The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 1

by Theodor Mommsen

Resistance in West Britain.They were masters of the level country, but not of the mountains or of the sea. The west above all gave trouble to the Romans. No doubt in the extreme south–west, in what is now Cornwall, the old nationality maintained itself, probably more because the conquerors concerned themselves but little about this remote corner than because it directly rebelled against them. But the Silures in the south of the modern Wales, and their northern neighbours the Ordovici, perseveringly defied the Roman arms;Mona. the island Mona (Anglesey), adjacent to the latter, was the true focus of national and religious resistance. It was not the character of the ground alone that hindered the advance of the Romans; what Britain had been for Gaul, that the large island Ivernia was now for Britain, and especially for this west coast; the freedom on the one side of the channel did not allow the foreign rule to take firm root in the other. We clearly recognise in the laying out of the legionary camps that the invasion was here arrested. Under the successor of Plautius the camp for the 14th legion was laid out at the confluence of the Tern with the Severn near Viroconium (Wroxeter, not far from Shrewsbury);[105] presumably about the same time, to the south of it, that of Isca (Caerleon = Castra legionis) for the 2d; to the north that of Deva (Chester = Castra) for the 20th; these three camps shut off the region of Wales towards the south, north, and west, and protected thus the pacified land against the mountains that remained free. Into this region the last prince of Camalodunum, Caratacus, threw himself, after his home had become Roman. He was defeated by the successor of Plautius, Publius Ostorius Scapula, in the territory of the Ordovici, and soon afterwards delivered up by the terrified Brigantes, with whom he had taken refuge, to the Romans (51), and conducted with all his adherents to Italy. In surprise he asked, when he saw the proud city, how the masters of such palaces could covet the poor huts of his native country. But with this the west was by no means subdued; the Silures above all persevered in obstinate resistance, and the fact that the Roman general announced his purpose of extirpating them to the last man did not contribute to make them more submissive.Paullinus. The enterprising governor, Gaius Suetonius Paullinus, attempted some years later (61) to bring into Roman power the chief seat of resistance, the island of Mona, and in spite of the furious opposition with which he was met, and in which the priests and the women took the lead, the sacred trees, beneath which many a Roman captive had bled, fell under the axes of the legionaries. But out of the occupation of this last asylum of the Celtic priesthood there was developed a dangerous crisis in the subject territory itself; and the governor was not destined to complete the conquest of Mona.

Boudicca.In Britain, too, the alien rule had to stand the test of national insurrection. What was undertaken by Mithradates in Asia Minor, by Vercingetorix among the Celts of the continent, by Civilis among the subject Germans, was attempted among the insular Celts by a woman, the wife of one of those vassal–princes confirmed by Rome, the Queen of the Iceni, Boudicca. Her deceased husband had, to secure the future of his wife and his daughters, bequeathed his sovereignty to the emperor Nero, and divided his property between the latter and his own relatives. The emperor took the legacy and, in addition, what was not meant for him; the princely cousins were put in chains, the widow was scourged, the daughters maltreated in more shameful fashion. Then came other wrongs at the hands of the later Neronian government. The veterans settled in Camalodunum chased the earlier possessors from house and homestead as it pleased them, without the authorities interfering to check them. The presents conferred by the emperor Claudius were confiscated as revocable gifts. Roman ministers, who at the same time trafficked in money, drove in this way the Britannic communities, one after the other, to bankruptcy. The moment was favourable. The governor Paullinus, more brave than cautious, was just then, as we have said, with the flower of the Roman army in the remote island of Mona, and this attack on the most sacred seat of the national religion exasperated men’s minds as much as it paved the way for insurrection. The old vehement Celtic faith, which had given the Romans so much trouble, burst forth once more, for the last time, in a mighty flame. The weakened and far separated camps of the legions in the west and in the north afforded no protection to the whole south–east of the island with its flourishing Roman towns.

Attack on Camalodunum.Above all, the capital, Camalodunum, was utterly defenceless; there was no garrison. The walls were not completed, although the temple of their imperial founder, the new god Claudius, was so. The west of the island, probably kept down by the legions stationed there, seems not to have taken part in the rising, and as little the non–subject north; but, as frequently occurred in Celtic revolts, in the year 61 on a concerted signal all the rest of the subject territory rose in a moment against the foreigners, the Trinovantes, driven out of their capital, taking the lead. The second commander, who at the time represented the governor, the procurator Decianus Catus, had at the last moment sent what soldiers he had to its protection; they were 200 men. They defended themselves with the veterans and the other Romans capable of arms for two days in the temple; then they were overpowered, and all that was Roman in the town perished. The like fate befell the chief emporium of Roman trade, Londinium, and a third flourishing Roman city, Verulamium (St. Albans, north–west of London), as well as the foreigners scattered over the island; it was a national Vesper like that of Mithradates, and the number of victims—alleged to be 70,000—was not less. The procurator gave up the cause of Rome as lost, and fled to the continent. The Roman army, too, became involved in the disaster. A number of scattered detachments and garrisons succumbed to the assaults of the insurgents. Quintus Petillius Cerialis, who held the command in the camp of Lindum, marched on Camalodunum with the 9th legion; he came too late to save it, and, assailed by an enormous superiority of force, lost in the battle all his infantry; the camp was stormed by the Brigantes. The same fate well–nigh overtook the general–in–chief. Hastily returning from the island of Mona, he called to him the 2d legion stationed at Isca; but it did not obey the command, and with only about 10,000 men Paullinus had to take up the unequal struggle against the numberless and victorious army of the insurgents. If ever soldiers made good the errors of their leader it was on the day when this small band—chiefly the thenceforth celebrated 14th legion—achieved, doubtless to its own surprise, a full victory, and once more established the Roman rule in Britain. Little was wanting to bring the name of Paullinus into association with that of Varus. But success decides, and here it remained with the Romans.[106] The guilty commandant of the legion that remained aloof anticipated the court–martial, and threw himself upon his sword. The queen Boudicca drank the cup of poison. The otherwise brave general was not indeed brought to trial, as seemed to be at first the intention of the government, but was soon under a suitable pretext recalled.

Subjugation of West Britain.The subjugation of the western portions of the island was not continued at once by the successors of Paullinus. The able general Sextus Julius Frontinus first under Vespasian forced the Silures to recognise the Roman rule; his successor Gnaeus Julius Agricola, after obstinate conflicts with the Ordovici, effected what Paullinus had not achieved, and occupied in the year 78 the island of Mona. Afterwards there is no mention of active resistance in these regions; the camp of Viroconium could probably about this time be dispensed with, and the legion thereby set free could be employed in northern Britain. But the other two legionary camps still remained on the spot down to the time of Diocletian, and only disappeared in the later arrangements of the troops. If political considerations may have contributed to this ([p. 190]), yet the resistance of the west was probably continued even later, perhaps supported by communications with Ivernia. Moreover, the complete absence of Roman traces in the interior of Wales, and the Celtic nationality maintaining itself there up to the present day, tell in favour of this view.

Subjugation of Northern Britain.In the north the camp of the 9th Spanish legion in Lindum (Lincoln) formed the centre of the Roman position to the east of Viroconium. In closest contact with this camp in north England was the most powerful principality of the island, that of the Brigantes (Yorkshire); it had not properly submitted, but the queen, Cartimandus, sought to keep peace with the conquerors and showed herself compliant to them. The party hostile to the Romans had attempted to break loose here in the year 50, but the attempt had been quickly suppressed. Caratacus, beaten in the west, had hoped to be able to continue his resistance in the north, but the queen delivered him, as already stated, to the Romans. These internal dissensions and domestic quarrels must have partly influenced the rising against Paullinus, in which we find the Brigantes in a leading position, and which fell with all its weight upon this very legion of the north. Meanwhile the Roman party of the Brigantes, however, was influential enough to obtain the restoration of the government of Cartimandus after the insurrection was defeated. But some years afterwards the patriotic party there, supported by the tidings of revolt from Rome, which during the civil war after the downfall of Nero filled all the west, brought about a new rising of the Brigantes against the foreign rule, at the head of which stood Cartimandus’s former husband, set aside and scorned by her—the veteran warrior Venutius. It was only after prolonged conflicts that the mighty people was subdued by Petillius Cerialis, the same who had fought unsuccessfully under Paullinus against these same Britons, now one of the most noted generals of Vespasian, and the first governor of the island nominated by him. The gradually slackening resistance of the west made it possible to combine one of the three legions hitherto stationed there with that stationed in Lindum, and to advance the camp itself from Lindum to the chief place of the Brigantes, Eburacum (York). But, so long as the west offered serious resistance, nothing further was done in the north for the extension of the Roman bounds; at the Caledonian forest, says an author of the time of Vespasian, the Roman arms were arrested for thirty years.

Agricola.It was Agricola who first, after his work was over in the west, energetically set himself to the subjugation also of the north. First of all, he created for himself a fleet, without which the provisioning of the troops in these mountains, which afforded few supplies, would have been impossible. Supported by this fleet he reached, under Titus (80), as far as the estuary of the Tava (Frith of Tay), into the region of Perth and Dundee, and employed the three following campaigns in gaining an exact knowledge of the wide districts between this frith and the previous Roman boundary on the two seas, in breaking everywhere the local resistance, and in constructing intrenchments at the fitting places; with reference to which, in particular, the natural line of defence which is formed by the two friths running deeply into the land, of Clota (Clyde) near Glasgow, and Bodotria (Forth) near Edinburgh, was selected for a basis. This advance called the whole Highlands under arms; but the mighty battle which the united Caledonian tribes offered to the legions between the two friths of Forth and Tay at the Graupian mountains ended with the victory of Agricola. According to his view the subjugation of the island, once begun, had to be also completed, nay, even extended to Ivernia; and in favour of that course there might be urged, with respect to Roman Britain, what the occupation of the island had brought about with respect to Gaul. Moreover, with an energetic carrying out of the occupation of the islands as a whole, the expenditure of men and money for the future would probably be reduced.

Caledonia abandoned.The Roman government did not follow these counsels. How far personal and spiteful motives may have co–operated in the recall of the victorious general in the year 85, who for that matter had remained longer in office than was usually the case elsewhere, must be left undetermined. The coincidence of the last victories of the general in Scotland and the first defeats of the emperor in the region of the Danube was certainly in a high degree annoying. But for the putting a stop to the operations in Britain,[107] and for the calling away, which apparently then ensued, of one of the four legions with which Agricola had executed his campaigns to Pannonia, a quite sufficient explanation is furnished by the military position of the state at that time—the extension of the Roman rule to the right bank of the Rhine in upper Germany and the outbreak of the dangerous wars in Pannonia. This, indeed, does not explain why, withal, an end should be put to the pressing forward towards the north, and northern Scotland as well as Ireland should be left to themselves.

Probable grounds for this policy.That thenceforth the government desisted not on account of accidents of the situation for the moment, but once for all, from pushing forward the frontier of the empire, and amidst all change of persons adhered to this course, we are taught by the whole later history of the island, and taught especially by the laborious and costly wall–structures to be mentioned immediately. Whether the completion of the conquest was renounced by them in the true interest of the state, is another question. That the imperial finances would only suffer loss by this extension of the bounds was even now urged, quite as much as it formerly was against the occupation of the island itself; but could not be decisive of the matter.[108] In a military point of view the occupation was capable of being carried out, as Agricola had conceived it, beyond doubt without material difficulty. But the consideration might turn the scale, that the Romanising of the regions still free would have to encounter great difficulty on account of the diversity of race. The Celts in England proper belonged throughout to those of the continent; national name, faith, language, were common to both. As the Celtic nationality of the continent had found a support in the island, on the other hand the Romanising of Gaul necessarily carried its influence over to England, and to this especially Rome owed the fact that Britain became Romanised with so surprising rapidity. But the natives of Ireland and Scotland belonged to another stock and spoke another language; the Briton understood their Gaelic probably as little as the German understood the language of the Scandinavians. The Caledonians—with the Iverni the Romans hardly came into contact—are described throughout as barbarians of the wildest type. On the other hand, the priest of the oak (Derwydd, Druida) exercised his office on the Rhone as in Anglesey, but not in the island of the west nor in the mountains of the north. If the Romans had waged the war chiefly to bring the domain of the Druids entirely into their power, this aim was in some measure attained. Beyond doubt at another time all these considerations would not have induced the Romans to renounce the sea–frontier on the north when brought so near to them, and at least Caledonia would have been occupied. But the Rome of that time was no longer able to leaven further regions with Roman habits; the productive power and the progressive spirit of the people had disappeared from it. At least that sort of conquest, which cannot be enforced by decrees and marches, would have hardly succeeded, had they attempted it.

Fortifying of the northern frontier.Their aim therefore was to arrange the northern frontier appropriately for defence, and to this object their military works were thenceforth directed. Eburacum remained the military centre. The wide territory occupied by Agricola was retained and furnished with forts, which served as advanced posts for the headquarters in rear; probably the greatest part of the non–legionary troops were employed for this purpose. The construction of connected lines of fortification followed later. The first of the kind proceeded from Hadrian, The wall of Hadrian.and is also remarkable, in so far as it still in a certain sense subsists to the present day, and is more completely known than any other of the great military structures of the Romans. It is, strictly taken, a military road protected on both sides by fortifications, leading from sea to sea for a length of about seventy miles, westward to the Solway Frith, and eastward to the mouth of the Tyne. The defence on the north is formed by a huge wall, originally at least 16 feet high and 8 feet thick, built on the two outer sides of square stones, filled up between with rubble and mortar, in front of which stretched a no less imposing fosse, 9 feet in depth and 34 feet or more in breadth at the top. Towards the south the road is protected by two parallel earthen ramparts, even now 6 to 7 feet high, between which is drawn a fosse 7 feet deep, with a margin raised to the south, so that the structure from rampart to rampart has a total breadth of 24 feet. Between the stone–wall and the earthen ramparts on the road itself lie the camp–stations and watch–houses, viz. at the distance of about four miles from one another the cohort–camps, constructed as forts, independently capable of defence, with gates opening towards all the four sides; between every two of these a smaller structure of a similar kind with sally–ports to the north and south; between every two of the latter four smaller watch–houses within call of each other. This structure of grand solidity, which must have required as garrison 10,000 to 12,000 men, formed thenceforth the basis of military operations in the north of England. It was not a frontier–wall in the proper sense; on the contrary, not merely did the posts that had already from Agricola’s time been pushed forward far beyond it continue to subsist by its side, but subsequently the line, The wall of Antoninus.about a half shorter, from the Frith of Forth to the Frith of Clyde, already occupied by Agricola with a chain of posts, was fortified in a similar but weaker way, first under Pius, then in a more comprehensive manner under Severus—as it were, as an advanced post for Hadrian’s wall.[109] In point of construction this line was different from that of Hadrian only so far as it was limited to a considerable earthen wall, with fosse in front and road behind, and so was not adapted for defence toward the south; moreover, it too included a number of smaller camps. At this line the Roman imperial roads terminated,[110] and, although there were Roman posts even beyond this—the most northerly point, at which the tombstone of a Roman soldier has been found, is Ardoch, between Stirling and Perth—the limit of the expeditions of Agricola, the Frith of Tay, may be regarded as subsequently still the limit of the Roman empire.

Wars in the 2d and 3d centuries.We know more of these imposing defensive works than of the application that was made of them, and generally of the later events on this distant scene of warfare. Under Hadrian a severe disaster occurred here, to all appearance a sudden attack on the camp of Eburacum, and the annihilation of the legion stationed there,[111] the same 9th legion which had fought so unsuccessfully in the war with Boudicca. Probably this was occasioned, not by a hostile inroad, but by the revolt of the northern tribes that passed as subjects of the empire, especially of the Brigantes. With this we shall have to connect the fact that the wall of Hadrian presents a front towards the south as well as towards the north; evidently it was destined also for the purpose of keeping in check the superficially subdued north of England. Under Hadrian’s successor Pius also conflicts took place here, in which the Brigantes again took part; yet more exact information cannot be got.[112] The first serious attack upon this imperial boundary, and the first demonstrable crossing of the wall—doubtless that of Pius—took place under Marcus, and further attacks under Commodus; as indeed Commodus is the first emperor who assumed the surname of victory Britannicus, after the able general Ulpius Marcellus had routed the barbarians. But the sinking of the Roman power was henceforth just as apparent here as on the Danube and on the Euphrates. In the turbulent early years of Severus’s reign the Caledonians had broken their promise not to interfere with the Roman subjects, and, resting on their support, their southern neighbours, the Maeates, had compelled the Roman governor Lupus to ransom captive Romans with large sums. For this the heavy arm of Severus lighted on them not long before his death; he penetrated into their own territory and compelled them to cede considerable tracts,[113] from which indeed, after the old emperor had died in 211 at the camp of Eburacum, his sons at once of their own accord withdrew the garrisons, to be relieved of their burdensome defence.