by Simon Schama
But was it a civilization? The Roman historians of the invasions, from Caesar himself to Tacitus, didn’t think so, not least because ‘civilized’ meant, by definition, dwelling in cities. Although the Romans called the undefended town centres of the British tribes oppida (towns), by Latin standards they were still primitive timber settlements, with wattle and daub huts, a far cry from even the simpler stone-built cities of the Mediterranean world. And they wrote off as hideous savages the barbarian warriors who appeared before them in battle, covered in bright blue body paint, waving their long, slashing swords, blowing war-trumpets and yelling unintelligible war-cries, in much the same way as the soldiers of the Victorian empire would describe their ‘primitive’ enemies in Africa and India.
But suppose they had seen the extraordinary artefacts produced by the Picts, who left behind astonishing carved stones with symbolic hieroglyphs of birds, oxen and fish, and frieze-like reliefs of long-robed, bearded and coiffed warriors, which looked for all the world as if they had been directly transplanted from Assyria rather than being created in the valley of the Tay. Suppose they had come across sculptures like the haunting stone head, found on Anglesey, with its archaic, secretive smile, the deep-set eyes half-closed as if in some mysterious devotional trance, the nose flattened, the cheeks broad, the whole face so spellbindingly reminiscent of the ancient Mediterranean busts they might have encountered in the Greek islands or Etruria. Would they have conceded that this was, in fact, a work of art? Probably not, especially when they noticed that the top of the head had been scooped away like a boiled egg to make room for some votive offering. For this might have confirmed the gruesome stories heard from some of the more cultivated barbarians encountered in the Roman world (for there were many) of cults of decapitated heads – not to mention ritual sacrifices and drownings – which were said to be a special feature of British religion. Some of the natives even appeared to believe that, unless swiftly buried and preferably in a deep well, the heads would continue to reproach those who had parted them from their trunks.
So why should the Romans have wanted to have gone to Britain, to the edge of the world, to an island of talking heads? For despite Tacitus’s fantasy of a British El Dorado, a commander as canny as Julius Caesar is unlikely to have been persuaded that the island was indeed ‘worth the conquest’ had not hard-headed political considerations within Rome itself pushed him in the direction of a British adventure. In the middle of the first century BC he was restlessly sharing power with two other triumvirs, Pompey and Crassus, and a brisk triumph would unquestionably establish him as the senior partner. And he would not be going to Britain as an ignorant outsider. In all likelihood, it was delegates from British tribes themselves who offered Caesar a perfect opportunity to pose as peace-maker, arbitrator, overlord. Nothing could be further from the truth than to imagine a confederation of united British tribes massing shoulder-to-shoulder at the cliffs to resist the Latin invader. Two of those tribal kingdoms – the Catuvellauni in what is now Hertfordshire and the Trinovantes in Essex – were seen by many of the others in the south, east and west as threateningly expansionist and aggressive, and calling in the Romans as allies must have seemed a way to stop them. (When, nearly two millennia later, the British came to establish their own new Roman empire, it was through very similar overtures to the indigenous population that they would secure their own foothold in India.) It was, after all, Commius, the king of the Atrebates, who came with Caesar on the original expedition and who must have supplied over-optimistic intelligence about its prospects. The enterprise of Britain would not, then, be a journey into the unknown, the legions bringing light to the heart of barbarian darkness. It was because Britain was a known quantity – its famously mild winters, its cornucopia of food supplies, its obliging native allies – and because Caesar probably thought of the campaign as a limited exercise, a show of superiority rather than a wholesale colonization, that it must have seemed so temptingly feasible. Sitting in sunlit Rome at the height of his powers, a little giddy with invincibility, Caesar must have imagined a nice little sideshow, a triumph on the cheap. Faced with the glittering armour of the legions and the eagle standards, the barbarians would simply line up to surrender. They would understand that history always fought on the side of Rome.
But, as it turned out, geography did not. Two years in succession, in 55BC and 54BC, Caesar’s painstaking logistics were turned into a bad joke by the one element that was supposed to have been dependably friendly, the weather. On the first campaign, with a force of 12,000 infantry and 2000 cavalry on the water, fierce gales blew the ships carrying the horses and their troopers back to Gaul before the rest of the fleet had even made a landing. And on both occasions stormy high tides and violent winds smashed the boats that had managed to make it to the Kentish beaches. Where Caesar had imagined the disciplined Roman troops ploughing their way through the British warriors in open combat, what he actually had to deal with, once his troops moved inland, was an enemy that melted away, spookily, into the woods, reappearing only to launch deadly hit-and-run raids. Although the Romans crossed the Thames at Brentford on the second campaign, Cassivellaunus, the king of the Catuvellauni, remained elusively undefeated, and, deprived twice in a row of reinforcements or winter supplies, Caesar had no option but to come to a political, face-saving settlement with the king, extracting promises (not worth very much) that Cassivellaunus would leave the Roman allies among the British in peace. Cicero, whose brother was serving with Caesar’s army, put a brave face on the failure by writing off the botched expeditions as not worth the trouble. Gold and silver had not materialized, nor was there ‘any booty apart from captives, and I fancy you won’t be expecting them to be highly qualified in literature or music’.
Memories of the British fiasco must have rankled, however. By the time the Romans returned, ninety years later in AD43, the mood in Rome had become more aggressively imperialist. In the great Latin verse epic of empire-building, the Aeneid, Virgil has Jupiter proclaim: ‘I have set upon the Romans bounds neither of time nor space.’ Even so, the irritation of a Britain eluding Roman grasp would not itself have been enough to persuade the successors of Julius and Augustus of the need for an all-out campaign of conquest had not Roman credibility as a reliable supporter and protector of its allies been on the line. For if Caesar had abandoned Britain, the Britons had not abandoned Rome. In the decades before the invasion of 43, trade between Roman Gaul had never been more active; bulky goods going south, fancy goods going north. Rome itself was full of disaffected sons and rivals of the dominant British kings, in particular Cunobelinus (whom Shakespeare called Cymbeline), who had put together a formidable power base in the southeast. His death in AD41 and the predictable squabbling among heirs were almost certainly the occasion for his many enemies among the British tribes – the Iceni of East Anglia, the Regnenses in what would be Sussex – to present the disarray as a now-or-never moment for a new Roman campaign.
Perhaps because there had already been so many false starts – Tiberius procrastinating; Caligula never getting beyond the harbour front – Claudius, the club-foot stammerer, on the face of it the most unlikely conqueror of all, was determined to get it right. If it were to be done at all, Claudius must have reckoned, it had to be done in such massive force that there was no chance whatsoever of repeating the embarrassments of Julius. He was not so secure on his throne as to be able to afford even a mixed result, and because the politics of the British tribes were so notoriously unstable and their attitude to hostages indifferent, there could be no thought of a limited holding campaign. This time it had to be serious. So Claudius’s invasion force was immense, some 40,000 troops, the kind of army that could barely be conceived of, much less directly encountered, in Iron Age Britain. Even this armada, however, got off to a comical false start, for although it was commanded by some of the most rock-solid veterans of the empire, the rank-and-file troops took one look at the fleet at Boulogne and refused point-blank to embark – until, that is,
a personal letter arrived from the emperor himself. This duly came, although it probably didn’t help that the letter was delivered by Claudius’s personal manservant, an ex-slave known as Narcissus!
Claudius succeeded where Julius Caesar failed, through a brilliantly synchronized campaign of concentrated military ruthlessness and shrewd political pragmatism. His commanders, such as Aulus Plautius, understood the developing society of the Britons well enough to know that by seizing the largely undefended oppida they would strike at the heart of the British aristocracy – its places of status, prestige and worship. But in place of those Iron Age centres of conspicuous consumption and display, the Romans could, of course, offer to those sensible kinglings who reached for the olive branch rather than the battle javelin something of a completely different order of magnificence. One such individual may have been Togidubnus, successor to Verica, the King of the Atrebates, who was indirectly responsible for the Claudian invasion. Togidubnus had probably been educated in Rome and thus recognized the benefits of a Roman lifestyle. After the invasion he became known as Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, Great King in Britain, which probably reflects his new role as a Client King. His loyalty to Rome may be reflected in the construction of a spectacular palace at Fishbourne, near Chichester, which was decorated with brilliantly coloured mosaic floors, the kind of house imaginable, until now, only amid the olive groves of Latium, not the pear orchards of the South Downs.
Togidubnus was not the only tribal chief to take a pragmatic view of what was in the best interests of himself and his people. All the way through the island the Romans found support from local chiefs, who assumed that their alliance would strengthen rather than weaken their local authority. The fourth-century Roman historian Eutropius wrote that the king of Orkney submitted to Claudius at the time of the invasion of AD43, but until shards from Roman amphorae of a type that became obsolete by the end of the century were found at Gurness, this seemed far-fetched. Now we know that in the Iron Age broch, turned royal palace, as much as in the hillforts of southern England, there were shrewd local rulers who knew very well which side their bread was buttered. With the individual kings of the British tribes atomized, it was possible for the Roman army to pick them off one by one as they rolled their machine through the island. One of the sons of Cunobelinus was beaten in battle; the other, Caratacus, retreated north. Behind him he left the town of Colchester, where Claudius himself arrived to make a triumphal entry seated on an elephant. In short order, Colchester was turned into a model of what Roman Britain would look like: a metropolitan centre, with long, straight streets, formidable stone walls, packed markets, imposing temples and grandiose statuary. It may not have been Britain’s first town, but it was certainly its first city, and a place where it was possible to be both Roman and British.
Tribal Britain and the coming of the Romans.
For a while it must have seemed almost too easy. The fugitive son of Cunobelinus, Caratacus, was handed over by the obliging Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes in the north of England and paraded in chains in Rome. He behaved with such dignity, however, that, in a famous scene of imperial magnanimity, he was pardoned by Claudius. As many as 50,000 Roman troops, almost an eighth of the entire imperial army, occupied Britain, and it may have been the very size of the military garrison that prompted some of its junior commanders to overplay their hand, especially once the watchful Claudius had been succeeded by the indolent Nero in AD54. In the kingdom of the Iceni the careful conventions by which the local aristocracy were bought off and co-opted into the Roman alliance were brutally discarded for a show of naked force. Trying to pre-empt trouble when her husband King Prasutagus died, Boudicca had already offered to share her realm with Nero. Instead, in a show of suicidal arrogance and brutality, the local administrator had it declared a slave province as if it had resisted rather than collaborated with the Romans. To make the point about exactly who owned whom, Boudicca was then treated to a public flogging while her two daughters were raped. The immediate result was not only to transform a willing, even eager, family of collaborators into implacable enemies but also to bring about exactly what the more intelligent Romans all along had sought to avoid: an immense coalition of the disaffected sweeping through an entire region of the country.
With the cream of the Roman troops tied down suppressing an insurgency in remote north Wales, in AD60 Boudicca’s army marched towards the place that most symbolized the new world the Britons had almost inadvertently allowed to happen: Colchester. It helped that it was lightly garrisoned. After a firestorm march through eastern England, during which Roman settlements were burned one by one, it was the city’s turn. The colonists retreated to the one place where they must have felt they would be safe – the great temple precinct that had been built by Claudius – but Boudicca’s army proceeded to demolish the place, knocking the emperor’s head off its bust and throwing it into the river Alde. (The ritual drowning of bodies or of severed heads in wells or rivers was a traditional practice of the British tribes, and Boudicca’s army may have been making the point that their culture was still very much alive.) With thousands of terrified Romans huddled in the inner sanctum, the precocious imperial city was set alight. Cowering behind their walled-in sanctum, the colonists must have smelled the advancing smoke before they, too, were incinerated in the remains. A bowl of carbonized dates, a relic from the firestorm, tells you all you need to know about Boudicca’s revenge.
Her victory couldn’t last. Elated by the destruction of Colchester, Boudicca’s army snowballed in size, and this, paradoxically, may have been its undoing. Once it had to face a disciplined army – Roman troops rushed back from Anglesey – the uncontrollable horde that the British force had become became a victim of its own unwieldiness. Women and children who had gathered in wagons at the rear of the battlefield obstructed the manoeuvrability of the war-chariots and foot soldiers once the Roman legionaries had managed to carve a way through. The congested melée turned into a gory, chaotic slaughter, and Boudicca took her own life rather than fall into the hands of the Romans.
Lessons had been learned the hard way, at least by some. If we believe the history left by his son-in-law Tacitus, Julius Agricola, the general in charge of the pacification of Scotland and Wales, tried to avoid the causes of rebellion by ‘putting his own house in order’ and making every effort to govern with integrity and justice. Agricola also wanted to draw the boundary line of Britannia at the Clyde and Forth, leaving the logistically difficult Highlands to the tribes known as the Caledonians. But, as usual, it was impossible even for a prudent general to sit on his hands while barbarians attacked Roman forts with impunity. In 84 an enormous pan-European pitched battle took place on the slopes of an unidentified Highland mountain, certainly north of the Tay, which Tacitus calls Mons Graupius, where 30,000 of the Caledonians and their northern allies engaged with the Roman legions and their Dutch (Batavian) and Belgian (Tungrian) auxiliaries. The result was a slaughter of 10,000 of the natives and 360 Romans. The most remarkable pages in Tacitus’s history are not the battle scenes, with their predictable gore, but the speeches he puts into the mouths of the opposing commanders, especially the Caledonian general Calgacus, who delivers the first of the great back-to-the-wall, anti-imperialist speeches on Scotland’s soil, a ringing appeal for his native country’s freedom:
here at the world’s end, on its last inch of liberty, we have lived unmolested to this day, defended by our remoteness and obscurity . . . But there are no other tribes to come; nothing but sea and cliffs and these more deadly Romans whose arrogance you cannot escape by obedience and self-restraint. Robbers of the world, now that the earth falls into their all-devastating hands, they probe even the sea; if their enemy have wealth they have greed . . . [neither] East nor West has glutted them . . . To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace.
We have no evidence, of course, that Calgacus ever said any such things. The impassioned appeal for fre
edom comes straight from Roman republican, rather than Celtic tribal, rhetoric of which we can know nothing. Yet this kind of burning sentiment would echo down the generations. Like the identity of ‘Britannia’ itself, the idea of a free Caledonia was, from the first, a Roman invention.
‘Perdomita Britannia et statim omissa’ (Britain was subjugated and straight away let slip) was Tacitus’s damning verdict on Roman policy after all his father-in-law’s Herculean efforts in the north. Tacitus was an armchair warrior, unburdened by the practical responsibilities of governing an overstretched empire that, at the turn of the second century, extended from rebellious Judea to insubordinate southern Scotland. But there was one emperor, Spanish by birth, the most thoughtful of them all, who had grown wise on years of campaigning on behalf of his predecessor, Trajan, and his impossibly far-flung empire and who well understood the virtues of containment. And he was destined, in Britain, at any rate, to be remembered by a wall.
Hadrian’s Wall is too often imagined rather like a frontier fort in Indian country, with the US cavalry peering nervously through the palisades and straining to hear the war-drums, a structure sweating paranoia from every stone. But it wasn’t like that at all. The wall, all 73 miles of it, 7–10 feet thick and 15–20 feet high, running from the Tyne to the Solway Firth, was begun around AD122, shortly after Hadrian’s imperial tour of inspection in Britain. The logic of its engineering and its breathtaking ambitiousness bear all the hallmarks of Hadrian’s personal touch. There is no doubt that it was initially a response to the endemic insubordination of those whom the Romans sometimes referred to, rather loftily, as the ‘Brittunculi’ – the wretched little Brits – and, especially in the first fifty years of its life, it was certainly above all a military base, with troops stationed along the ‘milecastles’ and turrets, which appeared every 500 yards) along its line. Hadrian, who came to inspect its progress in 122, clearly thought of it as marking the limit of the regions of Britannia that could plausibly be made into a governable Roman province. The Brigantes, amid whose territory the wall was built, had originally been a compliant ally under their queen Cartimandua, but she had been challenged by her husband, Venutius, who attempted a full-scale revolt, and by the end of the first century the Northumbrian countryside was not thought of as a region particularly hospitable to Roman colonization.