The Wall Page 4

  This time there were no celebrations in Rome, no vote of public thanksgiving from the Senate. Caesar’s political enemies had regrouped. The great orator and lawyer Cicero had been in favour of the expedition to Britain but was becoming increasingly uneasy about Caesar’s ambitions. By a stroke of good fortune, Cicero’s brother, Quintus, had been a staff officer in 54 BC and he wrote letters home full of disappointment at the lack of booty. In the Senate Cicero could report that there was no silver to be had, no cartloads of loot, only slaves, hostages and a vague promise of tribute. The pyrotechnics of 55 BC and the daring crossing of the Ocean had turned out to be a damp squib. Added to these disappointments was a sense of non-fulfilment. Some of Caesar’s actions in Britain hinted that he had planned a thorough conquest (of the south, at least) and was in the early stages of establishing a new province. The whispers of insurrection in Gaul which took him back across the Channel seem to have been an unwelcome interruption.

  It would be almost a century before a Roman legionary would again set foot on British soil. Between 54 BC and 50 BC there was almost continuous war in Gaul as Caesar’s army criss-crossed the centre of the province suppressing opposition. After the murder of the great man in 44 BC, civil war turned Rome in on itself, and even when Augustus had established himself as the first emperor, it was to Germany that he directed his legions.

  Propagandists and apologists nevertheless wrote of Britain as though it was a semi-detached satellite, not a formal part of the Empire but certainly within its control. Rome had only to reach out and take the island if the need arose. As a facet of his self-appointed role as Caesar’s heir, Augustus felt that he should complete what his uncle had started. Three expeditions were planned. But in 34 BC, 28 BC and 27 BC other priorities prevented the legions embarking at Boulogne.

  While British kings will not have recognised it, the Greek geographer and historian Strabo’s view was that there was no need for the Romans to cross the Channel and conquer: Britain was too weak to pose any military threat in Europe (perhaps implying that that had not been true in the past), and in any case the tax yielded by trade was already substantial and cost little effort to collect. So why bother?

  Despite this patent political spin, Strabo’s observations had some substance. British kings showed themselves acutely sensitive to events inside the Empire. The Catuvellaunians had ultimately ignored Caesar’s insistence on the independence of the Trinovantes and overrun the kingdom. But when Augustus was in northern Gaul in 16 BC, the Catuvellaunian king, Tasciovanus, thought it prudent to withdraw. And, as disaster struck Rome in AD 9, when three legions were ambushed and annihilated in the German forests, the Catuvellaunians promptly retreated.

  The British economy also saw some profound shifts as it reacted to Roman imperial policy. After the expeditions of 55 BC and 54 BC, the major points of contact with continental commerce moved eastwards. Much evidence of a busy trade in Roman and European goods had been found at Hengistbury Head, near modern Bournemouth, and in the kingdom of the Durotriges. Business appears to have dried up there and the points of entry shift to the Kent and especially the Essex coasts. Around AD 14 Strabo reported that British farmers were producing and exporting a grain surplus, and their customers were almost certainly the Roman legions who had been campaigning in the Rhine basin for more than twenty years. It was much easier to handle bulk commodities like grain by sea and river than overland, and the Essex coast probably thrived as business boomed. British coins minted during this period sometimes have an ear of corn stamped on one side.

  On the other side of the coin the name of a substantial British king occasionally appears, someone whose name was remembered long enough to gain him literary immortality. Shakespeare called him Cymbeline, but the mintmasters spelled his name as Cunobelin. The name means ‘the Hound of Belenos’, a Celtic fire god whose presence flickers in the bonfires of the Beltane celebrations on May Day. King of the Catuvellauni, Cunobelin had extended his grip over the East Midlands and most of the south-east of Britain, and had probably become wealthy through control of the corn trade. He reigned for a long time, probably from AD 5 to AD 41, and appears to have ruled with caution and determination. After the final takeover of the kingdom of the Trinovantes, he moved his capital place from St Albans to Colchester, perhaps to be closer to the source of his wealth. Suetonius, the historian and former Director of Chancery for the Emperor Hadrian, hailed Cunobelin as Britannorum Rex, King of the British, and it may be that his writ ran further than his formal rule.

  In his superb account of the campaigns in Gaul and Britain, Caesar characterised Cunobelin’s kingdom as the richest part of the island. Its people were like the Gauls he knew so well. And indeed there is evidence that recent migrations had crossed from the continent. From the modern country which bears their name, the Belgae settled in the south of Britain, and some historians believe that they supplanted the aristocracies and royal families of several native kingdoms. In eastern Yorkshire a people known as the Parisii came and their burials strongly suggest a recent European origin. The first century BC coinage issued by British kings certainly shows continental influence, although it is uncertain that a money economy operated in any meaningful sense.

  Of those living beyond the fertile cornlands of the southern lowlands, Caesar has been dismissive: The people of the interior for the most part do not sow corn but live on milk and meat and dress in skins. The impression of a more primitive society, one which had had much less contact with Roman Europe and the civilising south, is reinforced by the fact that the peoples of the north were mostly pastoralists. They walked the ancient paths of transhumance, moving their flocks and herds up the hill trails and onto the summer pasture, and then back down to the wintertowns in late autumn. To the city-dwelling Romans, they will have seemed like semi-nomads: primitives who wore skins and lived out on the windy hills. Certainly their summer shielings will have seemed little more than shacks and their more permanent settlements unimpressive.

  TEN BASE

  On memorials and inscriptions on stately buildings the date is often expressed in Roman numerals. It takes time to work out the bits of subtraction and addition, but the basis of ancient arithmetic is very simple. It relates to our hands. Ten fingers (OK, eight fingers and two thumbs) contain most of the basic Roman numbers. I is one finger held up, II is two and so on. V is five and represents the nick between the thumb and index finger. X is ten and is both index fingers crossed. The English counting system is also based on ten but the Celts had a twenty-base system. They used their toes as well. Fichead, in Scots Gaelic, is twenty. Dha fhichead is two twenties or forty (four tens), and ceithir fhichead is four twenties or eighty (eight tens). Simple.

  Such attitudes were engrained in an Italian aristocrat like Julius Caesar. The ploughman always had a greater status than the herdsman. These farmers had formed the backbone of Rome’s old citizen armies, and a heroic figure of the past, the dictator Cincinnatus, had twice laid down his plough to lead campaigns against the enemies of the city, and then returned to his farm once the battles were won. By contrast, tending to flocks and herds was the work of slaves. But to move from Caesar’s cultural biases and simple observations to the assumption of a lesser, unsophisticated society would be a mistake. The kingdoms of the north were powerful, they held territory which the Romans had great difficulty in subduing, and they outlasted them.

  When Cunobelin died in AD 41 (or perhaps AD 42), the political balance tilted. The emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, had followed Tiberius onto the throne. But his short reign was disfigured by crazy, impulsive acts. Not the least of these was a planned invasion of Britain. When Adminius, an exiled son of Cunobelin, arrived at Caligula’s court in AD 39, he persuaded the Emperor that Britain could be easily conquered – and he himself could of course be made king of the Catuvellauni. But as the invasion force mustered at Boulogne a year later, the legionaries refused to embark and mutinied. Caligula’s reaction was bizarre. Here is Suetonius’ account:

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bsp; Finally, as if he was about to embark on a war, he drew up his battlelines and set out his catapults and other artillery on the Ocean shore. When no one had the least idea of what he intended, he suddenly gave the order that they were to gather sea-shells, filling their helmets and the folds of their tunics. These were what he termed spoils owed by the Ocean to the Capitol and Palatine. And, as a monument to his victory, he had a very high tower constructed, which would, like the Pharos, send out beams of light to guide the course of ships by night. As if he had exceeded all previous models of generosity in announcing a donative for the troops of a hundred denarii per man, he told them, ‘Depart in happiness, depart in wealth.’

  It is not difficult to imagine what the soldiers said to each other as they departed with all that wealth and their sea-shells. Despite the charades, it is likely that much of the preparatory work for an invasion had been done. The Roman fondness for organisation will have meant that the legions would not have reached the harbour without all being in readiness – transports, military intelligence and supplies. After Caligula’s inevitable assassination, his successor determined to follow through the aborted plan. In AD 42 Claudius had been seriously threatened by a coup which had only fizzled out at the last minute, and to bolster his authority, he needed a military success. And quickly. A triumph to rival those of his glorious predecessors? Britain fitted the bill. Claudius could complete what had been begun by the deified Julius. Glory waited on the shores of the Channel. And the political weather was favourable.

  With the death of Cunobelin, his sons, Togidumnus and Caratacus, had divided the Catuvellaunian kingdom between them. The crack Roman legions stationed on the Rhine were a formidable concentration of power which needed to be broken up before another ambitious soldier could organise a coup – and an expedition to Britain would do just that. And another dispossessed British king, Verica, gave Claudius a convenient excuse for intervention, a casus belli. In the summer of AD 43, all seemed set fair.

  Four legions had marched to Boulogne, the II Augusta, the IX Hispana, the XIV Gemina and the XX Valeria. They were under the command of a notable general, the former govenor of Pannonia (most of modern Hungary), Aulus Plautius, and he had laid meticulous plans. And then, on the shore at Boulogne, everything unravelled. The legions mutinied again, refusing to board the transports, seemingly terrified of the ancient dangers of crossing the Ocean and passing over the edges of the world. They would not shift.

  All the efforts of Aulus Plautius were in vain. No inducement or threat would move the obdurate legionaries off dry land and onto the transports waiting in the estuary at Boulogne. When news of the mutiny reached Rome, Claudius himself did not take the risk of being humiliated by his own soldiers. Instead he sent a freed slave, Narcissus, who had risen very high in the new imperial civil service. The sheer weight and complexity needed to run Rome’s vast empire demanded the creation of a substantial bureaucracy to deal with it. At first this resembled a vast household department more than an apparatus of state. Freed slaves or freedmen were often appointed by aristocratic families to run their estates and business affairs, and Narcissus’ rise seems to have been very much in that tradition. In any case Claudius could trust men who owed him their position entirely rather than rely on aristocrats who had their own independent means, power base and ambitions.

  When Narcissus arrived at Boulogne, he insisted to Aulus Plautius that he be allowed to address the legions directly. When Roman commanders spoke to their armies, they climbed onto a platform known as a tribunal so that all could see them. Twenty thousand legionaries and perhaps a further 20,000 auxiliaries made up the invasion force of AD 43. So that commanders could be heard by such a huge assembly, they used professional heralds to repeat their words. With specially trained voices, their words could carry far enough. But when Narcissus, a freed slave and not a soldier, appeared on the tribunal usually occupied by aristocratic generals, the soldiers grew angry and the mood darkened. Then someone made a joke. They shouted Io Saturnalia!, a reference to the annual winter festival when slaves exchanged roles with their masters for a day. The affront of being lectured on loyalty by a former slave turned into a piece of daftness, and the atmosphere of tension broke. Amidst the laughter, Narcissus no doubt announced more inducements and made more appeals to nobler instincts, promising glory as the men walked in Caesar’s footprints. Whatever the mixture of motives and circumstances, the embarkation of the invasion fleet began almost at once.

  ROSTRA

  In Latin a rostrum was the beak or prow of a warship. Its English meaning of ‘platform’ developed because of what happened to the beaks of warships captured by the Romans. They set them up as trophies in the Forum and speakers got into the habit of standing on the rostra so that a listening crowd could see them. News was disseminated from these platforms by orators who were often in the service of different generals and senators. Political spin is nothing new.

  Its destination was not to be the beaches near Deal used in 55 BC and 54 BC. Much had been learned about Britain’s geography in the intervening century, and Aulus Plautius’ sea-captains sailed further north, to what is now Richborough in north-east Kent. It looked different 2,000 years ago. The Isle of Thanet was a genuine island, cut off from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel. Richborough was probably also an island, and the fleet entered the eastern end of the narrow channel and made for the island. Again learning from history, once the transports had disembarked, they were moored in the sheltered anchorage. Traces of the ditching dug around the temporary ship-camp have been found. These now lie about a mile inland from the Channel coast.

  Perhaps misled by the news of a mutiny at Boulogne, perhaps awed by the scale of the army wading ashore in the Kentish marshlands, perhaps expecting another fiasco, the British kings at first kept their distance. Here is part of the classical historian Dio Cassius’s excellent account of the invasion of AD 43:

  . . . they melted into the marshes and forests, hoping that they would wear them down in fruitless effort, so that they would sail back after an abortive mission, as had happened in the case of Julius Caesar.

  Plautius experienced a deal of trouble in searching out their forces, but when he did find them, he defeated first Caratacus, and then Togidumnus.

  Advancing further into Kent, probably to the line of the River Medway:

  . . . which the barbarians thought the Romans would not be able to cross without a bridge, and consequently they were encamped on its bank opposite in a rather careless fashion. Plautius sent across the German auxiliaries, who were quite used to swimming easily even in full armour across the swiftest currents. These fell upon the enemy unexpectedly, but they did not shoot mainly at the men: rather they set about wounding the horses which drew the chariots and, when these were thrown into confusion, the mounted warriors were endangered too. Plautius then sent across Flavius Vespasianus (the man who later gained the imperial power), with his brother, Sabinus, who had a subordinate commission on his staff. They too got across the river somehow and killed many of the barbarians who were not expecting them. The rest, however, did not take to flight, but on the next day they joined issue with them again. The battle was indecisive, until Hosidius Geta, who had just missed being taken prisoner, defeated them so soundly that he exceptionally was granted triumphal ornaments, though he had not been consul.

  From there the Britons retreated to the River Thames in the area where it empties into the Ocean and at flood-tide forms a lake.

  In the first century AD great rivers like the Thames had not been channelled between built-up banks, and their courses were often very wide and changeable. At Southwark, for example, opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, the river flowed in a series of channels at least 700 metres further south, creating several river-islands. At high tide the Thames could be as much as a kilometre wide, presenting a real obstacle to an advancing army.

  Aulus Plautius relied on his German auxiliaries. They were Batavian cavalry originating from the Rhine delta, soldiers well u
sed to crossing rivers. These regiments were recruited from recently conquered provinces and were often led by their own chieftains. Roman policy tried to remove fighting men from an area of potential unrest and post them well out of the way elsewhere in the Empire. When the Batavians attacked the British encampment on the far bank of the Medway, they will have shown skills which seem acrobatic to us now. Throwing javelins and probably firing arrows from the backs of their small ponies, they were able to steer them with their legs and stay wedged into the saddle. Stirrups would gallop into European history much later, with the arrival of the Huns in the fourth century. Roman cavalry troopers did expect to fall off or be knocked off because remounting was an essential – and spectacular – part of cavalry training. It is the origin of that well-worn piece of school gymnastic equipment, the vaulting horse. Roman cavalrymen used it to practise remounting both from the back, in classic manner, and also from the sides at various angles. But, unlike vaulting horses, real ones were usually moving in battle, often very quickly. The writer Arrian claimed that well-trained cavalrymen could vault onto their ponies in full armour, while they were cantering – slowly presumably.

  THE REAL BARBARIANS

  The application of modern ethical standards to history is inevitable. Even though historians go to some trouble to avoid value judgements, few fail to characterise Roman culture as sophisticated or civilised, particularly while contrasting it with the more primitive people that the Romans conquered, like the native British who were, well, uncivilised. It is a distinction which does not bear examination. The Romans were utterly barbaric in their ruthlessness, slaughtering hundreds of thousands as a matter of imperial policy. They even took some trouble to make a show out of all that appalling slaughter. When he defeated Decebalus, the Dacian/Romanian king, in AD 105, the Emperor Trajan sent 50,000 captives back to Rome to be butchered by gladiators in the circuses for the amusement of spectators. Other massacres routinely took place all over the Empire, especially when new provinces were incorporated. And the Romans did not hesitate when it came to each other. In the civil wars between Marius and Sulla rival factions murdered many thousands. When the Senate met in 82 BC they could barely hear themselves speak because ‘the clatter of arms and the groans of the dying were distinctly heard in the Temple of Bellona where Sulla was holding a meeting’. Augustus was a famously cold and ruthless killer. When he, Mark Anthony and Lepidus held power as the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC, more than 300 senators and 2,000 other aristocrats were slaughtered. One of them was Cicero and it was ordered that his head and hands be cut off and spitted on spikes displayed on the rostra in the Forum. Very civilised.