In Our Time - Roman Britain

Episode Date: May 1, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Romans in Britain. About 2000 years ago, Tacitus noted that “the climate is wretched”, Herodian said, “the atmosphere in the country is always gloomy”, Dio said “they live in tents unclothed and unshod, and share their women” and the historian Strabo said on no account should the Romans make it part of the Empire because it will never pay its way. But invade they did, and Britain became part of the Roman Empire for almost four hundred years.But what brought Romans to Britain and what made them stay? Did they prove the commentators wrong and make Britain amount to something in the Empire? Did the Romans come and go without much trace, or do those four centuries still colour our national life and character today?With Greg Woolf, Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews University; Mary Beard, Reader in Classics at Cambridge University; Catharine Edwards, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, London University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, about 2,000 years ago, Tacitus noted that the climate is wretched. Herodian said the atmosphere in the country is always gloomy. Dio said they live in tents, unclothed and unshawed and share their women.

and the historian Strabo said, on no account should the Romans make it part of the empire because it will never pay its way. But invade they did, and Britain became part of the Roman Empire for almost 400 years. But what brought Romans to Britain and what made them stay? Did they prove the commentators wrong and make Britain amount to something in the empire?

Did the Romans come and go without much trace? Or do those four centuries still colour our national life and character today? With me to discuss the history, myths and legacy of the Roman period in Britain, are Greg Wolfe, Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews University, Mary Beard, reading in classics at Cambridge University, and Catherine Edwards, lecturer in classics and ancient history at Birkbeck College, London University.

Greg Wolfe, Caesar first set foot on British soil in 55 BC, and he launches another campaign the following year. What brings him to Britain? Glory, desire for glory, to be the first Roman, to cross the ocean, to go beyond the big encircling river that runs round the known world. The Roman's idea was that the world was surrounded by a river or a sea. That's right. And Britain was beyond it.

Exactly, yes. And so this was an amazing thing to do. It was an amazing thing to report back at Rome that you'd done, stomping around bits of Kent for a while, and then getting back safely to Gaul as quick as you could. It's perhaps so amazing in fact. But for Romans back home, it was extraordinary. It's only eight years since Caesar had started conquering what we call France,

what we call France, they call Gaul. in that time he gets the other end of the continent, crosses the ocean, goes to a place no Roman to ever visit it or seen before. So we were a kind of trophy. Exactly, yes, it's a trophy. And he just came in order to go back and say he'd been. There was no other reason to brought him here.

We were not threatening, were we a refuge for the Gauls or anything? The claim is that Britons are helping Gauls resist, but it's a pretty unlikely claim to be true. These people are, of course, closely related, the ones on either side of the channel. But there's no real sign there's a proper message. military threat. Did it work? I mean, when he went back to Rome, did they believe

him that he'd done this fearless thing and crossed the ocean that encircle, the world, and conquered this other place, and therefore he was a wonder emperor? It seems to work. He's one of a group of... Sorry, not a wonder about it. Wonder General. Yes, he's one of a group of generals who are competing to do this kind of thing. A few years

before Pompey has got to the Caspian Sea, there have been a whole series of emperors, of generals who are trying to go beyond what Rome has ever done before. And so in a competition between these aristocrats who are trying to make their name for themselves, one of whom will eventually become an emperor, yes, it's a gain, it's a success.

So we're talking about a culture in which the way to get to the top is to win battles and bring back trophies to Rome of countries previously unconquered. An explorer and a general, these two things combined are what put you to the top in the power structure there? Yes, it's coming to be that way. towards the end of the Roman Republic.

Extending Roman knowledge, extending their intellectual grasp of the world, is maybe as big a gain for them as extending power or extending the reach of Roman soldiers. But it took about 90 years, Mary Beard, before the stuttering lame hero of Robert Graves' book, Claudius, I Claudius, successfully invaded Britain in 43 AD. Why did it take so long? Well, I think you have to put the question around the other way, really,

which is, say, why was it that Claudius, it was a really good idea to go and finish the unfinished business that Greg's been talking about. Now, it's not that no one had flirted with that idea in the intervening 90 years. The mad Emperor Caligula had had a bit of a go and had taken his troops up to the channel and then in the extremely hostile Roman reports of what went on. Launched a triremont to the sea, but then told his soldiers to set about the beach and pick up the shells as booty and take them back to Rome. and that was a Caligula's attempt at getting the province.

But Claudius needed it for absolutely straightforward internal political reasons at Rome. I mean, as you said, he was a slightly elderly, not very charismatic, stuttering, limping, surprise appointment to the Roman throne. We can feel sympathetic to this guy, but no Roman felt the slightest bit sympathetic, and he needed to show that he wasn't like that. And the easiest way to show you not like that is to do what every Roman general's been doing for the last 200 years, which is to conquer something. And the obvious thing to conquer is this bit of unfinished business across the channel.

And that's what he sets out to do. He doesn't do it. He sends a pretty first-rate general to go and do it on his behalf, and he follows a few weeks later and marches into the Conquer Territory. It's interesting that even at the time, the economists, as it were, are against it. And Strabo, well, writing much later, but he says that Britain will never be,

have any economic, worse, be an economic goer for the empire. Was that current at the time? So did that mean, did that hold Claudius back? Or was the military, the ethos of military glory so dominant that that was almost irrelevant? It's a difficult question to know how far economic interests

determine Roman imperialism. Do they go because, they actually want the cash and the goods, or do they go because they want the conquest? In the case of Britain, there must have been some people who still thought there was gold and buried treasure there. But I'm absolutely certain

that it can't have been what's really driving Claudius. I mean, what you need is to be able to say that you've conquered something, and Claudius boasts of that throughout the rest of his career, going so far as to call his son Britannicus, as it were, kind of perpetual living. memory of the province that he's now made part of the Roman world.

Now, we can question how complete the conquest was, but as far as Claudius is concerned, he's been gone and done it, he's got it, he's had a triumph, he's put up a triumphal arch, and he's got the little boy called Britannicus to remind everybody ever after that he has. Coins struck with Britain all around the empire and so on. It took him, it seems to me, but you're going to tell me that it's not surprising. It seems to me it took them a surprising long time,

given the power of Rome, given the might of the armies, given that later on people said, well, it's an easy place to get a victory. But it took him over a year to get up to the Thames. It then took them 40 years to get up to, let's call the Hadrian Walls area, although it wasn't built until 1-2-280, get up to the lowlands of Scotland, say. Which seems to me, with the power that they had,

rather a long time. Is there any one reason for this? I think there's a lot of reasons they obviously could have put more resources into it, but I think one factor you have to bear in mind all the time is what kind of warfare you are fighting. And legions are great. The Roman legions are actually kind of unbeatable on basic flat land in proper engaged battles.

As soon as they get into the mountains and they get guerrilla warfare. Or the forests in Germany, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. Then the legions become terribly vulnerable to guerrilla mountain tactics. We really don't know what the course of this invasion is

because the one thing that an imperial power has to do is not conquer, perhapsly hopeless enemy, so you have to have a sense that there was a real struggle going on and that these Britons are not a push-over. They're actually an opposing force that is worthy of the might of Rome to conquer.

So I think in part you've got bluffs and double-bluffs and spins and double spin. You might say, I mean, I think conquering a country in a year and a bit was not too bad. Well, they only got to the Thames and a year and a bit. Well, I'm worried about... I'm going to get off this. I'm going to off this.

I think we're not going to get anywhere on it. No, we're not going very far away. Catherine, what did the Romans make of Britain? We have an account of Tacitus towards the end of the first century AD. Does he tell us much of what we want to know? Well, as you mentioned earlier, he does comment on the miserableness of the climate,

and it is rather a sort of dreary place to be, although I think archaeologists tell us that the climate in Britain was actually a bit warmer then than it is now, some slightly more temperate crops grew at that time and once the Romans were established here, vines and so on. But nevertheless, the Roman perception was that it was a bit of a gloomy place. Tasters himself is, the way he writes about Britain, suggests that there were aspects of the place that rather impressed the Romans

and that the British warriors are held up as models of bravery and valor. They're not terribly good at being did. disciplined. And I think one of the big problems for the British, at least as the Romans perceive it, is that you've got all these different tribes, and they're not very good at working together against the Romans. There's a lot of infighting amongst

themselves. And I think, in fact, one of the reasons why the Romans actually perhaps don't invest so much energy in conquering all of Britain early on, is that, to start with, they've got quite a number of tribes who appear to be quite well disposed to them and say that their kind of client kingdoms. Later

on, then problems arise with those kind of client tribes and the Romans decide they're actually going to clamp down on them. But early on at least there's a sort of central bit that is under Roman control and then other places that appear to be occupied by relatively friendly tribes. Does it just came up with the magnificent remark,

I think, which applies all over the place, that the Romans make a wilderness and call it peace. That's fantastic, isn't it? Yes. Would he have used that of Britain? Well, the Britain itself is a wilderness. I didn't know that the Romans made a wilderness, I called it peace. Yes, I think, well, the words as they come in Tastas Agricula are in the mouth of the British chieftain Calgarcus,

who is giving this rousing speech to his troops just before the Battle of Mons Graupius. And he tells them how, you know, they're right at the very edge of Britain, and this is the kind of very edge of the Roman world, and they've got no choice that it's either fight or die. So he's rousing them against the Roman Empire. But what's so arresting, I think, about that speech is that we find a Roman writer Tacitus coming out with this searing indictment of Roman imperialism, so it seems.

He talks about the exploitation practiced by the Romans, how they leave nothing to their subject to the subject peoples. And Calgarcas comes up with this wonderful analogy about how in a household, the last slaves to become part of the household are the ones who are worse treated. and he suggests that therefore that they, the Britons are going to have no respect even if they are fully incorporated into the Roman Empire because they're sort of

the last ones on the scene, they're really going to be treated as the lowest of the low. They can have no respect. But this analogy of slavery is one that absolutely pervades Tastus description of the Roman Empire as it's perceived not only by the Britons themselves but actually when he's talking about

what Agricula does in encouraging the lowland Britons to take on Roman ways in terms of wearing togas and building villas and so on. He says the Britons saw this as civilization, but it was actually part of their enslavement. Greg, well, what kind of impact do you think that Rome has on the inhabitants of Britain? I know we're talking large centuries and I know it's not fair on you really, but still, it struck me when I was repairing for this programme that it is rather remarkable that in those 400 years there was no British senator. There were masses of senators from the other countries,

let us say, taken over by Rome, Spain. I know they're not called that at that time, but let's take for lots of other countries. Sorry, there are matters of senators. There were even two emperors from Spain. Not a single senator, let alone an empire, not a British writer of any note in those 400 years. Now, this must

be remarkable and perhaps is unique. Can you talk to that? Yes, it is different from some other provinces. There is a very It's very different, isn't it? It's quite different. There's a scale. You can sort of chart these things.

And if you look at the areas just north of the Alps, they're not quite so different from Britain. But southern Spain, southern France, Africa are very different. If getting integrated into the structures of the Roman Empire is a test of how well some provincials do, yes, some Britons really do fail that test on a ground scale. Totally. I mean, let's be, let's, I'm not exaggerating. I mean, nothing that I said is incorrect.

So you're saying pretty much fail it. I mean, they fail it. They become Roman citizens. It's very interesting. 400 years, we didn't go to Senator. I mean, it's very interesting. Well, you know, if... This sounds like a discussion

the privy couch of the Roman Empress. Why is Britain doing so badly? Exactly. Does not make any money. The cities are rubbish. The monuments are not a patch on Italy. I look out over 600 senators and there is not one Britain in them.

What's going on? Exactly. If you're here to explain that to... Close them down and merged them into... No, no, you're going too far. It's worth talking about. Now, I still haven't got an explanation. Mary Beard, what do you say to this?

Well, I think it, I mean, I think again, Melvin, you're not quite asking the right question here. Well, that's an easy way to get out of it, isn't it? I mean, that's the easiest method in the world. I don't want to answer your question, so I will say, for my authoritative, Professor of Cambridge, you're asking the right question. Well, it's good enough for me.

Why was there no senators, no British rights, for 400 years? It's a fair question. All right. have a go. Good. Okay. I mean, I think it's partly about what we start off talking about, which is Britain's position really at the margins of this world, that we can look at Spain, look at the bits of Southern Gaul, and we can talk about those as Roman provinces which the Romans conquer, which is all

true. On the other hand, those areas, or at least bits of those provinces, had been part of a classicising Mediterranean culture for hundreds of years. similarly the provinces in the east. Now, Britain and Germany are really provinces which have no foothold, have no existing foothold in Mediterranean structures of power, culture and acculturation. I think that's really the issue. You go to the ends of the world and you conquer a province and you are conquering something which for all the imposition of Roman power and all, I think, the serious differences that Rome makes to Britain,

you're still dealing with the people who aren't sharing, haven't traditionally shared anything of Mediterranean culture. The sense of which Rome needs Britain to be wild, isn't there? Yeah. That you need for Tacitus in the passage that Catherine was talking about, Britain is the moral opposite of Rome. It is the opposite end of the social, cultural spectrum. And it's important for Rome to have those opposites,

So they know what the centre is like. And it's no accident at the other province that Tustas chooses to write about is Germany, which is one which is in a similar position. It's fascinating. You actually think that they preferred, as it were, to keep this, as it were, unfenced zoo at the edge of the empire in order to prove and to test their own civilization in the middle of the empire. They have different uses for that. For Tassetus, it's a place that he can.

send his great Roman general, Agricula, to try and do the kind of things that he did in the Republic and to fail because the Empress holds him back. For successive Roman Empress, being able to repeatedly campaign in Britain, a very safe area, well, whatever goes wrong,

there aren't many people there to make it go wrong, is terribly useful. In this need for constant victories that Mary talked about earlier, that Roman Empress still have occasionally, people like Claudius, they don't want to take on the Persian Empire. Which became a kind of playground, warground?

Yes, for some. Except him as Severus takes his sons there when they run wild in the city of Rome. To toughen them up, to get them away from the flesh pots. Severus says... It's like outward bound. It's very like that. Or you go to Scotland. You can put up with the weather and, you know, kill a few natives.

But, Catherine, I've got no worries at all about hammering way at the obvious. Will you just add your two pen as to why, for those hundreds of years we didn't have? No, never mind. It's very interesting. Everybody else did. Not a senator. let alone an emperor and no British Ritism. What's going on?

I mean, the British Rydist, for instance, is that because the Celtic old religion was so powerful? Well, I mean, I think one of the things we need to remember about Britain before the Romans come that it's actually tremendously diverse. In a sense, there isn't a single, it's a geographical entity, that's what it is. It's inhabited by lots of actually quite different peoples.

And some of those peoples do have some prior contact with the Romans are more prepared to engage with aspects of Roman culture. we find some really very valuable goods in British graves that have come to Britain perhaps as diplomatic gifts or whatever before the Romans come. So there are some people who are in a sense part of that Roman world, but very much on the margins of it. And their culture is very different. I mean, it's an agricultural, you know, the southern part of Britain is quite well agriculturally exploited

and they can support a kind of warrior class. But it's a very, very different kind of culture. and the arrival of Rome does, I mean the sort of process of integration of Roman culture with those different British cultures. I think we can see that it's taking really quite a long time, much longer time than would be the case with other perhaps more readily compatible communities closer to the Mediterranean. That's right. And in some ways, Britain does quite well under Roman rule. And if we look at the fourth century, Britain actually seems to be more prosperous than quite a number of other parts of the Middle. empire. I mean, you might say that actually, perhaps by the

fourth century, being a Roman senator is not such a big deal, and maybe there are kind of other ways in which you kind of benefit from being under Roman rule. I think we can probably find lots of Britain's fighting in the army. No, please finish. So, you know, I wonder

if, you know, the Senate is really increasingly powerless, I think, by that point. So, you know, why would Britain's want to be senators? Let's leave that point aside now, as being answered. Some people maintain that actually the Roman cultural influence on this country was almost superficial

in the Celtic Iron Age culture continued continued unabated and largely undisturbed and when the Romans went away there it was still in place now what's your view on there? Well I think that's perhaps a bit simplistic because we do find in the degree to which Greco-Roman cultural practices seem to be diffused in Britain is and it does

it's really quite extensive. I mean, by trying to get to the fourth century, there's evidence for about a thousand villa sites that are, you know, they have their own local particularities, but they are very much along the lines of the villa, as you might find it in Italy. I mean, that is, you know, that's a major, that has a major impact on the landscape,

and they're probably, not necessarily people of Italian descent living in those. I mean, it's very hard for us to tell who, you know, exactly who lived where. And trying to determine the identity of individuals is not easy. But I think it would be safe to assume that at least some Britons are actually living

very much a Roman-style life. What about the degree of Romanisation? What's your view, Mary, then, Greg? Well, I think, again, it depends whose perspective you take. And if you say, Greg talked a bit about this, before, if you say, did life change for most peasants living in the country,

outside the towns, you know, no, it didn't. They were effectively living in the Iron Age throughout the Roman conquest. They're effectively living in the Iron Age, probably in the 17th century AD, that the life for the average peasant country dweller didn't change over millennia. And to test, I think to test how far Roman influence was important on the basis of whether it made a different to peasant life is simply to give the Romans a test they're bound to fail.

I think on the other hand, the impact for at least the elite of, actually, an entirely new urban culture is quite extraordinary. And as Catherine says, it's insinuating itself in all kinds of ways that are, I think, really surprising in the degree of apparent control over bits of Roman ways of doing things. There's an extraordinary mosaic, for example, at the Roman villa in Lullingston in Kent, which not only illustrates a passage from the Aeneid of Virgil, but it actually has a little verse below it parodying the Aeneid. Now, if you can get to the idea of somebody living in Britain, of course this might have been a real Roman, we don't know, someone living in Britain not just being able to mouth Virgil, but to joke with Roman culture,

I think you can see that at some points this is really going deep. Can I switch completely now to Catherine Edwards? For many people, the most famous figure of the Roman period is we have to call a Budica, so farewell Boehedicier of my schooling. the Queen of the Iceni and the leader of a great rebellion and she died in 6180s so we're going back now what significance do you attach to what she did first of all and then we can talk about what was represented

by what she did first of all to what she did right well Boudicca was the widow of Prezitagas who was a chief of the Akanie who was on reasonably good terms with the Romans although they hadn't actually been conquered by them and when he died in his will he left his kingdom jointly to his wife and to the Roman Empire, the Roman Emperor. But the Romans, it seems, were having none of this power sharing and seemed to have not only dispossessed Budika and her daughters,

but actually to physically abuse them. And in revolt against this, Budika led a rebellion, which also seems to have been prompted by quite a severe financial exploitation of the Britons by the local Roman officials, supposedly in order to pay for the temple to Claudius in Kamaludunum, which had been a British settlement that was taken over by the Romans, subsequent to the Claudian invasion. So there were all these kind of resentments

that seemed to have been built up over a number of years, and Boudicca then led her rebellion against the Romans, as Queen of the Akanie, but also with some other local tribes as well. She eventually failed and took her own life. But on the way, I've had some remarkable figures that were 70,000 people slaughtered? Well, it does seem to have been an extremely violent and bloody event. They swept down through Colchester, Kamaludunum, and slaughtered the sort of Romanised inhabitants of the town.

There was also devastation in London. London as well, and in St. Orban's very lamean. So it was very, very traumatic event in which many lives were lost. And Boudicca seems to have taken advantage of the fact that the Roman governor was off in Wales, having a go at the Druids on the island of Anglesey. So this provided something of an opportunity. But when he came back, he was able to suppress the rebellion. How near did it come to us being a success?

Well, I mean, the way in which Roman writers describe, describe it. Had some of the other tribes actually joined with Budica, then they might well have succeeded in defeating the Romans. Do you think it's not an isolated incident that you have these provincial rebellions all over the empire now and again, but perhaps partly because the emperors believe their own rhetoric about the completeness of the conquest. And why we know lots about Budica is because the scale of her revolt is a way of convicting the emperor at the time, Nero, of being bad at this job. And so people

afterwards writing about how bad Nero's reign was can add to this and this perfectly peaceful province went up in flames. We also know a lot about it because as a female leader of a rebellion, she attracts the attention of every

leering Roman writer ever after because it becomes a much more sexy, glamorous and horrible rebellion than a rebellion that was just run by a man. That's right. And I think it's part of the otherness of the Britons. It's part of their sort of wild strangeness, that they allow themselves to be led by women. And it does provide, as Mary says,

kind of for a very vivid narrative to have this woman saying, you men may accept slavery, but I, a woman shall not, and kind of leading your troops into that. Can I just ask, in, let's say the 19th century, if we leaped up, she provided the alternative view of the past, didn't she? We have, in one sense, Britain forming itself around the Roman Empire, getting a cadre together, the public school system, these must go out and rule an empire,

must have, as it were, Roman citizens to go out and beat the real legionnaires. On the other side, you have this wild, uncontained creature who is really underneath the character of the whole country who will go for liberty and sacrifice everything. These two things seem to run together. Is that right, Mary? Yeah, that's absolutely right.

She's a wonderfully ambivalent figure. She's either the absolute origin of... Our empire and that fantastic statue of her by Thornikroft by Westminster Bridge includes underneath the lines from Cooper's poem about how, you know, your descendants, O Budica, have conquered more people than the Romans ever did. So she becomes a kind of strange figure who represents imperialism for us, but of course she's also at the same time, and this is why she's so useful mythically, I think. she can also be someone who stands up for liberty against imperialism.

So she's one of the best kind of mythic symbolic figures and that you can back her either way. I was also part of the sort of European clash between classicism and nationalism, isn't it? Yes. That all over Europe people are reviving their, in France it's versing getericks and so, reviving their non-Roman ancestors because this gives them a national tradition, but equally all buying into the classicising tradition. We're all Romans now.

And this, of course, has gone on right through to the 20th. Densary, Chichescu, Hitler and others. I think that's absolutely right. But I think in some ways that highlights the way in which Roman Britain becomes increasingly problematic, actually, in Imperial Britain. How do you deal with the fact that, you know, you see yourself as an imperial people, but once Britain itself was a province of an empire. And in the 19th centuries, you get kind of theories of race

that are much more about seeing people's not in terms of levels of development and you can move from one to another, but races as being genetically fixed at one level of development or another. So Africans are just, you know, they can never, ever rule themselves, let alone anyone else. And they need Anglo-Saxon to kind of come in and sort them out. How do you then look back to Roman Britain and say, oh, well, you know, are we really descended from these people who are ruled by the Romans? Is that a bit of a problem for us?

Well, you've just given us the queue for the next programme. Thank you very much to you, Mary, to Catherine Edwards, and to Greg Wolf. And thank you all very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science, and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.