The Rest Is History - 500. The Roman Conquest of Britain: The Empire Strikes Back (Part 2)

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Viewed as an idiot by those around him, Claudius felt the need to prove himself. In the century since Caesar had invaded Britain, the mythology surrounding the island had taken hold in Roman imaginations. Stories of sea monsters, terrifying Druids, and human sacrifice by barbarians, instilled fear into the imperial legions. But Claudius was determined, and launched a two-pronged attack on the southeastern coast to immortalise his name as a victor. Accompanied by German mercenaries, Roman soldiers forced their way across the Medway in Kent and headed up the Thames to London. British elites had two options: resist or collaborate…  Join Tom and Dominic as they piece together, coin by Roman coin, how Claudius conquered Britain in 43 AD. _______ LIVE SHOWS *The Rest Is History LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall* Tom and Dominic, accompanied by a live orchestra, take a deep dive into the lives and times of two of history’s greatest composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York.  Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Editor: Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Meanwhile, away from Rome, a highly respected senator by the name of Aulus Plautius embarked on an expedition against Britain. For a certain native of the island called Bericus, who had been forced into exile by a coup against him, had persuaded Claudius to send an army against the Britons. So it was that Plautius prepared to launch his invasion, but when he commanded his soldiers

to embark and set sail from Gaul, they refused. The reason for this was the dread they felt at the thought of undertaking a campaign beyond the limits of the known world, and they remained in a state of open mutiny until Narcissus, one of Claudius' former slaves who had been sent to their camp by the emperor, climbed up onto the tribunal and sought to address them. At this, they became so indignant that they would not allow Narcissus to say a single word until suddenly as one they began to chant the phrase Io Saturnalia for as everyone knows slaves dress up as their masters during the festival of the Saturnalia and everything is turned upside down and with that the mutiny was ended and the soldiers willingly followed Plautius to Britain. So that, Tom, was Cassius Dio writing

a long time after Claudius's invasion of Britain in AD 43. So in the last episode, we did Julius Caesar and his landing, the first date in recorded history, as I think everybody agrees. The second most important date in history. This is all very mysterious, probably to a lot of our listeners, all this sort of shouting about the Saturnalia and stuff. What is going on? So we have moved on almost a century. The context is now totally different.

We're into the empire. Claudius is the emperor. People remember Claudius. You've seen the TV show, I, Claudius, or read Robert Graves' novels. And the context, the political context is so different because Rome is an autocracy now and not a competitive republic. Yeah. And I think that the change between the age of Caesar and Claudius, so it's a century pretty much, is best summed up by the way that the Latin word imperator has evolved. So in Caesar's time, imperator means a general, a victorious general. If you win a victory, your soldiers hail you as imperator. By the time of Claudius, it's coming to take on

the connotations of the English word emperor, which of course derives from the Latin word imperator. And this reflects the fact that the Roman empire now has a single figure at its head. This is reflection of the great revolution that's been achieved by Caesar's adopted son, his great nephew, Augustus Caesar. And the consequence of this is that the Roman Empire is even more formidable than it had been in Caesar's day. So it's hugely expanded. It's about twice the size that it was back in Caesar's time. It has this incredible innovation, which is professional armies, which the figure of Caesar stands at the head. So there's a very clear chain of command.

And it has a very aggressive public ideology, which is essentially that the Romans have the right to conquer anywhere they like. Empire without limits is what Virgil called it. But despite that fact, although under Augustus there had been a lot of conquest, as I said, under his two heirs, so first Tiberius, who had been his adopted son, and then Caligula, who had been his great-grandson. So that's why they come to rule, because both those two emperors have the mystique of Augustus. Despite that, there hasn't actually been any major campaigns of conquest. And I think there's a sense in the Roman high command, in the capital, that the empire has reached its natural limits, that it's bounded by deserts, by barbarians,

it's not worth conquering, or of course, by the ocean ocean so the question then tom given that in the last episode we said that apart from slaves and oysters i think it wasn't and a few pearls and i should have mentioned hunting dogs and hunting dogs and hoodies as well hoodies yeah britain's very well known for its hoodies as in people are wearing hoodies yeah okay that Okay, that's nice. Cloaked. Right. You know, hooded cloaks. So apart from those things, which, to be honest, in the grand scheme of things, if you're ruling the Roman Empire with the enormous wealth of the Mediterranean and of Egypt, what's now Turkey, Asia Minor, and so on, these things are pretty small beer. Why would anybody launch an invasion of Britain at all? Well, I think it's because Claudius has come to power very recently and he is very concerned to establish himself as a genuine imperator in both senses of the word. So as an emperor and as a general. And he wants to establish himself as an emperor

because he cannot cast himself as a son of Augustus, as Tiberius and Caligula had been able to do. He has come to power in a coup. And although he's been raised in the imperial family, this is because he is the grandson of Augustus's wife, Livia. And Livia had been married to a Claudius before she married Augustus. And this is why Claudius has been raised in the bosom of Augustus's household. You why Claudius has been raised in the bosom of Augustus's household. You know, he kind of needs to establish his legitimacy, but he needs to establish his legitimacy as a general, as well as an emperor, because he hasn't had any military experience, but also he hasn't had any experience of being in a position of authority at all.

His elder brother, a very kind of dashing man who gets the name Germanicus because of his campaigns in Germany, he's the great idol of the Roman people. He dies young, like kind of Princess Diana. It's kind of mass public effusions. So if Claudius had been like Germanicus, there wouldn't really be a problem. But he hadn't been for reasons that everyone who's seen like Claudius or read the books by Robert Graves will know that Claudius, he dribbles, he snorts snot out through his nose, he stammers, he has a limp, and he's seen by his own mother as well as by everyone else as an absolute idiot. So for that reason, he hasn't been given any public responsibilities at all. So he doesn't have a track record that he can use to kind of buttress his authority as an emperor. In fact, he's not

stupid at all. He's very smart. He's very competent. He's quite a scholar. But his style of administration, it doesn't seem heroic to most Romans. He's grown up surrounded by women and by freedmen. And as emperor, he relies on them because of course, freedmen are appointed to run the treasury or whatever, because they're very, very competent. But people don't want to believe, you know, freeborn Romans don't want to feel that former slaves have positions of authority over them. Like Narcissus in that opening reading. Absolutely. So it's absolutely classic of Claudius that, you know, he's informed there's a mutiny and he should send a freed person to try and sort it out. And really, I mean, he's kind of lucky the mutiny ends the way that it does. But people may also

be wondering, why has there been a mutiny? There hadn't been a mutiny when Caesar led his armies across the ocean, and that was the first Roman invasion of Britain. And I think the reason for that is that in the intervening century between Caesar's invasion and Claudius' invasion, two major disasters have happened that cast very, very long shadows over the imaginations of everyone who is contemplating an invasion of Britain. And the first of these had happened 34 years previously in AD 9. And that's the annihilation of three legions beyond the Rhine. And that's the Varus, the Teutoburg Forest under Augustus.

The Varian disaster. And this had been against the backdrop of an attempt by the Romans to establish a province across the Rhine in Germany. These three legions get wiped out and essentially the Roman occupation force withdraws to behind the Rhine. So that is a huge disaster that everyone is aware of. The other one happens seven years later in 1816, and it happens under the aegis of Germanicus, who's been leading reprisal campaigns against the Germans who had destroyed Varus. And he sets sail into the North Sea on a great fleet and a storm hits this fleet and absolutely destroys it. And Germanicus himself only survives with great difficulty. And actually, the disaster is so great that he has to be restrained from committing suicide.

And you can see why the thought of crossing the ocean and landing in a place where they might be cut off and is full of completely terrifying barbarians would be a shadow because there's a sense that the Britons are even more barbarous than the Germans. Because of their blueness, their moustaches, drinking milk, and other deviant behaviours, as I believe the jargon now has it. Women are supposed to strip off and paint themselves black. I mean, all kinds of terrible things. So I think that that anxiety about the dimension of the supernatural that we talked about in the context of Caesar's expedition has grown and grown and grown. And the reason for this is that every Roman soldier knows what had happened to prisoners that were captured by the Germans

in AD 9, that they were sacrificed to the German gods, that they were drowned in bogs, that they were taken into woods, that they were hanged from oak trees, that they were beheaded, that they had unspeakable tortures inflicted on them, offered up essentially as sacrifices to the gods. And they also have a sense that the storms that destroyed the Roman fleet, again, this had, you know, it's almost like something from Greek mythology that sailors who came back, soldiers who were shipwrecked and were returned to Roman territory, reported having seen terrible sea monsters, sea monsters of ambiguous form between man and beast and strange birds. So I think there's a sense that Britain isn't just barbarous, it's demon haunted.

And this reputation that Britain has as being not just a place where magic is very strong, but the home of magic is something that endures even after the invasion has been launched. So Pliny writing about 30 years later, he writes about Britain that magic to this very day holds it in its shadow. But Tom, how is this different from 100 years previously? The context for Caesar's invasion was slightly different in that those two disasters, the Teutoburg Forest and the disaster of the fleet, that they hadn't happened. But why are they not similarly anxious about magic and all that stuff?

Or are they? Back in Caesar's day, they weren't sure about Britain's reputation. And that has grown over the succeeding decades, in part actually because of Caesar's campaigns and his commentaries. Because Caesar fighting in Gaul had written about a cadre of priests who had practiced human sacrifice, Caesar writes. And these same priests, their home is seen as being Britain. And in Britain, it is said, you know, they practice these unspeakable rites of sacrifice in kind of oaken groves festooned with mistletoe. And these priests are the Druids. But am I not right in thinking the Druids don't actually exist? Am I giving too much

away there? I mean, the Druids do exist. I mean, I don't think there's any doubt about that. The Romans report on them in such detail that it's impossible to think that they just made them up. It's true that we have no artefacts, no physical evidence actually proving the existence of Druids. But I think one of the things that suggests they did exist is the fact that Roman attitudes to them are actually very ambivalent. So there is a whole tradition in not just Romans, Greeks as well, looking on Druids as kind of philosophers, great natural scientists. So Cicero, who we mentioned in the previous episode, the great orator, he actually meets with a Druid, a man called Deviciacus in Rome, and is hugely impressed by him. He says he knows all about astronomy and philosophy and

he can tell the future. He's absolutely brilliant. But others see them as the epitome of everything that is dark and sinister and demonic. They see them as kind of terrifying necromancers. Are they burning people in wicker men, Tom? Is that correct? Right. So that is a story that Caesar reports. And Caesar's reports absolutely embody this ambivalence that the Romans feel about Druids. So on the one hand, Diviciacus, the guy who goes to Rome, he's doing this as an ally and a friend of Caesar. Caesar respects and admires him. On the other hand, Caesar is saying the Druids round up criminals and put them in these vast

wicker men. You know, if they find any policemen, they'll put them in there as well. Yeah, all that kind of thing. Edward Woodward. Yeah. You find him, he's straight in. I think what happens in the wake of the occupation of Gaul is that attitudes in Rome harden towards the Druids. They come to be seen as subversive. They're impressive figures and they are agitators against Roman rule and that makes them dangerous. And so Tiberius, who succeeds Augustus as emperor,

orders their suppression. The idea that Romans tolerate all gods isn't true. They come to see the Druids as being exceedingly dangerous, and they are wiped out across Gaul. But in Britain, of course, the Druids are still there. The long arm of Roman law doesn't reach across the channel. You can see why an anxiety about Britain as a land of sorcery and magic blurs into an anxiety about Britain as a land where you are likely to be captured and tortured to death and have your entrails hung over oak and glades. I wouldn't want to get on a ship if that was what I was kind of worrying about. Now you asked, is it true? Were there druids? So I'll quote you Ronald Hutton,

who did two episodes we did on pagan Britain, very much a friend of the show. So he says, the Druids were the leading experts in religion, magic, and other matters concerning the supernatural among the Iron Age peoples of Northwestern Europe who spoke Celtic languages, including the British. And that is all that can be said about them with absolute certainty. So I think Ronald Hutton is incredibly sceptical. And if he says that they existed, then I think you can accept that they did. But I think what you can add to that is that the Romans did see them as being politically dangerous. And that's why they're targeted for extirpation.

And it's clear the Romans did also believe that they were practising human sacrifice. Now, Hutton in his book Pagan Britain which is brilliant and all this he's very skeptical about this the idea that Druids were actually practicing human sacrifice and he says well the Romans said this about the Jews or the Christians and we don't tend to think that they practice human sacrifice exactly but that's the counter view because the Romans said the Carthaginians practiced human sacrifice and archaeological evidence suggests that they did. And likewise, if we look at 16th century history, the Aztecs did practice sacrifice. Right. So just because people say it doesn't mean that it's not true. Yeah. But it kind of highlights the difficulty we have in making sense of the

Roman conquest of Britain is that, you know something so fundamental, you have to say, is probably not proven. Although, I mean, to give people a spoiler, I think they probably did human sacrifice in moments of particular stress and danger. And on the sacrifice issue, just before we move on, is it the case, as with your example about the 16th century, the Spanish and the Mexica, is it the case that the Romans are using the human sacrifice thing as a kind of bit of liberal interventionism from them? And this is one of their pretexts. It is. So they're going over there, they're stopping human sacrifice, taking prisoners and bringing them back to fight as gladiators in the arena.

Well, that's a definite progressive change, isn't it? It is. It's progressive imperialism at its best. So one of the paradoxes of all this, this growing sense of Britain as a terrifying place of darkness and magic, is that actually, over the centuries, we were talking about at the end of the previous episode, the British tribes in the southeast of Britain, in the lowlands, have actually become increasingly integrated into the networks of Roman rule and of Roman trade. And as we also mentioned, they are no longer entirely prehistoric. And this is the form of these remarkable coins that have the names of British rulers stamped on them. And I know you're not a great man for an ancient coin, Dominic. No, I love coins, Tom. Do you? You're quite mistaken. I love ancient coins.

Okay. So you must have seen these British coins. They're beautiful. They're kind of abstract. They're weird. They have a kind of strange physical quality that you can angle them and you will see new things. So it may look purely abstract when you look at it one way, but you'd angle it another way and suddenly you see a kind of face. And there's a wonderful description of them by Duncan McKay, who's written a superb book on Boudicca called Echolands, which I'll be quoting a lot in our next episode on Boudicca. It came out last year and it's the best book on Roman Britain I've read in ages. And I highly recommend it to everyone. And he describes these coins beautifully. He calls them little tabs of hallucinatory braille, which I absolutely love. I mean, anyone who's touched one will immediately recognize what he means. And ultimately, these coins derive not from the Romans, but from the Greeks,

and specifically from the Macedonians. So they are based on coins issued by Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great. So this particular coin that shows a charioteer on one side, Apollo on the other, and they've slowly spread across Europe. And by the time they reach Britain, they're essentially just abstractions. You can barely make out what they originally were. You have those abstracted renderings of the chari and then leaves, you also have the names of people and also amazingly of places. So I'll give three examples of coins that give us specific names and what that can tell us about the situation in Britain before Claudius' invasion. One of them is minted by a people we've already heard of called the Trinovantes. So they're in Essex, kind of moving towards where London would now be. And you get coins minted there from about 35 BC, so 20 years after Caesar's expedition,

by a king called Adedomarus. And this is a guy, we only know his name through his coins. There's no mention of him in any classical sources. He's the king of the Trinovantes. And what we can tell from his coins is that he moves his capital from Hertfordshire, so in the west of his kingdom, to Essex, to a place called Camelodunon, which today is Colchester in Essex. So that's all we know about him. We can trace the fact that he's moved his capital and founded this kind of new place. Then we have his neighbor, a king of the Catephalorni, who we again heard about in the previous episode. These are the ones who fought under Cassius Valonus against Caesar. And this is a guy called Tasciophanus. And Dominic, I have one of his coins. It's one of my most precious possessions. It dated to about 25 BC, and it shows him and his son in double

profile. But the thing that's really amazing about this coin, and the reason I got it, is that next to the faces of these two kings, Tascivanus and his son, you have Latin letters and they spell out V-E-R-U, so Veru, and that's an abbreviation for Verulamion, which is today the city of St. Albans, about 20 miles kind of northwest of London. And this is the very earliest record we have of a British place name from Britain. So it's amazing. The first time you could hold it in your hand, a complete thrill. And purely using the coins, because again, Tascivanus is not mentioned in any classical source, we can see how he's throwing his weight around, how he goes to war with the Trinovantes,

how for a brief period from about 15 to 10 BC, he's issuing coins from Camulodunon, so presumably he's conquered it, and then he gets thrown out. There's a war. He retreats again. So you can see there's war between these two tribes purely on the basis of the coins. And then the third one is our friend Commius, who we mentioned in the previous episode, Caesar's kind of slippery ally, who's always kind of switching sides. He becomes king of the Atrabartes in the south of the Catecholoniae. And he's probably the first king to issue coins with his name on in Britain. And to listeners, you know, they may seem just kind of weird names, these weird tribes, difficult to get a handle on. But just to emphasise, I mean, this is amazing because this is

where British history based on British sources begins. Think of all the British political rivalries that we've talked about. This is the earliest evidence from a British source for that long tradition of political rivalry that we have. This is the Johnson, Truss and Sunak of their day, Tom. Yeah. Unbelievably exciting. What a glorious progression that is. Indeed. Progress, progress. So what you have essentially in the southeast of Britain is a three-way contest, three rival groupings, three rival kings. And over the course of the decades that follow, so through the Augustan period, under

Tiberius, under Caligula, you can use these coins to work out for the first time the course of politics in an area of Britain. And the big story is the re-emergence to supremacy of the Catephaloni, the guys who occupy the home counties. And as they expand, so the Trinovantes to the east and the Atrobatis to the south are slowly eclipsed. And the key figure in this rise to greatness is the son of Tasciovannus, who's a man called Cnobolin. So he is the Kimberline of Shakespeare's play. His name seems to mean strong dog, which is a very good name. And he, as his father had done, but this time permanently, subdues the Trinovantes and makes Camulodunum his kind of permanent headquarters, his permanent capital. And meanwhile, his brother is expanding

southwards into the lands of the Atrobaties. And Cunabalin is so successful that even the Suetonius, the Roman biographer, he refers to him as king of the Britons simply. He's seen as the domineering figure in Britain. And when he dies in about AD 40, he's succeeded by his two sons, one of whom is called Togodumnus, who seems to have been centered in Beryllian and Camulodunum, so he's got that tranche. And Togedumnus' brother is a man called Caraticus, and Caraticus continues with the conquest of the Atrabartes, so moving south. And within a year or so of Cunabalin's death, Caraticus has cornered the king of the Atrabartes around where Chichester is now, so that's down by

Portsmouth Harbour. There's a peninsula, it's protected by great dikes, and this is the last holdout of the Atrobatic king. Caratacus forces his way through, the Atrobatic king flees across the channel, and the name of this king, based on his coins, is Verica. And this almost certainly is the Bericus who is mentioned by Dio in that section that you read. So there's a merging of the evidence from British coins and the classical sources. Right. Bericus, who had been forced into exile by a coup against him and had persuaded Claudius to send an army against the Britons. So says Cassius Dio, and that matches the coin evidence. That's fascinating. So Caraticus is the first character in British history that I remember ever studying. He's perceived as a sort of freedom fighter. But before we turn to Caraticus, so Bericus,

you see Bericus as a sort of, he's like Ambassador Graham Martin fleeing the US embassy in Saigon in 1975. Explain to me that analogy, Tom. Karatekus becomes a freedom fighter, but before that, he's very keen on conquering people. The Britons are perfectly capable of engaging in imperialism themselves. And when he conquers the last holdout, this tip of land on the south coast, surrounded by dikes. So it's a bit like the wall surrounding the US embassy in Saigon. And the reason I make that comparison is because of an extraordinary discovery that was made about a hundred years ago. And this is a Roman helmet encrusted with oysters, had clearly been lying in the harbour for centuries and centuries. And it's

a make that is pre-Claudian invasion. So it must have been there in the decades at some point before the Roman invasion, which implies a Roman military presence at the court of Veracus or Verica, whatever you want to call him. So you could kind of imagine a Roman military guard perhaps escorting Veracus, whatever you want to call him. This would be seen as a kind of humiliation for Rome to lose one of their client kings in this way. And it would absolutely provide a kind of casus belli, I think, a kind of justification

for the invasion. So if that's the case, right, if the Romans had military advisors with this guy, Vericus, who's been attacked by Caraticus, does that imply that in the century since Julius Caesar came and went, that the contacts have not just continued, but possibly deepened so that the Romans have client kings, they have their patronage, they are sending military advisors to Britain. And the only reason it's not recorded is we don't really have that many sources. There are particular sources that record that have been lost. You're right. I mean, we have very few sources. We do have kind of the occasional tangential allusion to the fact that British kings are always being expelled and kind of going to Rome and asking for help. So Augustus, for instance, he has this great thing of the raised guest diet. It's basically his kind of, you know, his CV, all his achievements. And he describes the British king coming to him and asking for help. And there's also a sense, I think, that these

British kings are sending their sons as hostages to Rome. We have an account by Strabo, the geographer who's writing in the time of Augustus. He says he saw them. He says, I saw in Rome young men from Britain who were taller even than the Gauls and taller than the tallest Roman by half a foot, but they were bandy-legged and most uncouth in appearance. And you have to wonder whether this is where, you know, the Trinovantes or the Catephaloni are getting their taste for coins from, from princes who've been raised in Rome

and who are going back with a taste for wine, a taste for whatever, and a taste for stamping their names taste for whatever, and a taste for stamping their names on coins. And on the point about the contacts, so Caligula had talked about attacking Britain, hadn't he? He had amassed his army in this very famous episode. Again, anyone who's read I Claudius or the Suetonius will know this very well. He amasses his army. They think they're going to invade Britain, but actually he says, no, we're going to humiliate Neptune and they all gather seashells. Did that really happen or was that just anti-collegial propaganda?

Come to that in a minute. I mean, the context for that is Cunabalin's conquests in the lands of the Trinovantes and the Atropates, both of whom are allies of Rome. And so Cunabalin, by doing this, is breaking all kinds of treaties that presumably he had signed with Rome. So Tiberius, for instance, had been sending him lots of gold. So this is a standing provocation. And I don't think there's much doubt that Caligula thinks, well, this is absolutely justification enough for an invasion. His reputation is that he's kind of mad, absolutely lunatic, but actually he makes very, very sensible preparations. So in Germany, he recruits two entire new legions so that he can take two legions from the German frontier to Britain, and there won't be a kind of threat to the Rhine frontier. And he also builds a huge

lighthouse at what's now Boulogne that can spill its light out across the channel. He's building up naval facilities. He's beefing up his military resources. He seems to be behaving quite well, which makes the whole story about why he orders his soldiers to pick up shells absolutely baffling. I don't really know what the answer is. The best suggestion I can come up with is that perhaps there was a mutiny under Caligula as well, and that Caligula didn't want to acknowledge this because it would be damaging for his prestige. And so this is why he does the whole Neptune shell picking. It's really difficult to know, but whatever the precise explanation for what's going on there, I think it is clear that Caligula's preparations had provided Claudius, who succeeds Caligula when Caligula's assassinated, with the perfect opportunity to

launch this invasion. He has the justification, because the Catecholoni have been behaving badly to his allies. He has the opportunity, because he has all these additional legions that have been recruited. He has all this naval infrastructure. And he has the motivation, because he needs to establish himself and burnish his prestige. And so it is in the early summer of AD 43, after his freedmen has come and has suppressed the revolt, and they've all had a

good laugh about it, that some 30,000 to 40,000 men, so either three or four legions plus auxiliary troops, set sail from Boulogne. They're pulling out from the harbour beneath the great glow of the lighthouse built by Caligula. They sail out into the channel, and when they pulling out from the harbour beneath the great glow of the lighthouse built by Caligula. They sail out into the channel and when they get out there, they're blown off course by contrary winds. Everyone starts feeling seasick, terrified, thinking the worst,

dreading sea monsters. But then high up in the sky, they see a shooting star and it's rising in the east and it's falling in the west over the island of Britain. And Dio, who reports this, says of this remarkable occurrence that the soldiers took it as an omen of success.

Well, Tom, as we all know, a portent in the sky can mean good fortune or it can mean humiliation and disaster. So listeners should come back after the break to find out which it is. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment. early access to live tickets head to the rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com

welcome back to the rest is history tom we entered the first half with the portent in the sky the comet or whatever it is i'm sure that definitely happened by the way yeah dipping over the western horizon and was it an omen of good fortune? That is the question. It was. Oh, great. So they're not shipwrecked. They make an unopposed landing. It's not absolutely clear exactly how they make their landing. So Dio says they make it in three waves. So that might be their landing in one place in succession, or it might be that they're kind of making three beachheads. One of them certainly is by the Isle of Thanet. That's the rule. You've got to go there. And it's on an island that is just between the Isle of Thanet

and the mainland in this channel called the Wantsum Channel on this island, which is easily connectable to the mainland, which becomes the great naval base of Ritu Pai or Richborough, as it's called now. And the Romans do their usual stuff. They build ditches, establish it as a supply base. But it's possible that they also send contingents to the region in Chichester, which had been the stronghold of the Atrabartes. Because if you remember, the shooting star described by Dio is coming from the east to the west. And Dio says that they were sailing in the direction of the soldiers they saw that. So perhaps, you know, that's one of the landing places. And the other landing place, I don't know, maybe in Sussex, something like that. We don't know.

But what is clear is that bridgeheads are established and a two-pronged invasion is launched against the Catavoloni. So heading up towards the Thames. Some are going up from the south coast, the lands of the Atrobatis. Others are moving from the Isle of Thanet across Kent. There's a great battle probably at the Medway. One of the Roman officers who performs very well there is a man called Vespasian. He's in charge of the Second Legion. A name to conjure with. Yeah.

And he also has these very impressive German mercenaries called the Batavians, these auxiliaries who are serving the Romans. They have the very estimable ability to cross rivers in full armor. They swim across the Medway probably and catch the Britons in the rear. It's a very bloody contest, but the Romans managed to force their way across the river. Then they rendezvous with the other prong of the attack on the banks of the Thames. They cross the Thames, probably in the vicinity of London, probably building the bridge that will become London Bridge, forcing

their way across. And they defeat the combined forces of the two sons of Cunabalin, Caraticus and Togodumnus. And the question then is what happens to those two men? Caraticus flees westwards and inland. And you talked about him, he will become the great resistance fighter. That's where he's going. He is going to try and raise tribes in the interior of Britain against the threat of the Roman advance to kind of open their eyes to what is coming. Togdamnus is more intriguing. So Dio says that he dies in the battle, but it's been argued that Dio was mistranslating a word in Latin and that perhaps Togdamnus survived. The reason for that is that Tacitus, who is the other great historian of this period who gives us a kind of balancing narrative, he describes a king called Togidubnus,

who rules the lands of the Atrabates as a loyal ally of Rome for decades. He's also called Togidubnus in his descriptions. But the names are so similar. They're so similar. And so it's become quite a popular theory. I mean, not universally accepted, but lots of scholars give it credence, that perhaps this is what happened to him, that rather than dying, he was turned, that he became a collaborator with the Romans. And if that's the case, then the fate of the two brothers, Caraticus and Togedumnus, illustrates essentially the two alternatives that are open to the British elites, either to continue resistance or to collaborate. What's clear is that for the

Catecholomeo, the vast mass of the Catecholomeo, they don't really have an option. Their resistance has been broken. Aulus Plautius, who's on the far side of the Thames now, halts because he knows that he has fulfilled his mission, which is to prepare the way for Claudius to come to Britain and lay claim to a great victory. So the word reaches Rome. Claudius leaves Rome. He sails up to Marseilles from Ostia, the port of Rome, crosses Gaul, arrives in Richebrough, Ritupiae, and comes up and joins all as Plautius. And they then advance on Camulodunum, which effectively has been cast by the Romans as the capital, not just of the Catephalornae, but of Britain. Camelodunon is a dump. So Shepard Freer in his Great History of Britain,

she wrote several decades ago, but I don't think there's any particular reason to change his judgment on it. The habitations, he wrote, were for the most part small huts of prehistoric character. So nothing that a Roman emperor would find very impressive. But Claudius doesn't care because he's got his victory. And so he makes a splendid triumphal entry. He's brought the Praetorians. He's probably, although again, inevitably there are scholars who dispute this, but I think probably he has elephants. So this is all very impressive. Well, they've obviously shipped them across the channel. The evidence, I think, suggests that. It's capable of being read different ways, but I think probably, yes, he's brought elephants

with him and he duly receives the submission of 11 British kings, including, if a subsequent record is correct, a king from Orkney, so miles in the north of Scotland. So impressive. So before we just get on to Claudius and the time he spends in Britain, two questions. Number one, you talk about breaking the British resistance. Presumably the Romans, I mean, as we've said, an incredibly professional army, technologically the most advanced army in the kind of Eurasian world. And the Britons, they've got their moustaches, they've got their javelins.

They've got their slings. They've got their slings and their chariots. But presumably just a pitiful force by comparison. They're not pitiful. The charge of a British army is terrifying. If you can withstand it, then you will probably win. And Roman professional training is all about conditioning soldiers to withstand a charge like that.

And of course, giving them the kind of armour and kit that will enable them to do it. So here's the thing. Do the Britons have swords? They have swords, yes. Very impressive swords. Ah, interesting. Which they seem to have offered as offerings to the gods, to the various rivers where they've been dredged,

which is why you can now go and see them in museums. And my second question, Aulus Plautius is a general, obviously. He's commanded the army. Claudius has not commanded it. Is that not an issue for Claudius with the whole prestige thing and being an imperator? It doesn't matter. No, it's like Caesar. It's all about the story. It's all about the spin that he can give it. And when he goes back to Rome, he really does spin it.

So there are celebrations across the empire. In Rome, he celebrates a triumph. So, you know, this great parade through the streets of Rome, he gets given the name of Britannicus. There's a huge triumphal arch. He restages the conquest of Camulodunum, as the Romans called Camulodunum, in a gladiatorial display. They've brought Britons who ride chariots and everything. It's like Buffalo Bill, only people actually get killed as part of the display. So he's all over it. And you get a sense of how this then gets promoted across the empire from a city called Aphrodisias in what's now Turkey, where there's a very celebrated frieze of Claudius. He's got an absolute six-pack. There's no hint that he might have trouble walking. He's an absolute brute. He's holding the first representation of Britannia as a female. He's forced her down to her knees.

Her tunic has been pulled off her breasts. And it's pretty clear what Claudius is about to do to her. And the Romans don't really have any compunction in celebrating the fact that what they're doing to Britain is raping it. There is an element of seduction. So if Togedubnus has become the king of this kind of client kingdom in the south, then he's very, very richly rewarded. There's a great villa there called Fishbourne, which lots of scholars, again, think was given to Togedubnus as a kind of reward. It's the equivalent of Indian princes buying Rolls Royces for their palaces, sending their sons to Harrow, that kind of thing. He's being given the best that the Roman Empire can give in terms of material culture and prestige.

So he's got his baths and are hyper-coarsed and marble statues and stuff. Yes. And in a town like Verulamium, so it comes to be called Verulamium by the Romans, within the first years, there are bath complexes being built. There are temples, there are forums, and the baths are the most important because this is a kind of socializing mechanism. So the British elites can go there, they start to wear togas, be acclimatized to the new dispensation. So as I say, if you collaborate, there are rewards on offer. But if you resist, then Roman response is incredibly brutal. So Camulodonum becomes the headquarters of the 20th

Legion. The soldiers treat the natives basically as slaves, appropriating their harvests, their livestock, probably their women. In 49, the 20th Legion abandons this base and Camulodonium is transformed into what the Romans called a colonia, which is essentially a transplantation of Rome to a kind of distant territory. It's essentially a showcase for Roman culture. So they built an enormous temple to Claudius, I mean, vast in the way that Durham Cathedral would have appeared vast to the people of the North in the wake of the Norman conquest. And the colonists, the people who settled there, are retired Roman soldiers. And so Tacitus explains the value of this. He says, this constituted a strong body of veterans, a defense against rebels, and a means

of instilling in our allies respect for our laws. There are no fortifications built around this colonia, Camulodonum, and it reflects the fact that the Romans by this point assume that the southeast is now secured. Meanwhile, legions are fanning out to conquer the rest of Britain. So we can track the advance of one of those generals, Vespasian, who we've mentioned in command command of the Second Legion. He heads into the southwest and Suetonius, who writes a biography of him, says that he brought two very strong tribes under Roman rule, together with over 20 large settlements and Vectis, that's the Isle of Wight, an island just off Britain. Now, Dominic, I don't know if you remember, I always did as a child, that I was always told that this

included Maiden Castle, which is this enormous hill fort outside Dorchester, the county town of Dorset. This was excavated in the late 1930s by two archaeologists, Mortimer Wheeler and his wife. And his wife died. Mortimer Wheeler then wrote up the report in 1941. And in it, he says how he has identified the Roman conquest, the Roman storming of Maiden Castle, how there'd been this massive artillery barrage. And he says how he's found a ballista bolt bedded in the spine of one of the Britons who were buried there at the

gateway of the hill fort. And this was still being repeated in the books that I was reading as a kind of Rome-enthusiastic child in the 70s. But sadly, not true. He'd been massively over-interpreting it. There was no military bolt in the spine. And it turns out that Maiden Castle had actually been abandoned decades before the Roman invasion. And if you think about it, anyone who's been to Maiden Castle, it is huge. It's a vast structure.

It would have been indefensible. There simply it is huge. It's a vast structure. It would have been indefensible. I mean, there simply wouldn't have been enough people to defend it. So it was probably a centre for cultic practices, for the sacral. So Ronald Hutton says that at hill forts, you know, people want to know what did the sacral look like in the British landscape? Look at hill forts. That's probably what they were. But I think that Mortimer Wheeler, he's writing it in 41. He obviously has the experience of the great 20th century wars in his mind. He'd fought in the First World War. He'd go on to fight in the Second World War. He becomes very decorated. And I think that he saw in the Roman conquest a preview of the horrors of 20th century warfare, where you would have artillery barrages and then soldiers going in. And the details may be wrong, but that sense of

mass slaughter, mass enslavement, mass rape, I mean, he's not wrong. That is what's going on. How do we know that these things happened? We can look at, I suppose, the paradigmatic example of this is what happens in Wales. You asked earlier, why are the Romans going to Britain? She fits for the mineral wealth and gold, silver, lead is to be found above all in Wales. And the conquest of Wales, as it was for, say, the English in the Middle Ages, is a very protracted and bloody process. Because of the geography, the hills,

the valleys, the forests, all that stuff. So by 47, so Aulus Plautius is recalled to Rome. He doesn't have a triumph because only emperors can have triumphs by this point, but he's given what's called innovation. So it's basically a triumph and you don't ride in a chariot, you walk. He leaves an island, the lowlands of which have been occupied. So in a line from the Humber down to the Aix in Devon. Of course, beyond the frontier is Wales. And Duncan McKay, in his wonderful book on Boudicca, he describes it when the Romans had first landed in Southern Britain, those distant tribes and their brooding cloud hung hills were no more than a darkness beyond the horizon. But when the Romans go into Wales, of course, they're plunging into the darkness as they would see it. And they're confronting two tribal groupings, the Silurians in the south,

so the Silurians, Dominic, as in... Dr. Who. And the Ordovicians in the north. So anyone interested in prehistory and geology will recognise them as periods of the geological past derived from the rocks that you get in the territories of these tribes. And the resistance there is incredibly brutal. And this is partly because Caraticus has made his base there. So that's super interesting. If Caraticus has made his base there, does that imply a kind of shared identity? Because he is a king from a long way away. I mean, days march or walk. Yeah, I agree. It's fascinating. And I think that

he makes common cause with the tribes in Wales. I mean, Wales is an anachronistic word, but let's call it Wales, the Welsh tribes, because he brings an understanding of how the Romans operate that the Welsh tribes wouldn't have because they don't really know what's about to hit them. It's an alliance of convenience and it's very successful. Caraticus and the Welsh tribes continue their fight until in 51 he's cornered by a Roman army and he's defeated in pitched battle. He flees to the upland regions of what's now the Midlands and Yorkshire, where there's a queen called Cartamandua. And Cartamandua is an ally of the Roman people. And so she hands Caraticus over

to the Romans. And this is always cast as an act of the basest treachery. But I think it's probably slightly more complicated than that. And it's probably a bit like she's playing the role that Commius did with Caesar. So she's essentially the kind of, not the middle man, the middle woman who's negotiating terms between the two sides. And so Caraticus is captured. He's taken off to Rome. He's led through the streets in chains. Everyone's terribly impressed by him, his noble bearing, the splendor of his golden moustache, all of that. And Claudius, with an imperious show of magnanimity, orders his chains to be struck off. And Caraticus then wanders around Rome saying, in an inspiring manner, I have no idea why the Romans came to

conquer my lands when you have such wealth. Why do you need my mean and backward land when you have such a splendid capital? I remember that story so well from when I was about seven. And I love that because everyone comes out well from that story. Claudius does. Graticus does. I suppose Cartabandua doesn't. No, I guess not.

She'll be getting up to more mischief in due course, as we will see. But the thing is that in Wales, Graticus' capture doesn't stop the fighting. They carry on. And this may reflect the influence of the Druids who have their base up in Anglesey, Mona. That's another thing that I learned when I was seven that stuck in my mind. Anglesey was full of these wild-haired wizards. And this is true. It is true. What is also true is that there are rumours that spread unsurprisingly through the Welsh tribes that the Romans are intending genocide.

The Silurians in particular are outraged by a report that Plautus' replacement as governor, a man called Ostorius Scapula, had declared that the name of the Silurians should be wiped from the face of the earth. The so the campaign is of a genocidal scope. The Romans are trying to wipe the Silurians out. The Silurians are trying to wipe the Romans out. And in fact, during Scapula's term of office, a legion is so badly mauled, it has to retreat. And that's obviously a kind of devastating blow to Roman prestige. And Scapular actually dies in office, it seems, of the strain. And he's followed by two more governors and they can't pacify the Welsh. The bloodshed continues, the slaughter, the enslavement. And so finally in 58, by which point Claudius has been dead for four years and been succeeded by his young heir Nero, the decision

is taken to send Rome's best general to sort the mess out. And this is a man called Gaius Suetonius Paulinus. And he has experience of fighting in mountains because he had been the governor of Mauritania, so Morocco as it is now. And he'd been the first person to lead a Roman military expedition up into the Atlas mountains, where he'd seen all kinds of wonders. And so he seems absolutely the man for a mountain campaign in the wilds of Britain. And he basically

breaks the Salurians and the Ordovicians. So after two years campaigning, so we're now into AD 60, the Salurians have been crushed so totally that they're not mentioned for at least a couple of decades after Paulinus's term of office. And he also does an Edward I and establishes a great complex of forts in the northern region of Wales, where the Ordovicians have their strongholds. And by building this kind of great network of forts, he is able to target the last stronghold, the last outpost, the great center of druidical practice, the island of Anglesey. And in the summer of AD 60, he marches a force of about 15,000 men. So that's legionaries, his own legion, another legion, auxiliaries, and they stand on the shores of the Menae Strait looking

across at Anglesey. And there, Dominic, is the bit that you probably remember from your Ladybird book. I'm just going to read it. It's from Tacitus, isn't it? They're stood along the shore, a diverse line, dense with arms and men and with females running in between in funereal clothing and with tumbling hair. They were flourishing firebrands after the manner of the Furies and druids around about pouring forth ominous prayers with their hands raised to the sky. This is reminiscent of the scene when Caesar had landed more than a century earlier. This image of kind of barbarism, mystical barbarism on the other side of the strait. Except that when Caesar lands, it's warriors that he's confronting.

This is wizards, women and wizards. Which in a way makes it more kind of terrifying. Oh, it's definitely, it's absolutely, I'm terrified just thinking about it. It's so vivid. The temptation is to say, oh, he's just made up. How could Tacitus possibly know? I think it has the immediacy of a kind of authentic experience. And we know how Tacitus could have heard about this because Tacitus is

the son-in-law of a man called Agricola, who will go on to play a great role in the history of the Roman conquest, but who at the time was a tribune on the staff of Suetonius Paulinus and almost certainly would have described it to Tacitus. I see no particular reason to doubt the general drift of that description, nor the account of what happens, because Paulinus has prepared kind of shallow-bottomed landing craft. His forces managed to get across the Meno Straits. The Britons on Anglesey then are absolute toast, as usual, the mass slaughter, mass enslavement. And it's from Tacitus that we get evidence, I mean, people can believe it to

the degree that they want to, of human sacrifice. Talking about the Druids, Tacitus writes, their groves devoted to inhuman superstitions were destroyed. They deemed it indeed a duty to cover their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their deities through human entrails. So you may say this is imperialist propaganda, or you may look at the evidence of the Carthaginians or the Aztecs and say, well, why not? We shouldn't impose our categories of what is right and wrong on a distant and ancient people. On balance, I would say probably, but we can't be certain. I mean, to be fair, I've been to North Wales. I knew you were going to say that.

Sorry, it's just an opening. Yeah, there we lose all our Welsh listeners. And I say that as a man who's Tom. Who is, of course, a quarter Welsh yourself. Yeah, exactly. So what's absolutely certain, even if there aren't graves full of human entrails, this is a great victory because it seems at last, as though all of Southern Britain, so below the line of the Mersey and the Humber, essentially has been brought to acknowledge Roman supremacy. And

Suetonius Paulinus, sweaty, bloodstained, wiping his brow, can nevertheless breathe a huge sigh of relief, feel incredibly proud of what he's accomplished. But then, Dominic, in the very hour of his triumph, crossing the straits, travel-stained, exhausted, a messenger from the far southeastern corner of Britain bringing terrible news that on the far side of Britain, a people called the Icani, who we haven't yet mentioned, have risen in revolt, that they are marching on Camulodonium, the great colonia, the capital of Britain, the showcase of Roman power. And worst of all, Dominic, the Icani are led by a woman. A woman?

Well, on that bombshell, Tom, thank you very much for that tour de force. That is the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers. Members of our own empire, the Restless History Club, will immediately be able to hear what happened next. Spoiler alert, the great story of Boudicca, or Baudicier if you prefer, the embodiment in many ways of British resistance or Brittonic resistance to the Romans. So if you're a member of the Rest is History Club, you can hear that straight away. If you're not, you can sign up at therestishistory.com. And if you don't want to, you'll have to wait until

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