In the year 78, the Emperor Vespasian appointed as his legatus the most celebrated and probably the greatest of the governors of Britain, Gnæus Julius Agricola. Verging as he was upon his fortieth year he was in the very prime of his matured and disciplined strength. He knew Britain well, having served when quite a young man as tribune (a rank nearly corresponding to our lieutenant) under Suetonius Paulinus, and having probably heard the clamour of the barbarian multitude who crowded round the chariot of Boadicea. Again, ten years later, he had been sent over to Britain to confirm the doubtful loyalty of the Twentieth legion. Since then he had been governor of the important province of Aquitaine, afterwards consul, and he was actually holding the distinguished and well-paid office of Pontifex Maximus when he was appointed to the British command. What was more important for his future fame and for our knowledge of the history of Britain, he had given his daughter in marriage to that master of grave historic style, shot with indignant epigram, Cornelius Tacitus. When the new governor landed in Britain, both soldiers and natives thought that, the summer being now nearly ended, there would be no more fighting that year. Not so, decided Agricola. The Ordovices, dwellers in North Wales, had lately almost destroyed an ala (squadron) of cavalry stationed within their borders. This insolence, it was felt, must be chastised, and the might of Rome speedily displayed by the new legatus, who at once marched against them with a moderate force of legionaries and allies. The Ordovices refused to descend into the plain and fight there on equal terms. Agricola having climbed the hills of Denbighshire at the head of his troops, defeated and all but destroyed that clan of mountaineers. He looked westwards to the sacred Isle of Anglesey, once conquered by his old general Suetonius, but almost immediately abandoned on account of the terrible tidings from Camulodunum. He had no ships in which to cross the Menai Straits, but he had among his auxiliary troops men, probably from the mouths of the Rhine and the Waal, expert swimmers and skilled in finding possible fords, and these men laying aside the cumbrous loads which the Roman soldier was accustomed to carry, dashed into the stream, appeared on the shore of Mona and received the submission of the surprised and terrified islanders, who thought that till ships appeared in the straits they at least were safe from conquest. Having thus displayed his power, the governor now set himself to win the hearts of the natives by reforms in the administration, especially the financial administration, and redress of grievances. The burdens which rested upon the provincials of Britain were of two kinds, the tributum and the annona: the former a payment in money which was, it may be presumed, remitted by the revenue officers direct to Rome; the latter a payment in kind of the various stores needed for the sustenance of the army—fodder, lard, fish, firewood, but pre-eminently corn; and these things would of course not be sent out of the country but consumed in the various camps and cities where the soldiers were quartered. There was some good work to be done by Agricola in equalising the assessments to tributum, or rendering them proportionate to the ability of the British town or village responsible for its payment. But the chief abuses seem to have arisen in connexion with the annona. Fraudulent revenue officers would probably contract for the harvest on low terms before it was reaped, would gather it into the granaries, close the doors and laugh in the faces of the unhappy natives who were ordered to furnish so many bushels of corn and could only comply with the order by buying it from them at their own extortionate price. Then they would purposely fix the place where the annona had to be delivered, as far off as possible, in districts traversed by the poorest of roads. All these various abuses were, we are told, at once removed or greatly mitigated by the firm hand of Agricola.
It was not enough to remove causes of complaint. He would also win over the natives to positive affection for the Roman rule. He was constantly urging all the wealthier Britons to come into the towns and to take part in building operations. Everywhere temples, market-places, well-built houses were rising, reared by British natives, and pledges for their future loyalty. He gathered round him the sons of the chiefs, had them instructed in liberal arts, praised their aptness to learn at the expense of their Gaulish contemporaries, listened before long to eloquent declamations, delivered, of course, in the Latin tongue, by young Britons, gracefully clad in the Roman toga. The bath and the luxurious banquet offered their attractions not in vain to the late hunter of the forests, and as Tacitus sarcastically observes “the simple folk called that civilisation (humanitas) which was really the beginning of slavery”.
The summer of A.D. 79, the second year of Agricola’s command, seems to have been chiefly occupied in measures for completing the military occupation of the recently conquered territory, that is, probably, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Northumberland, the country of the Brigantes. “He himself chose the site of the camps; he himself reconnoitred the forests and the estuaries” (probably of the Tees, the Wear and the Tyne, and perhaps also Solway Firth), “and meanwhile he gave the enemy no rest, but was for ever harassing them by sudden excursions, and when he had terrified them sufficiently, then by holding his hand he gave them an inducement to desire peace. In consequence hereof many native states which up to that time had treated the empire on a footing of equality now gave hostages and laid aside their animosity. They found themselves surrounded with forts and garrisons, and all was done with so much science and system as had never before been applied to any newly conquered part of Britain.” It is possible that Eburacum, which at this time, or very soon after, became the headquarters of the Ninth legion, was one of the strong places thus founded or fortified by Agricola.
The record of the year 80, the third year of Agricola’s command, is one of the most interesting to all north-country Englishmen, but it is unfortunately also one of the most obscure. It will be well to quote the words of Tacitus as they stand, without attempting conjectural amplification. “The third year of expeditions opened up to us new tribes, all the nations up to the estuary called Tanaus having their lands laid waste. The enemy cowed by these operations did not dare to harass the army, though it was buffeted by fierce tempests, and thus a respite was afforded which was employed in building more forts. It was observed by military experts that no general ever showed greater ability in his choice of suitable sites for such defences. No fort founded by Agricola was ever stormed by hostile violence, or surrendered, or abandoned by its fugitive garrison: yet frequent sallies were made from them, for they were fortified against a tedious siege by a yearly renewed stock of provisions. This gave the defenders courage for the winter; each garrison relied on itself for its safety, and the enemy were driven to despair by the uselessness of their attacks. For aforetime they had been wont to recoup themselves for the losses of the summer by the successes of winter, but now they found themselves repelled in both seasons alike.” We have here evidently to deal with an extensive system of fortification; but we are provoked by being unable precisely to identify the region in which it took place. What is the meaning of the estuary called Tanaus “up to which Agricola ravaged the land”? It is certainly not the Tay (which was indicated by the corrupt reading Taum); it may be the Firth of Forth; only that estuary is immediately after called Bodotria. The little Scottish river Tyne near North Berwick has a kind of estuary, and Mommsen’s conjecture that this is the Tanaus of Tacitus would have much probability, were it not so near to the far mightier estuary of the Forth that it is difficult to imagine any one choosing it as a landmark. The better known Tyne of Newcastle would be clearly the strongest claimant if the course of the narrative did not seem to have already carried us to the north of it. No piece of water would meet the geographical condition better than the splendid estuary of the Tweed, so well fitted by nature for a limitary stream, but no other passage of any author has been found in which any name resembling Tanaus has been applied to that river. In the next year (A.D. 81) Agricola undoubtedly reached and fortified the narrow neck of land between Clyde and Forth (Clota and Bodotria); but the point practically at issue is this: “May we understand that we have in this passage of Tacitus a description of the building by Agricola of some at least of the forts between Tyne and Solway on the line which was afterwards marked by the Roman wall?” It has been often suggested, and in the opinion of the present writer with some probability, that we may. In that case great additional interest attaches to Chesters, Housesteads and others of the ruined Roman stations in Northumberland, when we think that they may have been planned by the exceptional military genius of Agricola.
With the three remaining campaigns of this general (A.D. 82–84) we have no special concern, as they were all fought beyond the limits of England. We must not follow him as he cruises about the Kyles of Bute and the Mull of Cantire, gazes across to Ireland (an island, Tacitus thinks, with better harbours and more frequented by merchants than England), nor discuss his opinion, often expressed to his son-in-law, that with one legion and a moderate supply of auxiliaries he could have added Hibernia to the empire. Nor must we linger over Tacitus’ celebrated description of the great fight on the Mons Graupius,[14] and the spirited war-speech of the Caledonian hero Galgacus, which according to Tacitus preceded the encounter. Almost immediately after this victory—perhaps more dearly bought and less decisive than would appear on the surface of the Tacitean narrative—Agricola, whose term of command was already of exceptional length, was recalled to Rome. The Emperor Domitian’s jealousy of a soldier whose admiring legions might insist on proclaiming him as a candidate for the empire, may have been, as Tacitus suggests, the sole reason for his recall; but nearer danger was also threatening Rome from the region of the Danube, and, as Mommsen has pointed out, one of the British legions was actually recalled for service in Pannonia. True statesmanship as well as mean personal jealousy may have prompted the recall of so adventurous a general from the scene of his triumphs. Agricola made no attempt to resist his supersession, but returned to Rome, lived there as a private but harassed citizen, declining the governorship of Syria (which was offered to him with a hint that it would be dangerous to accept it), and died at Rome in the fifty-fourth year of his age on August 23, A.D. 93. The suggestions of foul play and of poison stealthily administered by order of Domitian are mentioned, but hardly endorsed, even by the suspicious pen of his son-in-law. That son-in-law was absent from Rome at the time of his death, but describes the deathbed scene from the reports of the bystanders; and his farewell to the departed spirit of the beloved one, the celebrated peroration of the Life of Agricola, is one of the most beautiful things in Roman literature.
CHAPTER V.
THE ROMAN OCCUPATION.
With the departure of Agricola the literary history of Roman Britain comes to an end. For three centuries longer the legions were to remain in our island, and the buildings which they reared, the altars which they inscribed, the roads which they constructed, tell us something of the life which they led during that long space of time, as long as the whole period that has elapsed from Elizabeth’s days to ours. Archæology has much to tell us concerning it, but history is almost altogether silent. A few sections of Dion Cassius, some confused notices in the Historia Augusta, a page or two of Ammianus Marcellinus, are practically all that is left to us of the written history of our country from Agricola to Stilicho. We need not here discuss the causes of a silence so tantalising and so irremediable; how far it may have sprung from Roman contempt of a distant and mist-enveloped island, how far from a decay of courage and hopefulness in the Romans themselves, symptoms of the impending ruin of their empire; it is enough that the pages are for us left blank and can now never be filled.
The greatest monument of Roman power in Britain and that which has yielded the most fruitful results to archæology is the Roman Wall between the two estuaries of Tyne and Solway. Almost all that we know of Roman life in Britain during the second century centres round this one great work. Towards the end of the first century a change took place in the organisation of the defence of the empire on the frontiers. Hitherto the republic, and after it the empire, had been satisfied to keep a strong body of troops in all the imperfectly conquered provinces, and to plant well-garrisoned castles near the river or the range of mountains on the other side of which were the barbarians of Europe or Africa, or the hostile monarchies of Asia. Soon after the death of Nero a different system was adopted, involving the formation of a definitely marked boundary which when not protected by very strong natural barriers was guarded by an actual wall of stone or earth upon which the garrisoned fortresses were strung, like beads on a chain. Not only in Britain are traces of these limiting walls to be found, but also in Germany, between the Lower Rhine and the Danube, and in the Dobrudscha on the western shore of the Black Sea: and there is reason to believe that a similar wall of defence shut out the barbarians of Mount Aures who threatened the provincials of Roman Africa.
“The real authors of the frontier system were the Flavian and Antonine Emperors, and the period extending from the accession of Vespasian to the death of Marcus Aurelius, or, roughly, from 70 A.D. to 180 A.D., witnessed its complete organisation. The interest of these emperors in the matter was no doubt quickened by the growing anxiety, an anxiety unknown to the Augustan age, but perceptible in Tacitus, as to the increasing pressure from without upon the empire.... It is well for students of the British frontier to remember that the emperor with whose name the organisation of the imperial frontier system is most closely connected is Hadrian.”[15]
There has been much discussion about this matter. As we shall see, there is good reason for connecting the name of a later emperor, Severus, with the building of the wall, but, on the whole, the testimony of inscriptions and the labours of archæologists tend to confirm the clear statement of the biographer Spartianus (writing, it is true, a century and a half after the event): “Hadrian visited Britain, in which island he corrected many things that were amiss, and was the first to draw a wall across for eighty miles, in order to divide the barbarians and the Romans”. In all the long list of Roman emperors it would be hard to find a more fascinating figure than that of this great wall-builder. By no means the best of his class, far surpassed in moral excellence by Trajan, Antoninus and Marcus, but removed by an immeasurable distance from the worst, from such men as Nero, Domitian and Commodus; architect, artist, author, and, above all things, indefatigable traveller, Publius Ælius Hadrianus united a truly Greek versatility and brilliancy of intellect to all the Roman’s strong sense of duty towards the great Res Publica, and willingness for Rome’s sake to sacrifice many of the sensual gratifications in which his soul only too clearly delighted. The traveller who wanders for hours through the ruins of the vast collection of luxurious palaces which is called the Villa Hadriani, or who, in sunny Athens, sees the arch which bears the proud inscription, “On this side the city of Theseus, on that the city of Hadrian,” can in some measure realise the self-denial which must have been involved in Hadrian’s presence with the legions during the setting out of eighty Roman miles of wall[16] across the misty moors of Northumberland and Cumberland.