Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (28 page)

A second attempt led to a Roman victory at Tapae, only thirty-five miles short of the Dacian capital. Success at last. But news of a mutiny on the Rhine eclipsed Domitian's moment of glory and sent him scurrying north. This was the rebellion of Antoninus Saturninus, who blackmailed the legionaries of the Mainz garrison into supporting him by sequestering their life savings, deposited in the regimental strongroom. However, the rest of the Rhine army stayed loyal and the rising collapsed. For a second time Domitian marched against the Chattans, who had dared support Saturninus. At this unfavourable juncture the Danube again erupted with the Marcomanns or south Germans, probably prompted by Decebal, attacking from today's Slovakia.

Domitian had now reigned nine years in an accelerating nightmare of reverses, rushing between Rhine and Danube in a manner prophetic of the later empire. Rich in promise, his wars had been poor in results, with no prizes to assuage his insecurity or soothe the envy which corroded his spirit. He had backed the wrong horse. He could, like Claudius, have chosen to visit Britain and reap the triumph of Agricola's 600-mile advance, crowned by victory on the ancient world's northernmost field. Instead the setbacks tipped him into darkness, creating, during his last six years, a time when Rome spoke in whispers, senators chose to potter on their estates and writers pretended their muse had forsaken them.
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‘He was suspicious of all mankind' (commented Dio, from the safety of a later age).
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Dio also described
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how he invited senators and knights to banquets conducted in near-darkness, with the guests' places at table written on imitation gravestones, served by black-painted slaves, with black tableware and the accoutrements of a funeral feast; the host droning on about topics related to death while his guests reclined in shivering silence. Informers were ubiquitous, show-trials frequent, murders and enforced suicides a daily event. Domitian was even said to have executed a man because he had a map of the world painted on his bedroom wall and could be accused of ‘dreaming dangerously'!
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What of Agricola, commander of the only successful front who, in six years, had doubled the area of Britain under Roman control? His successes had coincided with Domitian's early disappointments, fortunately not quite as dangerous a time as these later years. Here was a dutiful but ingenuous soldier, nearing the end of a long and hazardous mission during which every congenial voice had fallen silent and every friendly door had closed.

These achievements, though played down in Agricola's despatches, were received by Domitian with a mixture of pretended pleasure and disguised disquiet. He knew that his own recent Triumph over the Germans had been a fraud and the subject of ridicule. In place of captives he had purchased slaves who could be kitted out to look like prisoners of war. By contrast here was the genuine article: thousands of casualties inflicted and a decisive victory for all to see. The very thing the emperor most dreaded: that a private citizen's name should outshine his own!
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It was time for Agricola to return, entering Italy on tiptoe lest his coming should be greeted with a warmth Domitian himself had been unable to inspire. Then, ‘so that his entry into the city might not excite attention, he avoided all friends, slipping into Rome by night and by night visiting the palace, as required. There, after a perfunctory peck and not a word spoken he quickly melted into the crowd of creeps round the throne.'
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Willy-nilly our general was a national hero. Triumphal ornaments were awarded and the regulation statue put in hand. Spite bided its time. Though only forty-five, Agricola would never work again. Prudently he withdrew to Fréjus and obscurity, dying there at fifty-four (three years before Domitian), probably poisoned by an imperial courier. ‘For the remainder of his life Agricola lived not only in disgrace but in actual need, just because the things he had accomplished were too great for a general. That is why Domitian finally had him murdered, despite giving him the triumphal ornaments.'
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Tacitus leaves his hero with a phrase famous for its bitterness:
perdomita Britannia et statim omissa
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(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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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 memoriae
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(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.
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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.
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EPISODE FOUR

The Artist

I
N 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. The 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.