Marching down Marylebone Road I counted 26 neoclassical columns, then my mobile phone rang: a TV researcher was asking why film fetishises the Roman experience. Past the reconstructed remains of a Temple of Mithras in Queen Victoria Street, a billboard announced that new Romano- British artefacts had been unearthed by London developers, adding to those recently turned up by the Jubilee Line extension. One favourite was a lamp in the shape of a soldier’s foot, the wick lit on the big toe. It was a 40-minute journey that sang out Vivat Londinium! Romanis Victoria! In truth I had also travelled through Anglo-Saxon Lundenwic, and across both prehistoric Tamesa and the Viking battlefields near the Bank of England. Yet we seem less enthused by these tuftier DNA strands in our genetic make-up than by the 400-year span that is Roman Britain.
As David Mattingly convincingly points out, there are two reasons why our Roman inheritance is un-avoidable. The Romans landed on an island with a deep past, but no formal “history”. The invaders abhorred that void and filled it: the province of Britannia has more textual and archaeological clues than any other in the Empire (and, given that the Empire at its peak stretched from the River Clyde to Ethiopia, that is quite something).
Then in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, Rome’s “enlightening” empire became a touchstone for Britain’s; copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars and Virgil’s exhortations to “make your task to rule nations . . . to impose ordered ways . . . to spare those who have submitted and subdue the arrogant” were packed in the Gladstone bags of our own empire-builders.
Mattingly is transparently troubled by imperial ambition — “For the majority of Britons, it is clear that, in the short term, the Romans were very bad news” — and has written his 622-page book to encourage us to think outside the Roman box; to give that box a contemporary dimension.
His point is twofold. First, and quite rightly, he explains that previous interpretations of Roman power have rested on literature and high-end material evidence — inscriptions; statues; Hadrian’s Wall.
Wide ranging archaeology (from the 100,000 Romano-British sites in Britain) now offers a richer and more subtle palate. The evidence of Boadicea’s revolt is not found just in the works of Tacitus and Dio Cassius but in blackened coins warped in the warrior-queen’s furious flames and (despite the fact that “resistance is harder to demonstrate archaeologically than conformity”) within a wider schema of dissatisfaction: at one point a tenth of Rome’s armed forces occupied the province of Britannia. The natives put up a more tenacious fight than official sources imply.
Secondly, Mattingly reminds us that indigenous characters and characteristics feature only when they tangle with Rome. We remember the determined rebel Caractacus and his Judas, Queen Quartimandua, because they affected imperial interests. Popular native gods were romanised and while the Sulis-Minerva blend appears smooth, it was not a marriage of equals. Pre-Roman divinities were frequently yoked to that bully-boy Mars or simply obliterated.
An Imperial Possession’s theme is the power attendant on ownership — of names, of territories and of history. We still study Roman Britain rather than Britain in the time of Imperial Rome.
This is a candid argument straightforwardly put: “Another group of elite Britons were the druides (druids), about whom much rubbish has been written.”
There is so much detailed evidence that reading it can be a little dense: one sunny afternoon I found my mind wandering as I embarked on yet another page of cohort statistics. Still, my attention was snapped back by a clever illustration mapping the concentration of Roman garrisons throughout 400 years of occupation — a stark indicator of the reach of Rome’s iron fist.
The book encourages readers not to feel nostalgia for a land filled with bath houses, villas, strigils, apples, cherries and straight, empty roads. The benefits of empire were regional and predominantly available to representatives of Rome.
In a subconscious “don’t mention the war moment” we are also reminded just how many Germans (from Germania) ran Britain — particularly during the last 150 years of occupation. And those north of Watford will not be pleased to hear that in AD213 the country was divided into two sections, Britannia superior, controlled by London, and Britannia inferior.
I do not entirely share Mattingly’s testy disapproval of the Roman occupation, of Britannia perdomita. There are drawbacks as well as benefits to insularity.
Human history is an unbroken round of population movement and displacement. We do not have documentary evidence for the oppression experienced within Iron Age communities, just as we should not romanticise Roman Britain nor whitewash Britain BC.
Opportunistic Iron Age aristocrats made pilgrimages to Rome to better themselves and to promote their own vigorous slave trade (I bet they didn’t expect to be invaded in return).
Mattingly is refreshingly honest about his mission. New evidence has suggested a new orthodoxy and he builds up his argument confidently: as he does so he propels us towards an important — very unRoman — activity. That is the need to pursue not just the strong and the charismatic (who could not be delighted by a lamp in the shape of a human foot) but to peer into a sparser historical landscape: to follow and appreciate those whose footfall is light.
Extract from AN IMPERIAL POSSESSION Britain in the Roman Empire by David Mattingly
When Caesar invaded the south-east of England in 55-54 BC . . . his political opponents held their breath and awaited word of this mysterious land. One of those opponents was the arch-Republican M. Tullius Cicero and, as news of rather mediocre results filtered back, you can sense his relief in letters to his friend Atticus and to his brother Quintus, who was in Britain with Caesar. He stressed the fact that, contrary to expectations, the campaigns had not yielded much gold and silver “nor any prospect of booty except slaves” (adding snidely that such slaves were not expected to be accomplished in literature or music). His overall conclusion was “that there is nothing there for us to fear or rejoice at”. Strabo, explaining why Augustus had subsequently chosen not to annex Britain, expressed the same sentiment:
“For though the Romans could have held Britain, they have rejected the idea, seeing that there was nothing to fear from the Britons, since they are not powerful enough to cross over and attack us, nor was there much advantage to be gained if the Romans were to occupy it.”
The campaigns of Caesar (are) often written off by modern commentators as no more than a brief and inconsequential encounter. The real disruption was to come under Claudius a century later. Indeed, the Roman conquest of AD43 is often presented as the end of the Iron Age in Britain, in much the same way that 1066 is held to mark the end of Anglo-Saxon England. This is wrong in several respects. Many of the islands of the British archipelago did not become part of the Roman Empire in 43; some never did.
