Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (22 page)

Roman guns were based on the idea of twisting a rope until tension was created, 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.
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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.'
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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.
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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,
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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,
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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 degrees 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.

The pain was not entirely one-sided. We have spoken of the Romans as boreaphobic or fearful of the north, especially in connection with the Cimbric and Teutonic migrations of 100
BC
. A far deeper scar had been left by the sack, almost two centuries earlier, of Rome herself. This followed an overspill from the Celtic movement into the Balkans. Seventy thousand rampaging Gauls looted and burned all Rome except the Capitol; but after a seven-month siege this too was taken. The Romans were obliged to buy off the raiders with a humiliating ransom. A result of this shock was the building of the Servian wall, so-called because its 19th-century discoverers assumed it to be that of King Servius Tullus.
41
This was in huge blocks of dressed tufa, to a width of ten-and-a-half feet and a circuit of seven miles, the impressive relics of which may be seen outside Rome's terminal railway station. A second result was the Celtic settlement of northern Italy which, despite Roman annexation and some colonization, was still in essence Gaulish. So Virgil, from Mantua, was perhaps an ethnic Gaul. Romans would not feel secure until the land beyond the Po – and ultimately most of Celtica – was under total control.

This would take time. Meanwhile, as with other eager consumers on Rome's rim, Greek and Roman merchants were hustling the Gauls toward that ‘prestige goods dependence', in which chieftainship is synonymous with showmanship. It was the same pattern as the later trinkets-and-gunpowder trade on the Gold and Ivory Coasts: luxuries, slaves to pay for them and war to get the slaves. We know the huge size of wine shipments but can only guess at the ills which this prolonged inflow of luxuries and outflow of slaves was inflicting upon the Celtic world.

What of the Britons?
Et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos
42
(and the Britons, wholly sundered from the world) as Virgil put it. This was an isolation more romantic than real. Despite the mystery and metaphor, the less-than-poetic activities of the Roman merchant had already gained a firm hold in southern Britain. The main port appears to have been Hengistbury,
43
but commercial control soon passed to the south-east, where the adoption of the wheat symbol on pre-Roman coins
44
suggests a grain-based export drive, probably to supply Rome's Rhine armies.

On the question of food production: opinion continues to revise this upwards. Strabo said of Gaul that ‘nowhere is untilled except where swamp and forest prevail'.
45
It is not of course known how much swamp and forest there was; but relative to today perhaps more swamp than forest. Mastery of iron had increased the tempo of man's war on woods, with a far tamer terrain than that of prehistoric Germany as the probable result. Agriculture was in a state of revolution. In Britain productive wheat strains such as emmet allowed yields more abundant than was previously imagined.
46
Excavation of Roman forts in bleak, northern locations has in some instances revealed ploughmarks beneath their earliest levels. Though the north and west were still largely pastoral, these final decades of prehistory were a time of transition between grazing and planting. In the Celtic world generally this tendency was reducing the instability feared by Rome, though there was still the occasional migration. Another result of sedentary agriculture was abandonment of the native forts and the realization that wealth could better be pursued through activity in valleys than passivity on hilltops.