One way in which local tribes could guarantee peaceful co-existence with Rome was to bequeath to the Romans their lands on the death of the monarch. As noted, Prasutagus, prosperous king of the Iceni did just that, citing Nero as heir but with a codicil naming his daughters as coheirs. The Iceni had been on friendly terms with the Romans since the early days of the invasion, but on the king’s death in AD 60 these same Romans chose to ignore the small print in the king’s will, divided up the legacy, took over the kingdom and plundered it. Indeed, Suetonius relates (Augustus 48) that Augustus had ordained that many years before client kingdoms (reges socii) were always ‘integral parts of the empire’ (membra partesque imperii). Perhaps it was naive of the Iceni to expect an extension of the special relationship after Prasutagus’ death, but the aftermath of the Roman decision was shocking, brutal and highly provocative: Prasutagus’ daughters were raped, Queen Boudica, his wife, was flogged, the family was treated as slaves and his Roman creditors called in their loans, loans which the Iceni had been led to believe were gifts; grants made by Claudius were also revoked. Boudica was comprehensively humiliated and outraged.
Elsewhere in Britannia, the time was ripe for revenge and rebellion: the Iceni were joined by the disaffected Trinovantes, the tribe that had been ignominiously displaced from the native capital Camulodunum and enslaved as labourers to help in the construction of the colonia in AD 49–50 with its Temple of Claudius, a citadel unmistakably symbolic of oppressive Roman rule, a beacon of Romanisation, which was the focus of an imperial cult dedicated to Claudius with the burden of cost on the native aristocracy. Furthermore, the Romans settled it with a large contingent of army veterans, which would provide a permanent insurance against rebellion, in effect making it a small piece of Rome in Britannia. What they failed to do, however, was fortify the place.
On the eve of the uprising the omens were not good for the Romans: ‘the statue of Victory in Camulodunum crashed to the ground as if in flight; there were lamentations, though no mortal man had uttered the words or the groans’; hysterical women chanted, heralding impending doom, ‘at night there was heard to issue from the senate-house foreign jargon mingled with laughter, and from the theatre more cries; a ghost town on the Thames was seen to be in ruins and the Channel turned blood red; shapes like bodies were washed up.’ More crucially, Camulodunum was not only not fortified but largely undefended – Suetonius Paulinus had fatefully posted the garrison legion, the XXth, to the Welsh borders. The procurator was found wanting: when the Roman inhabitants clamoured for reinforcements, Catus Decianus sent a mere 200 auxiliary troops.
In AD 61, the Iceni under Boudica advanced on the colonia. Camulodunum was sacked and the temple fell after two days; the saevitia, savagery, of Boudica’s forces was uncompromising. The sounds of human sacrifice rang around the sacred groves. The IXth legion under Petillius Cerealis rushed to relieve the defenders but was annihilated. Catus Decianus fled to Gaul. Only the IXth’s cavalry escaped to fight another day. Suetonius reached Londinium – then an important but undefended trading port – calculating that it was impossible to defend with the meagre forces at his disposal. The awful decision to abandon Londinium was made and those left behind were slaughtered in the carnage that ensued. Excavations have revealed a thick red layer of burnt detritus covering coins and pottery dating before AD 60.
Euphoric and drunk – metaphorically and actually – on their easy successes, the Britons then devastated Verulamium (St Albans), a stronghold of the pro-Roman Catuvellauni. According to (an exaggerating) Tacitus, up to 80,000 men, women and children were slain in the orgy of destruction visited on the three towns by Boudica’s forces. The Britons were not in the habit of taking prisoners – they had no interest in selling slaves – they showed no quarter; the only options were rape, slaughter, hanging, burning alive and crucifixion. Dio’s account is even more graphic: he says that the noblest women had the length of their bodies impaled on sharpened spikes and their breasts were hacked off and sewn onto their mouths, ‘to the accompaniment of sacrifices, feasts, and lewd behaviour’ sacrilegiously performed in sacred places, such as the groves of Andraste, a British goddess of victory.
Suetonius Paulinus hurriedly assembled a force of around 10,000 men and prepared for battle, the Battle of Watling Street, to salvage what he could of the Roman occupation. His army included his own Legio XIV Gemina and units from the XX Valeria Victrix; Legio II Augusta under Poenius Postumus, near Exeter, did not respond to the call for assistance either because Postumus was petrified at the prospect of fighting Boudica or, more likely, because he (sensibly) did not want to leave the south west unprotected. Whatever, his insubordination would have fortuitously detained some tribes in the south west preventing them from joining Boudica.
The 10,000 were massively outnumbered by Boudica’s 230,000 – no doubt another huge exaggeration but Boudica certainly enjoyed a substantial superiority; as Dio says, even if the Romans were lined up one deep, they would not have reached the end of Boudica’s line. However, British complacency was to be their undoing: so casual, so confident was Boudica’s army of victory that women were allowed to attend the battle as grandstand spectators in wagons on the edge of the battlefield. Boudica herself rallied her troops from a chariot, her violated daughters beside her, in a rousing speech, anticipating another easy victory.
Unfortunately for the Britons, there was to be no victory; Boudica was soundly defeated. The Britons were hampered by their poor manoeuvrability and their inexperience of disciplined open-field tactics. Moreover, the narrow battlefield restricted the numbers Boudica could deploy at any one time, thus diminishing her numerical advantage. The Britons were felled in their droves by the Roman javelins which rained down on them.
Women and domestic animals were slaughtered while Boudica’s retreating warriors were hampered in their collective flight by the wagons nearby, all full of those hapless spectators. According to Tacitus (exaggerating again), 80,000 Britons died that day to the Romans’ loss of 400. No doubt there was more rape and other atrocities; the fate of Boudica’s daughters is not recorded. Some say Boudica herself committed suicide by poisoning; Dio disputes this, or at least paraphrases the detail out of the same story, and claims that Boudica fell ill and died, and was buried at great expense and with full honours.
Postumus fell on his sword, his leaderless legion along with the IXth joining Suetonius. The IXth was reinforced with 2,000 infantry from Germany, eight cohorts of auxiliary infantry and 1,000 auxiliary horse. Catus Decianus was replaced by Gaius Julius Alpinus Classicianus. Suetonius instigated vicious slash-and-burn reprisals on every tribe involved in the rebellion, but he was eventually replaced by the more conciliatory Publius Petronius Turpilianus, in the interests of averting another revolt. The pretext for Suetonius’ (the commander) removal was that he had apparently ‘lost’ some of the ships of the Roman fleet. If Suetonius, (the biographer), is to be believed, the crisis, as noted, almost made Nero, now emperor, abandon Britannia for good.
Iceni territory was amongst the lands laid waste by Suetonius Paulinus with many surviving rebels sold into slavery, and ‘whatever tribes still wavered or were hostile were ravaged with fire and sword’. The prospect, and reality, of famine became all the more real because the Britons had not bothered to sow seeds for the year’s harvest, over-optimistically and naively assuming they could live off plundered Roman supplies. It is likely that Britannia went into recession, even depression: the fields were empty and the agricultural workforce was severely depleted through war casualties, disability and enslavement.
What little evidence we have of Romanisation immediately after the revolt comes from the rebuilding of London, as a civil rather than the military community destroyed by Boudica. In the ‘70s there was reconstruction work at Verulamium and civic projects at Exeter and Cirencester. But it was the new procurator, Gaius Julius Alpinus Classicianus from 61 to 65 who salvaged the increasingly tenuous Roman hold on Britannia. He was a man with experience of motives for rebellion and the consequences of repression, gained through his father-in-law, Julius Indus, a distinguished provincial from the Trier region. Classicianus saw what the destruction of these huge swathes of Britannia would do to his tax revenues: his intervention was pivotal in the future of Roman Britannia.
In the short term, the Romans had to win back the hearts and minds of those members of the British aristocracy who were pro-Roman or, at least, not anti-Roman. They had obviously lost much goodwill and sympathy during and after the revolt, particularly following Suetonius’ savage reprisals. Classicianus’ critical report, especially in relation to Suetonius Paulinus, led to an inquiry presided over by the freedman Polyclitus. Tacitus loathed Polyclitus, because, as a snob, the historian loathed all freedmen and their new powers, alien as they were to the mos maiorum – the way your forefathers did things – the mantra of the conservative Roman. He despised Publius Petronius Turpilianus, the new governor (62–63) because of what he saw as disgraceful turpitude when he failed to rush headlong into more conflict with the barbaric Britons. But between Classicianus and Turpilianus, it cannot be denied, they restored much-needed order to southern Britain and southern Britain never rose in revolt ever again.
Tacitus hints of some success here when he says, not without a sneer, that the Britons were beginning to enjoy the fruits of peace and the allurements of civilisation under Trebellius Maximus, governor AD 63–69. The Britons were turning into Romans. . .
Mos Maiorum
An unwritten, but nevertheless powerful, code subscribed to by conservative Romans who believed that in all things their ancestors did it best and they did it in the right way. The code prescribed social norms and laid down values for the true Roman to follow. According to some, Rome had been declining in so many ways since the third century BC. We have already encountered Cato the Elder; to Cato and others like him the waging of war was one answer to all manner of political and social issues.
Here are the key pillars of the mos maiorum:
Fides
Trust, trustworthiness, good faith, faithfulness, confidence, reliability and credibility.
Pietas
Respect towards the gods, homeland, parents and family, which required the maintenance of relationships in a moral and dutiful manner. Cicero defined pietas as ‘justice towards the gods’ (De Natura Deorum 1, 116). It was the principal virtue of Aeneas in Virgil’s national poem, the Aeneid.
Religio and cultus
Religio was the bond between gods and mortals, as carried out in traditional religious practices for preserving the pax deorum (‘peace of the gods’). Cultus was the active observance and the correct performance of rituals.
Disciplina
The military character of Roman society explains the importance of disciplina, as related to education, training, discipline and self-control.
Gravitas and Constantia
Gravitas was dignified self-control. Constantia was steadiness or perseverance. In adversity, a good Roman must maintain an emotionless disposition.
Virtus
Virtus enshrined the ideal of the true Roman male.
Dignitas and auctoritas
Dignitas and auctoritas were what you got by displaying the values of the ideal Roman in the form of priesthoods, military rank and magistracies. Dignitas was reputation for worth, honour and esteem. Thus, a Roman who displayed their gravitas, constantia, fides, pietas and other values of a Roman would be exhibiting dignitas among his peers.
The Romans showed breathtaking arrogance and naivety in the run-up to the rebellion. History should have told them that much of what they were doing in the years before AD 60 was politically inept, provocative, inflammatory, diplomatically disastrous and certain to end badly. The maulings Rome took in the Clades Lolliana in 17 BC and in the Teutoburger Wald in AD 9 were still relatively recent, but any lessons learned there seem to have been forgotten. The only good that came out of the Boudican revolt was the programme of civic and fortress building which the Romans undertook to defend against the rebellious Brigantes and Welsh tribes. Eboracum was one of those fortresses which benefitted, and as such became a major player in the defence of Roman Britain and the civilising and Romanising which went with it.