The sole municipal recognition of these events (any physical traces of which, as the eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley pointed out, are ‘many ages since absorpt by the ocean’) is an inconspicuous plaque set into the grass near the lifeboat station at Walmer, with Caesar’s craggy profile rendered in concrete relief. As I examined it one sunny, cloud-scudded April morning, an elderly man walking his spittle-flecked Alsatian wandered up to see what I was doing. ‘Could do with a clean-up,’ he remarked – indeed, it was lichen-crusted and the inscription was almost illegible. But there were moves afoot to commemorate Caesar’s landings more forcefully. In a camera shop on the high street, the proprietor, Peter Jull, told me about his campaign to erect a memorial to the landings. He envisaged, he said, a complicated bronze assemblage, with Julius Caesar in the prow of his galley, the standard-bearer of the 10th about to leap, and the Britons, in their war chariots, poised to attack. ‘It would be high-profile, and photogenic,’ he said. ‘It would be good for tourism to the town. And as an event it ought to be better recorded, not just for Deal people but for people everywhere in the country.’ Jull also claimed he could trace his own ancestry back to the Kentish Queen Bertha, who welcomed St Augustine’s mission in AD 597. Out on the seafront, I encountered a philosophical street-sweeper, catching the sun on a sheltered bench, his rubbish cart beside him, who said that he had found perfect happiness by way of his job: ‘I wish I’d done it in 1956 when I left school.’ I asked him if he knew about the campaign for the sculpture of Caesar. ‘It’ll be between him and Norman Wisdom,’ he said drily. It turned out there was a rival campaign under way to memorialise the Deal-born comedian.
As holidaymakers bicycled along the promenade, and children queued for ice cream despite the chill wind, it was hard to imagine the English Channel as the implacable, terrifying barrier classical writers described. The Romans’ world was a generous sphere. The Mediterranean lapped comfortably at the shores of its more familiar regions, with Italy snug at its centre. Far, far away, where no civilised man ventured, roared the Ocean, girdling the world’s inhabitable regions – or so Homer had written, and so it was generally maintained. In this liminal realm between the Earth and the void, in this frighteningly distant zone, lay Britain. Here, even the laws of nature could not be relied upon. Tacitus, writing in the dying years of the first century AD about his father-in-law’s stint as governor of Britain, reported tales of curious gelatinous waves in the northern seas that were ‘sluggish and heavy to the oars, and not set in motion as much as other seas even by the winds’. If for Shakespeare the ‘silver sea’ around Britain served it ‘in the office of a wall’ or as ‘a moat defensive to a house’, then the Romans thought about it in not dissimilar vein – but as outsiders.
Caesar tried his hand at Britain after he had conquered his way through Gaul. According to his own account, taking the island was the natural extension of his gains on the continent, since (he claimed) the Britons had close links with their neighbours across the Channel; alongside this practical justification came the kudos attached to campaigning on the very fringes of the known world. Britain stayed on the Roman agenda, on and off: Caesar’s successor, the emperor Augustus, mooted, but never carried through, an invasion. As Britain crept into political focus for Rome, so it began to be harnessed as a literary metaphor for extremity and isolation. A poem by Catullus, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, is addressed to two friends, Furius and Aurelius, who are, says the poem, so loyal they would accompany the author even to India or Arabia, or to the steppes of Scythia, or Parthia, or Africa – or to the ‘Britons at the margins of the world’. In Latin, the phrase is ‘ultimosque Britannos’, and the word ‘ultimosque’ is split awkwardly between two lines: these Britons drop over the world’s edge. The poet Virgil’s first Eclogue, composed during the civil wars that ended in 31 BC with the accession of Augustus as emperor, is a pastoral set in a mythical landscape inhabited by shepherds and nymphs; Tennyson’s ‘the moan of doves in immemorial elms’ is inspired by one of its lines. But the poem also seems to have a demi-life in Virgil’s own turbulent era of civil strife, aristocratic power struggle and land confiscations. One of its characters has received the right to continue his bucolic existence; the other has been cast from his land and is forced into exile – perhaps, he says, he will be banished to the steppes of Scythia, perhaps to Britain ‘toto divisos orbe’, ‘quite cut off from the world’.
Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century BC, had been sceptical about what could be known of the ‘extreme tracts of Europe towards the west’. It is possible, he wrote, that there were islands called the Cassiterides (meaning ‘tin islands’), but ‘I have never been able to get an assurance from an eyewitness that there is any sea on the further side of Europe.’ Nevertheless, he acknowledged, ‘tin and amber do certainly come to us from the ends of the earth’, and there is surely some echo here of a trading route linking Herodotus’s world with the far west, for the Baltic was the source of amber and Cornwall did indeed, suggests the archaeological evidence, export tin. But for Herodotus, these are fanciful travellers’ tales, to be doubtfully bracketed with what he describes next – a race of one-eyed men inhabiting the far north, who obtain gold by stealing it from griffins.
So much that we could know about the ancient world is tantalisingly out of reach. For every book that was cherished, copied and passed down through the uncertain ages between antiquity and the Renaissance, dozens were carried out of existence by a myriad possible mischances. So it is with the work of Pytheas, a Greek of the fourth century BC from the western colony of Massilia – modern Marseilles. He was the author of a book called On the Ocean, which we know about only in so far as it was quoted by later writers, such as the Roman geographer Strabo, who was working during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, and the Roman natural historian of the first century ad, Pliny the Elder. When On the Ocean was quoted at all, it was usually witheringly, for (so it seemed to his readers in antiquity) Pytheas was obviously lying when he claimed to have sailed into the perilous Ocean and actually to have circumnavigated Britain. He reported a yet further island called Thule – perhaps the Shetlands, or Iceland, or Norway. He claimed to have visited a a promontory called Belerium, where tin was quarried, which might signify Cornwall; and an island called Ictis nearby, which could be reached on foot at low tide, just possibly St Michael’s Mount. I would give a great deal to be able to read On the Ocean.
In the first century BC, Pytheas’s book was drawn on by the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus, author of the Library, an immensely ambitious work gathering together the history of the entire known world, from the deep mythological past to the exploits of his contemporary, Julius Caesar. Fifteen of its forty books survive, and they include a description of Britain, in his Greek rendering Pretannia – the first surviving use of the word. Tantalisingly, he promises to return to the subject of Britain in more detail when he comes to describe the actions of Caesar, but that part of the book is lost. His description begins – oddly touchingly, to me – with his likening Britain’s triangular shape to that of his familiar native Sicily. He names a region called Cantium, which is our Kent. As for its people, writes Diodorus, Britain ‘is inhabited by tribes which are native to the land and preserve in their ways of living the ancient manner of life. They use chariots, for instance, in their wars, even as tradition tells us the old Greek heroes did in the Trojan War, and their dwellings are humble, being built for the most part out of reeds or logs … they are simple and far removed from the shrewdness and vice which characterise the men of our day. Their way of living is modest, since they are well clear of the luxury which is begotten of wealth.’
And so emerged another trope in classical writing about Britain. Untouched by the modern vices, suggests Diodorus, these people are instead tinged with the ancient glories of Homer’s heroes. There is a moral flavour to this account that will be much more fully developed by the historian Tacitus in the next century: the thought is that at the edges
of the Roman empire a certain kind of simple nobility flourishes. For the writers of such ethnographic descriptions, the world was parsed as if it was a series of concentric circles: at the centre, Rome, civilised (though, perhaps, corrupt). As the encircling bands become larger, so the people become less civilised, more savage (though also, sometimes, virtuous). The rule works in microcosm: for example, Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War insist that the people of Cantium, geographically the closest in Britain to the Roman world, are the island’s most civilised. And for Strabo, the inhabitants of the unimaginably remote Ireland are even ‘more savage than the Britons’. They eat, he says, their dead fathers, and have sex with their own mothers and sisters – the triumph of the seething, unfettered id.
What the Britons thought about themselves, and their place in the wider world, is a matter of speculation. It is clear, though, that just as Britain was becoming a reality for Rome in the first century BC, so was Rome looming larger for the Britons. There were trade links: luxury goods from the Roman world began increasingly to be placed in the graves of the British elite; there are finds of glass vessels, of fig pips, of amphorae once filled with Mediterranean wine. According to Strabo, Britain was an exporter: of hides, hunting dogs and slaves. And even if Caesar emphasised Britain’s exoticism, claiming that it was a land of almost complete mystery to the invaders, he noted that it was visited by merchants, at least ‘the maritime shore and those parts facing Gaul’. For the potentates of southern Britain, the presence of Rome could not be avoided.
Britain, during the period when it came to the focused attention of the Roman world, was an Iron Age Celtic society with much in common with its neighbours over the Channel. Roman authors tell us that the inhabitants were grouped in regional ‘tribes’ led by male or female rulers (Boudica is only the most famous of the queens; Tacitus also writes of Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes tribe in northern England). Archaeological evidence tells us – though there are wide geographical variations – that the Iron Age Britons lived in settlements largely consisting of groups of thatched roundhouses. Some of them inhabited hill forts – settlements on a high point in the landscape, encircled by mighty ditches. The most impressive example is perhaps Maiden Castle in Dorset, which looks down upon Dorchester and its satellite, Poundbury, from its windy heights, the centre girdled by a tangled coil of earth ramparts. Towards the period of Roman conquest, powerful settlements known as ‘oppida’ also seem to have been established, especially in the south. Archaeologists are gradually hypothesising a more and more sophisticated modus vivendi for the Iron Age Britons, undermining traditional views, propounded since the Renaissance, that the Romans brought civilised ways to an entirely untutored race of savage natives. In 2011, by way of example, the wooden foundations of a metalled, cambered road in Shropshire long thought to be Roman were carbon-dated to the second century BC. The craftsmanship of Iron Age Britain also suggests a sophisticated culture, or at least a wealthy elite: not only the obvious splendour of the gold torcs, thick as my wrist, from the Snettisham hoard (now to be seen in Norwich Castle Museum and the British Museum), but myriad other exquisitely designed and crafted objects, such as the grave goods found in 1879 near Birdlip in the Cotswolds and now in the Gloucester Museum. Along with a necklace of thick, chunky beads of Baltic amber and Kimmeridge shale was discovered a beautiful bronze mirror engraved with complex, sinuous abstract patterns and inset with enamel.
In the years before the reign of the emperor Claudius, a new power base seems to have emerged in the south-east of Britain. Rulers of the Catuvellaunian tribe, from north of the Thames around modern St Albans, had started minting coins in Camulodunum, now Colchester, the oppidum at the heart of the Trinovantes’ tribal lands. A south-eastern power, one can infer, was growing. Examples of these coins can be seen in the museum at Colchester: tiny, shining gold discs sitting alongside their original moulds, like jam tarts sprung from a baking tin. On one side: a leaping horse and the letters ‘CUNO’, for the ruler Cunobelinus (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline). On the other, an ear of corn and the letters ‘CAMU’, for Camulodunum. This is a British ruler harnessing Roman modes of power projection (coinage, Roman letters). The coins were almost certainly not money – exchangeable for goods within a currency system – in any meaningful way.
Cunobelinus was indeed sufficiently powerful to be referred to as ‘king of the Britons’ in Suetonius’s second-century biography of the emperor Caligula, Augustus’s successor-but-one, who ruled Rome from AD 37 to 41. And he provided Caligula with a justification for an invasion of Britain, too: according to Suetonius, he expelled one of his sons, Adminius, who then sought political sanctuary with the Romans. In Suetonius’s account – which, in common with the other biographical sketches in his Twelve Caesars, is coloured by his generalised animosity towards the Julio-Claudian emperors – Caligula received Adminius’s ‘surrender’ with an absurd degree of ceremony, and planned an invasion in AD 40. But the adventure ended ignominiously on the shores of Gaul, with Caligula commanding his troops to gather seashells to bring back to Rome as spoils. Whether this story is sheer malicious invention, or evidence of the emperor’s mental instability, or even a sarcastic gesture intended by Caligula to humiliate troops who had been unwilling to venture across the treacherous tidal wastes of Ocean, we shall probably never know. The second- to third-century Roman historian Cassius Dio – whose eighty-volume History of Rome, written in Greek, survives partly through the abridgements, or ‘epitomes’, prepared by medieval Byzantine monks – has the emperor embarking from Gaul in a trireme, then doing a sharp about-turn, mid Channel, without so much as touching the British coastline.
Caligula, whose eccentricities blossomed into a full-blown reign of terror, did not last. His own elite troops, the Praetorian Guard, assassinated him and inserted his uncle Claudius in his place. But the position of Claudius – who had a reputation for physical and mental decrepitude – was deeply insecure. A military victory was required, and he chose Britain as the theatre for his exploits. The symbolic value was clear: to complete a conquest that had eluded even Julius Caesar, the greatest general of them all, would provide a much-needed boost to his shaky regime. There may have been other reasons in play, too. Cunobelinus’s sons and successors, Togodumnus and Caratacus, seem to have been pursuing an aggressively expansionist policy that may have threatened the balance of power in Britain and, by extension, Roman interests in Gaul. Dio recorded that ‘a certain Berikos’ had been driven out of the island, and had sought asylum in Rome. ‘Berikos’ was possibly Verica, of the Hampshire and Sussex Atrebates tribe, whose name is recorded as ‘rex’, king, on coins; his expulsion may have come about as a result of the rise of Togodumnus and Caratacus. At any rate, his appeal to Rome provided a reason, or pretext, for invasion, according to Dio. What is clear is that Claudius will not very likely have been impeded by moral scruples. We may take it as a fair articulation of Roman imperial ideology when, in the first book of the Aeneid, Virgil has Jupiter grant Rome ‘imperium sine fine’ – empire without limit.
Most historians believe that the Roman fort of Rutupiae at Richborough, a few miles north of Deal, near Sandwich, is the best contender for the Romans’ main invasion point in AD 43. Sandwich is an insistently picturesque town, where even the building housing the local branch of Barclay’s is dated 1610. But when I walked around it, its air of prosperity seemed fragile. The independent bookshop had closed, and Pfizer, the big pharmaceuticals firm based a few miles away – famous for producing Viagra – was winding down, shedding 1,500 jobs. I walked along the reedy river Stour, its edges clumped with houseboats. Occasionally a patch of the otherwise scrappy bank had been tended into suburban neatness by its riverine inhabitants. There was no one around. At length I climbed up over an old railway line, through nettle beds, and emerged into the fort.
I was surrounded on three sides by forbidding grey-white rubbly walls, some a full eight metres high. Inside the enclosure formed by the walls, and not quite parallel t
o them, ran a series of three deep concentric ditches, also forming three sides of a rectangle, their corners rounded off into sinuous curves. They looked as if they might have been made by a fashionable modern landscape architect. However, none of these things, dramatic as they were, were built by the Claudian invaders: instead, I had to search to find the traces of the shallower ditches that indicated the first defences built here to shelter the influx of perhaps 40,000 troops under the command of the general Aulus Plautius. The first walls would have been timber, the ramparts earth. Both the deeper ditches and the high flinty walls were made, it is thought, as defences against Saxon raiders in the third century. The fort holds great layers of Roman history between its walls. At the centre, for example, is a cruciform platform, its sides grass-covered, its top scabbed with flint. This is the base of a monumental arch of Carrara marble from Tuscany, which stood twenty-five metres tall. Built in the AD 70s or 80s, it was once caparisoned with sculptural reliefs and blazoned with inscriptions: it marked the triumphal seaward entry to a young province, and was a piece of architecture, with its sharp classical angles and its shining Italian stone, that would have been visible from the sea and the low-lying land for miles around, a complete contrast to the single-storey thatched roundhouses of the Britons. The arch was deliberately demolished in the late third century, for reasons that are ill-understood. As I looked north from the fort towards Thanet, the land stretched away as a sea of waving grass, through which the wind thrummed and sighed. When Aulus Plautius landed here, Thanet was properly an island, and Richborough was bounded by water on three sides. Later, the wide channel, the Wantsum, that separated Thanet from Richborough and the mainland, gradually silted up. When I looked out on to the green ocean, the only vessel riding it was the giant hulk of a concrete power station. Its triple cooling towers no longer breathed steam. This, too, stood as a wreck in the landscape.
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