While Caesar was still in Britain he had begun to collect materials for a description of the island and of the manners Caesar’s description of Britain. and customs of its inhabitants. Partly, indeed, it may have been based upon the account of the Greek historian, Timaeus, who had himself derived material from the journal of Pytheas;[1405] but certain sentences embodied the results of his own observation. What specially struck him as he marched through the country was the density of the population and the superiority in material civilization of the people of Kent. ‘The population,’ he wrote, ‘is immense: homesteads, closely resembling those of the Gauls, are met with at every turn; and cattle are very numerous.’[1406] His curiosity was excited by the statement, which he had seen in one of his Greek authorities, and the origin of which we have already endeavoured to trace,[1407] that in some of the islands off the mainland there was continuous night for a month about the winter solstice. ‘Our inquiries,’ he tells us, ‘could elicit no information on the subject; but by accurate measurements with a water-clock we ascertained that the nights were shorter than on the Continent.’[1408] It would be useless to guess from what authority he derived the puzzling statement that groups of ten or twelve men had wives in common, brothers sharing with one another and fathers with their sons;[1409] in other words, that one of the British customs was polyandry. Thoughtless commentators have condemned the passage as simply untrue: it has been explained as the outcome of a misunderstanding; and an eminent scholar, with a theory that needed every support, has insisted that it was merely a blundering description of the primitive institution of matriarchy, which he believed to have survived among the Picts of a later time.[1410] We can only be sure that neither matriarchy nor polyandry existed among the dominant Celts; but it is permissible to suppose that certain primitive communities in remote districts had some usage which gave colour to Caesar’s statement. But perhaps the most remarkable feature in his description was the approximate accuracy of his estimate of the size of the island. He was told that its circumference was two thousand miles; and this information was certainly not derived either directly or indirectly from Pytheas, whose estimate, if Strabo has reported it correctly, was monstrously exaggerated.[1411] On the other hand, Caesar, although, like Pytheas, he placed Ireland in its true position, imagined, in common with other geographers who derided Pytheas’s teaching, that the Gallic coast, from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, was roughly parallel with Southern Britain.[1412]
Review of Caesar’s invasions of Britain.
The story of these invasions is not without interest for students of military history. In Britain Caesar was confronted by tactical problems of an entirely strange kind; and he did not dissemble the difficulty which he had experienced in attempting to solve them. The Roman soldiers had been trained to encounter an enemy who fought in close order; if ever, in the stress of unforeseen circumstances, such as those which beset the foragers of the 7th legion, they found themselves cut off from the standards which they were accustomed to rally round, they felt that they were but the units of a mob.[1413] It was not perhaps that they lacked the intelligence which enabled the German soldier in 1870 to adapt himself to new conditions. The coolness with which, in the fearful combat with the Nervii, each legionary shook off the effects of his surprise, and, disentangling himself from the press, ‘fell in by the standard he first caught sight of,’[1414] and fought as steadily as under his own centurion, shows that in Caesar’s soldiers no moral, as no physical, military qualification was wanting. But encompassed by those rushing chariots, assailed by those nimble groups of skirmishers who would not come to sword’s point with them, they found themselves helpless. And when they advanced with ranks closed—for the enemy never succeeded in breaking their formation—the charioteers could easily keep out of the way and concentrate the whole weight of their attack upon the cavalry, which they had lured away from their support. Cassivellaunus handled his levies with commendable skill; and if he did not deserve from Caesar the admiration that makes itself felt in the terse chapters which mirror the tremendous personality of Vercingetorix, he was a leader of no ordinary capacity, raised to his high place by merit alone. For the mistake which gave Trebonius the opportunity of dealing him that staggering blow near the banks of the Stour—the rush of his tribesmen, intoxicated by success, upon the ranks of the legions—not his lack of judgement but their lack of discipline was responsible. And if, instead of disbanding his infantry and following Caesar’s march with his chariots, he had then had the hardihood to let Caesar go his way, and, leaving his cattle, his homesteads, and his granaries to their fate, had hurled his entire force, combined with the levies of the Kentish kings, against the little garrison which held the naval camp, it might have gone hardly with Caesar. For, like the weak cohorts with which Galba strove to hold his camp in the Valais against a host of mountaineers, the garrison would have been compelled to defend themselves without respite against assailants whose numbers enabled them to fight and rest by turns; and if, like Galba’s men, they had attempted to disperse their enemies by a sortie, they would have been attacked in flank and rear by the charioteers and cavalry. Perhaps, indeed, Cassivellaunus saw what to do, but was not sufficiently master of his countrymen to do it. He who can keep in hand an aggregate of levies, shattered by defeat in a regular combat which they should never have fought, must needs be a king of men. Caesar understood the weaknesses of half-civilized tribes, and knew what risks he might fairly run. Just as Vercingetorix was compelled by his tribesmen to let go his hold upon the country of the Bituriges, where he barred Caesar’s advance, and to leave the way open to him by returning to succour their farms, so Cassivellaunus, we may be sure, would not have been able to withstand the clamours that would have bidden him go to the rescue of the threatened dominions of the Catuvellauni and their allies, even if, by sacrificing them, he could have cut the invaders’ communications, and detained him a prisoner in Britain. One may be allowed perhaps to speculate whether Caesar, if he had himself had much experience of British tactics in his first expedition, would have been able, without sacrificing the advantage of discipline, to train his troops in the intervening winter to adapt their formation to the methods of attack which they had to expect; or whether it would have been possible for him then, as it was two years later, to enlist the invaluable aid of German cavalry: but in his second campaign he speedily corrected the mistakes which his sanguine temperament had led him to make; and in his mode of conducting the war he conformed so closely to the maxims which the foremost British soldier of our time, himself an enthusiastic admirer of the Commentaries, has laid down for generals who have to command against uncivilized enemies,[1415] that one might almost suppose those maxims to have been derived from a study of the campaign. By marching in the night to seek out his enemy after his disembarkation, he gained the advantage which is the reward of a secretly-planned, sudden, and swift movement against an undisciplined foe. Instantly following up his success, he taught the fugitives that the strongholds which kept their own countrymen at bay were of little avail against Roman soldiers. As soon as he was free to advance into the interior, he demoralized his enemies by rapidity of movement and incessant energy; and by ruthlessly destroying their crops, seizing the stores upon which they depended for subsistence, and driving off the cattle, which were their most valued possession, he succeeded, within a few weeks, in bringing the campaign, which fortune would not permit him to continue, to a successful conclusion.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RESULTS OF CAESAR’S INVASIONS OF BRITAIN
54 B.C.—A.D. 43.
Caesar’s contemporaries and the Roman writers of succeeding The importance of Caesar’s British expeditions under estimated by his contemporaries and by historians. generations did not over-estimate the results of his British campaigns. The well-known line of Lucan—
Territa quaesitis ostendit terga Britannis[1416]—
is only worth quoting as an instance of the poet’s animosity; but the impression left by the various passages which refer to Caesar’s expeditions is, that public expectation, having been wrought up to a high pitch, had suffered disappointment.[1417] Everybody knew that Caesar had not incurred the vast expense of his second expedition merely for plunder or to deter the Britons from aiding the Gauls: they gathered from his own book that he had aimed at conquest; and they could see no more than that he had failed. Tacitus came nearest to the truth when he said that ‘Julius, though by a successful engagement he struck terror into the inhabitants and gained possession of the coast, must be regarded as having indicated rather than transmitted the acquisition to posterity’.[1418] But even this judgement was based upon imperfect knowledge; and the tendency of modern historians, including the greatest scholar of them all, has been to underrate the importance of what Caesar had achieved.