Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (25 page)

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 half 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

Boudicca now struck swiftly at the lightly guarded towns of an already Romanized South-East. ‘Avoiding fort and strong-point, the rebels headed for where the booty was richest and protection poorest; itching to chop heads, stretch necks, burn and crucify; as if taking revenge now for the retribution which would come later. The Roman provincial dead were put at 70,000.'
79
Colchester, St Albans and London were destroyed and their Roman or pro-Roman populations butchered before Boudicca was defeated, perhaps in Northampton-shire or elsewhere in the West Midlands. The queen and her family took poison. Such were Agricola's experiences at twenty years of age and his first taste of service in Britain.

In due course there followed the Year of the Four Emperors, with the heavy drafting of British troops to fight in the civil war. Those who stayed held steady; perhaps too busy with Wales to become involved in continental politics. None the less, reduction of the army's numbers would have dangerous repercussions in the North. The Brigantians were, according to Tacitus, the biggest British tribe, whose territory covered almost the entirety of what is now northern England, from Peak to Solway and from coast to coast. They were shepherds and stock rearers, ruled by a rich nobility. Their forts were few but impressive, like that on the summit of Ingleborough; or the sprawling, lowland complex of Stanwick, in North Yorkshire, seemingly enlarged in panic at Rome's advent to 730 acres! From here, or perhaps from Almondbury, near Halifax, Queen Cartimandua ruled in friendly alliance with Claudius and Nero. However, Brigantian politics included the usual anti-Roman faction and
AD
69, Rome's hour of weakness, saw a successful
coup,
led by Venutius, the queen's ex-husband. Again one senses the stress set up by Rome's proximity; sundering husband and wife as it had Armin and his brother. Venutius now thought to assume the mantle of Boudicca as leader of British resistance. He might have been less eager had he reflected that this same year, which brought him to power, also called to the purple the master-gunner, whose Wessex campaign of a generation earlier had consigned so many British strongholds to oblivion. Vespasian did not return to Britain in person but would field his strongest side in order to quicken a conquest begun twenty-six years earlier and whose termination was exasperatingly overdue. Accordingly he appointed three successive soldier-governors of unusual capability: Cerialis, Frontinus and Agricola, who would respectively take in hand the North of England, Wales and most of Scotland.

Petilius Cerialis was the emperor's son-in-law, a dashing general in the Caesarian mould, whose success in
AD
49 had beaten Vespasian a path to the throne. He was first sent to put down a revolt on the lower Rhine. Tacitus describes his raffish and unorthodox character, careless of the trappings of discipline and a brilliant improviser. There had been a whiff of scandal. The enemy attacked while Cerialis was out of camp spending the night with a local woman. However ‘luck always covered his lapses'. It was in a speech to the Germans that Tacitus attributed to him that crisp appraisal of the Roman system: ‘no peace without armies, no armies without pay, no pay without taxes.'
80

Cerialis took Agricola to Britain as one of his legionary commanders. It was his second tour and he was now thirty-one. We know little of the campaign, doubtless because Tacitus wished to underplay this part of the biography, keeping his best cards till its hero would himself be governor. We do, however, know that Cerialis sealed off Wales then headed north, defeating Venutius on some unrecorded field.
81
On the dreary Stainmore Pass is a legion-size, twenty-acre marching camp, cut in two by the modern road (A66), whose square shape and eleven gateways suggests this advance. With two similar camps in the upper Eden and Petteril Valleys, these point straight toward Carlisle, where Cerialis' drive is thought to have ended. The IXth
Hispana
legion now moved up from Lincoln to York, though there is no evidence for a widespread occupation of the North at this date.

Next came Roman Britain's tenth governor, Julius Frontinus, author of two books on the art of war:
De Rei Militari
(Matters Military) and
Strategematon
(Strategems). The former and more important is lost. The latter, its supplement, gives examples of military ruses said to illustrate the principles of the earlier book. These are, in our view, largely nonsense. Nevertheless there was nothing nonsensical about his struggle in South Wales, where the resurgent Silurians had drawn the conclusion, from Vespasian's campaign of vivid memory, that Rome was better fought by taking to the hills than by waiting in the hillforts. It was this adoption of guerrilla tactics, plus Rome's preoccupation with civil war, which lengthened the Welsh involvement to thirty years and thirteen known offensives.

Pacification of Snowdonia, followed by the second invasion of Anglesey, was left until Agricola's first year as governor. His Welsh conquest employed the network method, in which successive mountain blocks were isolated by building roads in the surrounding valleys and placing forts at key intersections.
82
Agricola would also apply this to southern Scotland; which helps explain the large number of forts and immense road mileages with which he is credited. First, however, Wales and its borders received over 700 miles of road and thirty-eight forts or fortlets, plus strategic supervision from
Legio XX Valeria Victrix
at Chester and
II Augusta
at Caerleon-on-Usk (near Newport, Gwent); though all would be held in sketchy fashion during the subsequent offensive into north Britain.