The Wall Read online

  While the Batavians and their ponies were swimming the Thames, another part of the army marched upriver and was able to cross by a bridge, perhaps a pontoon bridge anchored at a narrow stretch of the river. At this point in the campaign, Aulus Plautius appears to have got into some difficulty. In pursuits across what sounds like the Essex marshes, he lost a large number of men and was forced to retreat behind the line of the Thames.

  His prudence was also political. So that the Emperor could take an active part in the conquest of Britain and claim a share – the lion’s share – of the glory, Claudius had instructed his commander to pause and send for him before the decisive assault. Sailing from Rome to Marseilles and then travelling overland to either the Biscay or Channel coasts, Claudius arrived on the banks of the Thames to lead his legions into history.

  It was mid August AD 43, high summer in the south of England. The Roman invasion army of four legions and many regiments of auxiliaries was encamped at a place now buried by the buildings of central London. It is very likely that Aulus Plautius had halted at a crossing of the Thames, a vital strategic location which he could secure and protect. When Claudius and the imperial retinue arrived at the gates of the camp, British spies will have been amazed. Not at the detachments of the Praetorian Guard led by their commander, Rufrius Pollio, not at the endless number of clerks, their records and the household servants, not even at the splendour of the imperial court. Those watching the coming of the Emperor will have been amazed at the huge grey creatures plodding up the road from Kent. For Claudius had brought elephants.

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  No Roman ever said ‘Hail Caesar!’. Despite the instincts of scriptwriters of Hollywood ‘sword and sandal’ epics, Gaius Julius Caesar’s friends and colleagues would have called him Gaius. Or sir. Free Roman citizens usually had three names, known as a ‘praenomen’, a ‘nomen’ and a ‘cognomen’. The first was chosen from a traditional list of about twelve possibilities such as Marcus, Lucius, Servius, Gnaeus or Publius. The emperor who built the Wall was Publius Aelius Hadrianus and, before he became too grand, he was called Publius. The nomen was the surname or family name. The dynasty of emperors who followed Caesar was known as the Julians and then the Julio-Claudians. If Hadrian had had children, his dynasty would have been the Aelians. The cognomen was used of people when they were not present and often derived from a nickname. Caesar originally meant ‘hairy’, which was ironic since Julius was bald. Hadrianus might have meant ‘dark one’, or more prosaically that the family originated from Hadria in northern Italy.

  From the time of the Punic Wars and the spectacular campaigns of Hannibal in Italy, war-elephants had been terrifyingly familiar to Roman armies. First used in India and then by Alexander the Great, they had a simple tactical value: fear. Trumpeting, thundering so that the earth shook, elephants could be made to charge – or stampede. It appears that these normally placid great animals were prone to panic. Either way, they could devastate an enemy battleline. Standing at least 3.5 metres at the shoulder, carrying a howdah, directed by a mahout, their mere presence on a battlefield loosened the resolve of the men facing them. But if elephants could be manoeuvred, their charge could be decisive. Hannibal had a favourite, Sarus, meaning ‘the Syrian’, and he was evidently huge and fearless. Charging into enemy lines, he could scatter hundreds of men at a time and, where he led, his herd no doubt thundered after him. The British had seen nothing like Claudius’ elephants.

  Once across the Thames, it is not clear where Aulus Plautius and his emperor led their soldiers. But whatever was done was done quickly – and decisively. Claudius needed to recross the Channel to Gaul before the bad weather of mid to late September. The gaggle of senators who accompanied him to Britain to witness the military success of their great army and its elephants will not have wished to linger in these chilly northern latitudes. The invasion force advanced into Essex.

  This was significant in itself. They had gone further than Caesar – and perhaps they would do better. In the century between the first expeditions and the Claudian invasions, the army had changed and become even more professional. In 55 BC most of the legionaries were Italians but, as the Empire expanded, the legionaries grew more cosmopolitan. And soldiering became more attractive. Binding the army ever closer to his family – what would become the Julio-Claudian dynasty – Augustus improved pay and conditions of service, committing especially to a comfortable retirement. The auxiliary regiments became integral, and the Praetorians were formally established as the imperial guard. One of their prime responsibilities was to police the city of Rome. In the provinces, particular legions and auxiliaries were posted as garrisons on a semi-permanent basis. Of the legions camped on the banks of the Thames in AD 43, the II Augusta, the IX Hispana and the XX Valeria were to remain in Britain for many generations.

  Aulus Plautius and Claudius appear to have run into hard fighting in Essex, although no single pitched, set-piece battle is mentioned in any detail by Dio Cassius: . . . engaging the enemy who had gathered together to block his [Claudius’] advance, he defeated them in battle and captured Camulodunum, which had been the capital of Cunobelin. Now modern Colchester, the city’s ancient name gives a hint of its status as the prime target of the Roman campaign north of the Thames. Camulodunum means ‘the Fortress of the War-God’. Unlike most British Celtic deities, Camulos appears to have been widely worshipped, with dedications as far north as the Clyde. Archaeologists have confirmed that Cunobelin’s capital was a powerful sacred centre dedicated to the war-god worshipped by British warriors, who will have prayed hard for victory. Its fall would have been a catastrophe. Bounded by long runs of ditching which enclosed a sanctuary and a royal enclosure, the compound had an intense, even magical importance. The fires of Celtic festivals will have burned there in the winter’s dark at the turning points of the year. Sacrifices of propitiation will have been offered and all the drama of royal and priestly ritual will have focused behind the ramparts of the Fortress of the War-God.

  The Romans desecrated it immediately. A fort was built by the gates, and inside the sanctuary, the holy of holies, a temple to the cult of the imperial family was ultimately erected. After the shock of defeat, this terrible affront left deep resentments which would continue to simmer.

  Camulodunum was equally attractive for more everyday reasons. What had brought Cunobelin and his court to the Essex coast was the corn trade. From Camulodunum he could control it more readily and reap the harvest of the tax revenues as shiploads left to cross the North Sea and feed the legions on the Rhine. Now Claudius and Aulus Plautius had taken over this vital hub and no doubt the corn grew cheaper. Some of the legions of the Rhine had come to consume it in situ.

  TRIUMPHANT

  The greatest honour on offer to a victorious Roman general was a triumph, a huge procession through the streets of Rome. After Claudius enjoyed his in AD 44, there were fewer and fewer. An ‘ovation’ was a lesser award and, on his return from Britain, Aulus Plautius was granted one – the last, as it happened. But triumphal ornaments appear to have continued. These were insignia given to soldiers involved in a great military success. They could also be awarded medals, called ‘phalerae’, which took the form of metal discs displayed on the chest. A crescent-shaped neckpiece, a residual item of Roman armour, was copied by German armies of the modern era, and soldiers in Hitler’s Wehrmacht wore them as they went into battle.

  There followed a revealing sequence of events. On the triumphal arch erected in Rome in AD 51 to advertise and glorify Claudius’ personal achievement in conquering Britain, the submission of eleven kings is recorded. It is almost certain that this ceremony of subjugation took place after the capture of Colchester. One of these kings had travelled a long way. A later historian sheds a little light: Claudius, wrote Eutropius, added to the Empire some islands lying in the Ocean beyond Britain, which are called the Orkneys. This remarkable reference has been thought to be the result of confusion, probably a scribal error. The Emperor wa
s in Britain for only sixteen days. How could news of Roman victories reach Orkney, and its king travel south to submit to Claudius, inside such a tight timetable?

  Archaeologists have discovered that there was no mistake. Sherds from a Roman amphora have been found at the impressive broch-village of Gurness on the Orkney mainland – and not just any old amphora but a type which had become obsolete by AD 60. These particular containers had been used to transport a special liqueur probably only consumed by aristocrats – and kings. The nearest example of the same type of amphora was found at Colchester, or Camulodunum.

  An Orkney king did come south in AD 43, and his presence at Claudius’ moment of triumph had been planned, even stage-managed. Roman diplomacy had reached far to the north and supplied a grateful emperor with a valuable piece of propaganda, something people would remember. Not only had he exceeded the deeds of the deified Julius in actually conquering the island, Claudius’ power stretched even beyond the Ocean beyond Britain! Right to the very edge of the world. The Orkney submission had no other possible meaning or value, and no doubt rewards far greater than amphorae of fancy liqueur were handed over.

  As Claudius crossed the Channel again and hurried south through Gaul with all the senators who had witnessed the Orkney king bowing before the might of Rome, he will have been savouring the prospect of his triumph. Through the streets of the city and the cheering crowds it would glitter and shimmer in the sunshine. On a chariot the victorious emperor would stand, a laurel wreath held over his head by a man who whispered Remember! Thou art mortal. Claudius took the title Britannicus and settled down to govern his vast territories with far more authority than he could have imagined when the Praetorian Guard dragged him onto the throne two years before. News of the conquest of Britain and the islands beyond it crackled through the length and breadth of the Empire, triumphal arches being erected as far east as Asia Minor. A letter, written in Greek, from Claudius survives. It thanks a troupe of travelling acrobats for a golden crown they sent him.

  Britain had become Britannia, part of the Empire, its symbolic importance great, and its place in imperial history a turning point – for Claudius at least. The new province would last almost four hundred years, but not before a struggle.

  2

  Britannia Barbarica

  Great events not only make history, they make historians. When the Persian Empire overran the Greek towns of what is now Turkey’s Aegean coastlands, it looked certain that the swarming armies of Darius and Xerxes would overwhelm Athens, Thebes, Corinth and Sparta. And yet, at the beginning of the fifth century BC, these small states combined to turn back the mighty tide of Persia. At Marathon in 490 BC the infantry of Athens and Plataea astonished the Great King – and themselves – when they stopped the eastern juggernaut in its tracks. Ten years later the heroic delay won by the Spartans at Thermopylae allowed the Greek navy, led by the Athenian admiral, Themistocles, to obliterate the Persian triremes in the narrow waters of the Bay of Salamis. And finally at Plataea a huge Greek army, perhaps 60,000 heavily armoured warriors, annihilated the invaders in 479 BC.

  A turning point in world history, the outcome of the Persian Wars was remarkable. Apparently insurmountable odds were overcome by the determination of Greek infantry and sailors drawn from an alliance of small towns and by the brilliance of their generals and admirals. It was a story full of heroes and heroics – and it needed telling and explaining.

  The original meaning of the Greek word histor was something like ‘eye-witness’, and historie were ‘enquiries’. When Herodotus of Halicarnassus (now the city of Bodrum on the Turkish coast) began to write down his Histories, his Enquiries, he was moved to do it by the enormity of the world-changing events which swirled around the Aegean in his own lifetime. Taking testimony from many eye-witnesses and ranging widely over the eastern Mediterranean, he compiled the first coherent, and highly idiosyncratic, narrative of real events: what came to be recognised as the first history book.

  In the eighth century BC Homer had composed his immense epic poems on the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are founded on myth-history. Gods, heroes and mere mortals constantly interact, and events are often governed by the supernatural. Although it turned out that Homer’s blood-soaked epics were at least sparked by real events, they were not historical. There are no datable events, there is very little sense of the passage of time (when Odysseus returns to Ithaca after a twenty-year absence, it appears that neither he nor his wife, Penelope, are a day older than when they parted) and cause and effect almost always have a divine hand somewhere in the process. But Homer’s epics do have much to say about the atmosphere of the Aegean in the eighth century BC. As battle rumbles below the topmost towers of Troy, human relationships are well and sometimes convincingly realised. Homer tells his listeners what the society of the day admired and what it despised. Courage and manly honour were the virtues of a heroic age. Ingenuity and resourcefulness were also pre-miated, and the power of these ancient narratives is so enduring that the Iliad and the Odyssey are still regularly converted into films and novels. Not historical documents – but the stuff of history nevertheless.

  THE HISTORY MEN

  Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus kept busy. In addition to writing a defining history, The Caesars, he was also a civil servant. Under the Emperor Trajan he held the first of three important posts, Secretary in charge of literary matters. Then he took over responsibility for libraries and, under Hadrian, he was Secretary for correspondence. Usually known as The Twelve Caesars, his history of the early Empire was by turns informative, critical and partial. He praised Augustus, and damned Nero and Domitian. The book is dedicated to his friend, the Commander of the Praetorian Guard, Gaius Septicius Clarus. When Hadrian dismissed them both, they were almost certainly close friends and perhaps allies. Suetonius also knew other historians, Pliny the Younger and Tacitus. Rome may have ruled the Mediterranean and western Europe, but its governing caste was small and, as often, everyone of substance knew everyone else. The difference was the power of the pen, or stylus, and despite being sacked or sent into disfavour, Suetonius had, literally, the last word.

  The Iliad runs to 15,000 lines and the Odyssey to 12,000 but, despite this, the poems were almost certainly recited entirely from memory. Professional reciters, known as rhapsodes, performed them with music and probably some dramatic accompaniment. With the steady beat of its metre, the use of alliteration, repetition and rhyme, poetry is designed to be remembered, each line suggesting and retrieving the next. Choruses were a device to involve the listeners but also to allow time for the rhapsodes to summon up the next verse or passage.

  The art of memory is mostly lost now. We admire people who are able to speak in public without notes or a prepared text. We are astonished when someone can recall details of a story such as numbers, dates and quantities without reference to any written data. The ancients would have thought nothing of that. In the long past, very little was written down and almost everything of importance (genealogy, possessions, the cycle of the agricultural year) was held securely in memory. And that is what made Herodotus exceptional. He wrote down his enquiries, what his eye-witnesses could remember. The Histories were almost certainly performed at public readings. It is thought that no more than 20 per cent of Greeks were literate. In fact, some time around 443 BC Herodotus himself arrived in Athens, and it seems that he was paid handsomely in silver for giving readings of his work. But, because they were not structured like poetry, not meant to be committed to memory, the Histories had a written form from the very beginning. This made for a different sort of transmission. Many texts of Herodotus were copied onto papyrus rolls. The story of the extraordinary victory of the Greeks over the tyrannical Persians must have been very popular – and very lucrative for the author. As the texts multiplied so did their chances of survival. By contrast, memory changes, dilutes and is adapted to changing circumstance, but Herodotus’ writings were fixed in time, more or less at the momen
t when he dipped a stylus in a pot of ink. And so what has come down to us now, whispering across twenty-five centuries, is a largely authentic voice, a collector of historie, of enquiries.

  Across the rest of Europe in the fifth century BC important events also unfolded. Decisive battles were fought by mighty armies, and against the odds unexpected victories were gained. Strategists as astute as Themistocles succeeded in out-thinking adversaries and warriors as heroic as the Spartans who fought similarly selfless rearguard actions at Thermopylae. But we know little or nothing of them. No Herodotus wrote of their mighty deeds. No one did. But because no epic tales of great generals and their armies survive from fifth-century Spain, France, Germany and Britain, that does not mean that western European societies were somehow backward, or less sophisticated – only that they were different. And that their history was held in memory, not written down, and that it did not survive.