The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (10 page)

the battle of Mons Graupius in approximately a.d. 84. Tacitus claimed

Agricola’s forces slaughtered ten thousand Caledonians while losing

only 360 auxiliary soldiers.27

This seemingly decisive victory brought little long-term security

to Roman Britain. Agricola therefore gave up most of his northern

territory and withdrew to a fortifi ed frontier at the edge of the modern Scottish border. Beyond this line, the Romans relied on military

patrols, diplomacy, and subsidies to control the defi ant Caledonians,

which may well have been the most effective and economical strategy for dealing with the decentralized peoples across the frontier. It

is likely that Emperor Domitian ordered the retreat because the less

Roman

Britain 47

productive highland zones in Wales and Scotland were not worth the

cost of occupation.

Even after Agricola’s retreat, chronic resistance by tribal peoples

in the highlands and across the northern frontier was expensive and

diffi cult to contain. Consequently, the military garrison for Roman

Britain remained at roughly forty thousand men. This force, which

amounted to a signifi cant portion of the standing Roman army, would

have required eight thousand to twenty thousand metric tons of food

per day.28 Claudius’s imperial triumph thus turned out to be enormously expensive, and it is not surprising that Nero seriously considered withdrawing from Britain when he came to power in a.d. 54.

He did not, but the Romans were never able to reduce their British

garrison signifi cantly, and it remained a politically destabilizing drain

on the empire’s resources for the rest of the imperial era.

While hostile frontiersmen remained an ongoing threat to the

northern imperial border, it is far from clear how the people of occupied lowland Britain reacted to becoming Roman subjects. Some

scholars have argued that southern British elites were already so

romanized in the immediate preconquest era that they had little real

incentive to resist the invasion. Contemporary apologists maintain

that many Britons recognized the civilizing benefi ts of Roman rule

and welcomed the opportunity to join the empire.29

Perhaps, but there is no denying that some of Rome’s closest British clients revolted during the initial decades of Roman rule. The Iceni,

possibly one of the eleven kingdoms that submitted to Claudius, and

the Trinovantes, whose protection provided the excuse for the Caesarian invasion, were the most serious threats. Located in the Thames

region and modern East Anglia, these were two of the most romanized client states in all of Britain. The Iceni fi rst rebelled in a.d. 47

when the Roman governor ordered them to disarm. Imperial forces

crushed the revolt after storming their
oppidum
, but fourteen years

later the Iceni and the Trinovantes launched one of the gravest uprisings in the early principate. Led by the Icenian queen Boudicca, the

rebels sacked and burned the colony at Camulodunum, the Roman

settlement at the old Catuvellaunian
oppidum
at Verulamium (St.

Albans), and the commercial center of Londinium (London).

The Romans were caught entirely off guard by the scope and

intensity of the revolt. The rebels destroyed part of the Ninth Legion

48 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

as it attempted to defend Londinium. At Verulamium a small band

of legionnaires held out in Claudius’s temple for two days before the

Britons massacred them. All told, Cassius Dio recorded that the rebels tortured and killed eighty thousand Romans and Roman allies:

“They hung up naked the noblest and most distinguished women and

then cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, in order to

make the victims appear to be eating them; afterwards they impaled

the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the entire body.

All this they did to the accompaniment of sacrifi ces, banquets, and

wanton behaviour.”30 For a time it looked as though Rome might lose

control of Britain, but the failure of the rebels to attract support from

other
civitates
gave Governor Suetonius time to bring in reinforcements, crush the uprising, and undertake merciless reprisals.

Cassius Dio attributed the Boudiccan revolt to Roman oppression.

Writing at least a century later, it is highly unlikely that he had access

to fi rsthand accounts of the rebellion. Nevertheless, he drafted a speech

for the Icenian queen, whom he depicted as terrifying and noble, that to

modern ears sounds like an explicit indictment of imperial exploitation:

What treatment is there of the most shameful or grievous sort that

we have not suffered ever since these men made their appearance in

Britain? Have we not been robbed entirely of most of our possessions? . . . Besides pasturing and tilling for them all our other possessions, do we not pay a yearly tribute for our very bodies? How much

better to have been slain and to have perished than to go about with

a tax on our heads!31

Dio used Boudicca to attack the corrupting infl uences of empire

on Roman society, but he was probably correct in linking the Icenian

uprising to imperial abuses. Tacitus also charged that Roman misrule

had driven the Iceni to revolt:

Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, after a life of long and renowned prosperity, had made the emperor co-heir with his own two daughters.

Prasutagus hoped by this submissiveness to preserve his kingdom

and [family] from attack. [But] . . . kingdom and household alike were

plundered like prizes of war, the one by Roman offi cers, the other by

Roman slaves. . . . His widow Boudicca was fl ogged and their daughters

raped. The Icenian chiefs were deprived of their hereditary estates as

Roman

Britain 49

if the Romans had been given the whole country. The king’s own

relatives were treated like slaves.32

Roman fi nanciers, who did a good business lending money to client kings, probably provoked the crisis by unexpectedly calling in

their debts. The Iceni’s inability to pay apparently gave Roman offi cials an excuse to loot and plunder. Similarly, Tacitus charged that

misbehavior by discharged legionnaires at Camulodunum provoked

the Trinovantes into joining the Icenian revolt.

The rebels’ destruction of temples and other symbols of Roman

culture in Camulodunum and Verulamium may also have refl ected

popular opposition to the imperial transformation of Britain. Questions over the extent to which Britons became Romans lie at the

heart of current debates over the character of Roman Britain.

According to Tacitus, Agricola aimed to bind British nobles more

closely to Rome by encouraging them to learn Latin, wear togas,

adopt a Roman diet, and build bathhouses. Ever the critic, the

Roman historian sneeringly noted that while the Britons viewed

these luxuries as a mark of “civilization,” in fact “they were only a

feature of enslavement.”33

In this sense, romanization went hand in hand with imperial

domination, but elites could earn substantial rewards by embracing the new social order. The nobleman Togodumnus used Claudius’s patronage to claim a portion of the old Atrebatian kingdom

after Verica either died or was deposed by feckless Roman offi cials.

Apparently, they conveniently forgot that returning him to power

was a central excuse for the Claudian invasion. Taking the Latin name

Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus, which indicated that Claudius made

him a Roman citizen, he was a key ally during the Icenian revolt.

Tacitus may have considered him a dupe or slave, but his sumptuous

Italian-style palace at Fishbourne, near modern Chichester, testifi es

to the gilded nature of his chains.34

Cogidubnus and his peers used Roman ties to ensure that they

retained their status during the social turmoil that was an inevitable by-product of imperial conquest. This was a dangerous time

when Claudius’s triumph allowed senators, imperial administrators,

wealthy merchants, and discharged soldiers to acquire farms and

estates in Britain. The Roman colonists allowed cooperative
civitas

50 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

leaders to retain the rural bases of their authority, and the relatively

limited rewards of romanization eventually did produce a hybrid but

fairly narrow Romano-British cultural elite. For the most part, however, there were relatively few opportunities for Britons to play a role

in Roman governance and commerce. In contrast to other territories

such as Gaul and Spain, Britain produced no senators or emperors

during the early empire.

Commoners in particular did not have much of a chance or incentive to embrace the new imperial culture. Most were simple farmers, and archaeological evidence suggests considerable continuity in

rural settlement and landholding practices during the fi rst century

of Roman rule. Popular metalworking and pottery styles also survived into the imperial era. It is unclear if these preconquest cultural

institutions persisted because rural Britons refused to be romanized

or because the empire’s extractive reach lessened signifi cantly in the

countryside.

The Romans may not have been able to exploit their subjects

systematically, but tenacious resistance in Wales, northern England,

and Scotland, the Icenian rebellion, and accusations of corruption by

Tacitus and Cassius Dio suggest that romanization and the resulting reordering of British society were not particularly civilizing or

benign. Almost certainly, the imperial conquest resulted in mass

enslavement. Coerced British workers had to have built the grand

buildings and roads that so impressed later Romanophiles. The emperors were probably the largest landowners in Britain, and farmers in

the drained fenlands of East Anglia were most likely their tenants.

Similarly, Roman military and civilian entrepreneurs used local labor

when they developed the island’s gold, silver, lead, iron, and copper

deposits. Britons were also liable for conscription for military service

throughout the empire, and it is unlikely that any of the men in the

fourteen auxiliary units raised in the province by the end of the fi rst

century a.d. returned home. Finally, the Boudiccan uprising suggests

that Roman merchants and moneylenders had an unfair commercial

advantage over common Britons.

The imperial restructuring of local British institutions must have

been equally traumatic. The Romans were generally tolerant of exotic

religions, but Claudius made it a capital offense for Druids to practice

their religion. It is not exactly certain what Druidism entailed, but it

Roman

Britain 51

clearly became a focus of resistance, and Roman forces destroyed a Druidic center on the island of Anglesey during the conquest of Wales.

Female Britons probably also suffered in the immediate aftermath of the occupation. Excepting powerful queens such as Boudicca

and Cartimandua, they are largely missing from the historical and

archaeological record. But it does not take much imagination to envision that forty thousand legionnaires, who were forbidden to marry

under military law, might prey on subject women.35 It is equally

impossible to know how the soldiers viewed the general population.

Military records on tablets recovered near Hadrian’s Wall offer a hint

in their references to neighboring communities as “Brittunculi,” or

“wretched little Britons.”36

Comparatively speaking, the elites of most preconquest British

societies, particularly in the south, would have also looked down on

the rural population. It is therefore hard to determine if the Roman

empire builders treated common Britons better or worse than had

the kings and chieftains they overthrew. If the foreign administrators

and soldiers did in fact view the entire subject population as inferior, then Roman rule was most likely a much greater burden in the

fi rst decades of the occupation. Nonetheless, the bloody Icenian revolt

must have reminded succeeding Roman governors that there was a

signifi cant risk in pushing their subjects too far.

Roman Britain did in fact become more stable by the mid-fi rst

century a.d., but this was because the city-bound postconquest

administration did not exert direct authority in the countryside on

a day-to-day basis. Under the early empire, the island was a single

imperial province run by a governor based in London. His small staff

was essentially an informal circle of friends and advisors. An equally

undersized provincial bureaucracy consisting primarily of detached

army offi cers backed by a military guard was the formal imperial

administration in the province. An autonomous procurator answering directly to the emperor oversaw tax collection.

Roman rule was heavier in Wales and northern Britain, where

security considerations kept these restive frontier regions under direct

military control. Most Roman offi cials served short terms of less than

three years, which further limited the infl uence of the comparatively

minuscule civil administration. Emperor Septimus Severus was probably mindful of these realities when he introduced a greater measure

52 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

of bureaucratic control in a.d. 197 by dividing the island into two