Britain: Conquest and Revolt

The Claudian Invasion43–47

The invasion of 43 was assembled from the standard imperial kit: a dynastic need (Claudius, raised by the Praetorians over the Senate's protests after Gaius's murder, required a conquest as a coronation requires a crown), a legal pretext (the exiled king Verica of the Atrebates, suppliant at Rome against the expanding sons of Cunobelinus), and an economic brief the merchants had been writing for a century. Four legions were committed — II Augusta from Strasbourg under the future emperor Vespasian, IX Hispana from Pannonia, XIV Gemina and XX from the Rhine — with auxilia to match, some forty thousand men under Aulus Plautius; and the expedition began with the age's characteristic mutiny, the troops refusing the Ocean as a boundary of the human world until Claudius's freedman Narcissus, mounting the tribunal, was shouted down with the Saturnalian jeer Io Saturnalia — slaves playing master — and the army, having laughed itself out of its terror, embarked. The landing (Richborough by the consensus the archaeology of the Claudian base there sustains, against a minority case for the Solent) was unopposed, the Britons having stood down a coastal levy the delayed crossing outwaited; the campaign's decision came on the Medway, a two-day battle — a rarity in ancient warfare the sources mark as such — where the Batavian cohorts swam the river in armor to hamstring the chariot-teams, Hosidius Geta's division was cut off and nearly lost before winning the ornamenta triumphalia, and the brothers Togodumnus and Caratacus were broken westward. Plautius halted at the Thames per his instructions, and the emperor came out for the finale as the script required: Claudius crossed with the reinforcements and the elephant corps, presided sixteen days, received Camulodunum and the surrender or alliance of eleven kings — the arch at Rome would count them — and returned to celebrate the conquest of Ocean; the Senate gave him the name Britannicus for his son, and the reign its foundation myth. The real war then ran west and north for four years: Vespasian's II Augusta grinding down the Durotrigan hill-country — thirty battles, twenty oppida, and the Isle of Wight, says Suetonius; the war-cemetery and sling-arsenals of Maiden Castle and Hod Hill supplying the archaeology, with the Editor noting that the dramatic 'massacre' reading of the former has been tempered by re-excavation; the Fosse Way diagonal — Exeter to Lincoln — settling by the later 40s into the first frontier, a corridor of forts that said, prematurely, thus far.

Caratacus47–51

The son of Cunobelinus, twice beaten in the southeast, executed the strategic withdrawal that made him: westward, out of his own lost kingdom, into the hills of the Silures and Ordovices, where for eight years he ran the war Rome could least afford — the Sertorian war of ambush and weather, the legions' roads lengthening behind them, a governor (Ostorius Scapula) dying in harness of the strain. Brought to bay at last in 51 on a prepared position in the Ordovician hills — river in front, slopes stone-walled, the sources' description generic enough that no modern candidate site commands assent — he lost the set-piece battle to the escalade he could not prevent, lost wife and daughter to the camp's capture, and, fleeing north to the Brigantes, was delivered in chains by their queen Cartimandua, Rome's client, whose reward and whose consequent domestic history — the consort Venutius twice raised the north against her, the second time, in the year of the four emperors, for keeps — the chapter will meet again. The captive's Roman finale Tacitus stages as the dynasty's best theater and the tradition's best speech: the parade of the Claudian guard, the trophies, the kneeling family — and Caratacus upright, asking the emperor from the tribunal why a possessor of such marble should covet British tents, and closing on the hinge the historian built for him: kill me, and both the war and your glory die with me; spare me, and I am forever the proof of your clemency. Claudius spared him — the family lived out their days in Italy, and the Editor grades the speech as he graded Calgacus's to come: a Roman composition in a Briton's mouth, AGrade A evidence for what Rome wished its conquests said of it, ungradeable as transcript. The captor-queen's reward, and the Silurian war grinding on regardless — a legionary camp stormed, a governor's ashes, the Senate hearing the war-word deleri, extermination, entered into policy against the Silures — carried the province to the reign of Nero, the appointment of Suetonius Paulinus, the Atlas veteran, and the operation with which the next section opens: the reduction of the druids' island, Mona, in 60 — the shore-line of black-robed women with torches among the warriors, the soldiers frozen until shame moved them, the sacred groves cut — at the precise moment when, at the province's other end, a client-king's will came due.

Boudica60–61

Prasutagus of the Iceni had died leaving half to his daughters and half to the emperor, the standard actuarial flattery of a client court; the procurator Catus Decianus foreclosed on the whole as on a defaulted estate. What followed at the royal seat — the widow Boudica flogged, the daughters raped, the nobility's lands called in, the Claudian temple at Camulodunum meanwhile taxing the province to deify its conqueror — assembled in one season every grievance the compendium's provincial wars have catalogued, and the rising, Iceni and Trinovantes together with the harvest left standing, fell first on the colony itself: Camulodunum, unwalled, its veterans' appeals answered by the procurator with two hundred men, held the temple podium two days and was erased — the archaeological signature, the burnt destruction horizon of 60/61, red between the Claudian and Flavian layers under three modern cities like a page of the annals fired into the ground. The Ninth legion's relief column under Cerialis was ambushed and its infantry annihilated; Catus fled to Gaul; Paulinus, force-marching ahead of his army down Watling Street, reached Londinium first, judged it — undefended, unwalled, strategically nothing, humanly everything — and made the decision Tacitus grants him without softening: the town was abandoned to the enemy, with all who could not march; Verulamium after it; and in the three sackings the tradition's count is seventy thousand citizens and allies killed, the killing garnished in Dio's rhetoric with atrocities the Editor grades D and declines to transcribe. Paulinus, with XIV Gemina, detachments of XX, and auxilia — perhaps ten thousand — accepted battle where the ground was his: a defile fronting open plain, forest at the back, the site unlocated to this day though the search parties of scholarship have never disbanded. The disposition Tacitus gives is the manual's: legions in close order at the defile's throat, auxilia on the flanks, cavalry at the wings; the British mass — the figures run to the hundreds of thousands, with the wagon-laager of families drawn up at the field's rear to watch the victory — attacking up the funnel into the volleyed pila and then the wedge; the rout jamming against its own wagon-wall as at Vercellae; the killing running through baggage, beasts, and the audience alike, eighty thousand Britons to four hundred Romans by the tradition's arithmetic, which the Editor prints as the tradition's. Boudica ended by poison in Tacitus's account, by illness in Dio's — the divergence itself the measure of how quickly the queen passed from intelligence into legend; Poenius Postumus, camp prefect of II Augusta, who had refused Paulinus's summons and kept his legion in the west, fell on his sword when the news came. The sequel was the more consequential battle: Paulinus's reprisals — fire and sword through the rebel cantons, the famine of the unsown year — against the new procurator Julius Classicianus, whose report to Rome argued that vengeance was not a fiscal policy; the freedman Polyclitus's commission of inquiry; and Paulinus's supersession under cover of a lost fleet detachment. Classicianus's verdict on the war survives in the medium the age reserved for its most durable statements: his tombstone, raised by his widow — Julia Pacata, daughter of Indus, a Gaulish noble's daughter, wife of the Gaulish-descended knight who took the province's side against its conqueror — recovered piecemeal from a bastion of London's later wall and standing now in the British Museum, AGrade A testimony that the argument between the sword and the ledger was real, and that the ledger, for once, won.

Agricola and the Far North77–84

The Flavian governors resumed the advance the crisis had suspended: Cerialis (the Ninth's unlucky legate of 60, now consular) breaking the Brigantian north in the early 70s, Frontinus — the same whose Stratagems this compendium has cited throughout — solving the Silures at last with the fortress-and-road grid of Wales; and from 77, for seven years, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, whose governorship is the best-documented provincial command in Roman history for the sufficient and compromising reason that his son-in-law wrote it. Through the Agricola — biography, ethnography, and opposition pamphlet in one — the compendium receives the northern conquest whole: Mona finished in the first season; the Brigantian and lowland consolidations; the Forth–Clyde line garrisoned and judged, for one paragraph of the historian's regret, a sufficient terminus; then the estuary-hopping advance beyond it, the fleet feeling ahead of the army, the ninth legion's camp surprised by night and saved by the general's own column striking the attackers' rear at dawn; and in the seventh summer, at the mountain the sources call Graupius — unlocated; the northeast's candidates from Bennachie northward each keep their partisans — the massed Caledonian confederacy under Calgacus, thirty thousand by the account, standing at last. Tacitus built the battle as a diptych of speeches, and gave the Caledonian the greatest anti-imperial oration in the Latin language — the terrible sentences that have outlived every battlefield in this volume: auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant — robbery, butchery, rapine they call by the lying name of empire; they make a desert, and they call it peace. The Editor's grading of the speech was fixed in the Caratacus section and stands: the conqueror's own conscience, ventriloquized through the conquered, AGrade A for Rome's self-knowledge, nothing for Calgacus, who may not have existed. The battle beneath the speeches Agricola won without committing a legion: the auxilia — eight thousand foot, Batavian and Tungrian cohorts leading — carried the slope sword-to-buckler, the cavalry broke the flanking masses, and the pursuit ran to nightfall with the tradition's arithmetic at ten thousand Caledonians against three hundred and sixty auxiliaries; the fleet was then sent north about, took the surrender of Orkney, sighted Thule, and proved Britain an island — the campaign's real strategic yield, the Ocean's circumnavigation, worth more at Rome than the moor it garlanded. The sequel is the volume's recurring lesson in imperial arithmetic: Agricola was recalled with ornamenta and no successor-in-advance; the fortress rising at Inchtuthil to hold the Highland gates was dismantled unfinished within three years — its garrison needed on the Danube, where the next chapter but one is already burning — and abandoned so deliberately that its builders buried what they could not carry: the hoard of three-quarters of a million unused iron nails, ten tons of them, interred against enemy salvage and recovered by the excavators of the 1950s, the most eloquent quartermaster's document in the empire — conquest itself, crated and written off. Tacitus closed the account with the epigram the whole British book of this volume argues: perdomita Britannia et statim missa — Britain was thoroughly conquered, and immediately let go.