesakes.
This last structure, the Column’s podium, is a seventeen-foot cube of marble blocks, carved with captured armament and housing the sepulchral chamber for Trajan’s ashes and those of his empress Plotina. Above the doorway an inscription tells us that the Senate had the Column erected during Trajan’s sixth consulate (c. AD 113) ‘to show how high a hill required to be excavated to accommodate these great works’. The hill was the Quirinal; the works Trajan’s Forum (last and largest of the imperial fora), the vast Basilica Ulpia which lay along its northern side, as well as libraries, markets, shops, colonnades and other useful or ceremonial features. To accommodate what was by all accounts a breathtaking ensemble of buildings and spaces, it had been necessary to cut away a flank of the hill to a depth of 120 feet. It is clear from the inscription that the original reason for the Column was simply to record this effort, the combined height of podium and shaft being equivalent to the depth of rock removed. In other words, the Column’s far more famous function, as a memorial to the Dacian Wars, was an afterthought; and the shaft, originally intended to be plain, was adapted to this new purpose by carving on it the frieze, upon which its claim to greatness rests.
The Column consists of seventeen marble drums, each over four feet tall. Slanting across its joins and crossing them with extreme precision, the frieze covers the shaft’s entire surface in a spiral of twenty-three bands, approximately three feet wide and 656 long. Its subject is Trajan’s conquest of Transylvania, known as the Dacian Wars. It contains more than 2,500 human figures, those in foreground averaging twenty to twenty-two inches in height. These are in half relief, with background figures in low relief. Though the frieze is continuous, its action is divided into more than 150 episodes, separated by conventional uprights such as a tree, wall or standing man. The reliefs are thought to have been painted and many of the figures held metal swords and spears. Inside the Column is a spiral stairway, lit from four sides by forty-three window slits, which doubled as lewis holes when the drums were hoisted into place. There are also fourteen larger, round holes, brutally banged into the frieze at irregular intervals; probably for the scaffolding required to rob the marble hands of their weapons. It seems likely that the sculptors worked from a full-scale cartoon, consisting perhaps of a textile band on which the content had been drawn in detail. Opinions differ on whether it was carved drum by drum in the workshop; as one, on site; or in the workshop with a few inches, near each join, left for completion when assembled.
Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge Page 21