If you pause by the foundations of the monumental arch and look west, you can trace a line that turns into Watling Street: the Roman road that heads for Canterbury and London, where it becomes the Edgware Road, and, at length, reaches Wroxeter in Shropshire. Kent, from Julius Caesar on, has been a zone of national entrances: the first Saxon settlers, Hengist and Horsa, were supposed to have settled on Thanet; St Augustine’s mission landed nearby. Turn the other way, east and south-east, towards the Stour, and you face towards land that during the First World War was busy once more with soldiers. Here were built seagoing barges to transport munitions to France; eventually a great shipyard and workshops were built, with sonorously named camps (‘Kitchener’, ‘Haig’) to accommodate 14,000 people. In February 1939, the by now derelict Kitchener camp was brought back into use, this time as a transit camp for 5,000 German- and Austrian-Jewish male refugees. Here was a communal university, with scientists and scholars giving lectures. Here was a band, directed by a former conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, which was in demand in the Kent seaside resorts that summer. A Mr Hernstadt – who later anglicised his name to Hearn – performed turns as the magician ‘Harun al Rashid’. The camp was nicknamed Anglo-Saxon-Hausen by its inmates, a dark joke on the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany from which many of them had come, and perhaps also on the historical associations of the area. Signs in the camp proclaimed ‘England expects every man to do his duty. You are not Englishmen, but you should do your duty.’ Most eventually enlisted in the British army.
Suetonius sniffed at Claudius’s military record. ‘He undertook but a single campaign, and a minor one at that.’ It was not so minor, it seems, to the soldiers. According to Cassius Dio, the troops were unwilling to venture outside the known world – ‘exo tes oikoumenes’ – and almost refused to leave the coast of Gaul, until Claudius’s powerful henchman Narcissus (a freedman, Greek to judge from his name) harangued them. This from a civilian and a former slave was too much for the troops, who shouted him down with a derisive chorus of ‘Io, Saturnalia’ – the traditional cry of the Roman festival of misrule, at which slaves and masters swapped clothes and roles. At any rate, the troops were shamed into action. Whether true or not, the story gives a powerful indication of the fascination and terror exerted by the idea of the Ocean and its mysterious islands.
Aulus Plautius’s troops, writes Dio, met no immediate resistance – not the hordes that had confronted Caesar on Deal beach – but found themselves tackling an elusive enemy with a habit of melting away into swamps and woods. Plautius caught up with them in dribs and drabs, defeating forces under each of the brothers Caratacus and Togodumnus. An indecisive battle took place on the shores of a river – most likely the Medway. The Romans engaged with the British charioteers over a two-day battle, in which, notes Dio, Vespasian fought with distinction (twenty-six years later, this young officer became emperor). Somewhere in this or an earlier melee, Togodumnus perished – which, according to Dio, caused the Britons to unite to avenge him. Aulus Plautius, meanwhile, sent for Claudius himself – presumably to allow the emperor the credit of a now assured victory, though possibly also to rally the fatigued troops. At any rate, if Dio is to be believed, the arrival of the imperial train, and the advance upon the great power base of Camulodunum, was the cause of what must have been one of the more astonishing sights in Iron Age Britain: war elephants in Colchester.
According to Dio, Claudius advanced north of the Thames and captured Camulodunum in short order. Here he received the surrender of many tribes – some by force, some voluntarily. His stay was brief: after sixteen days, he began his journey back to Rome, where he was promptly granted permission by the Senate to celebrate a Triumph, the ritual procession through the streets of Rome undertaken on the occasion of a great – or allegedly great – military victory. In fact, despite Claudius’s moment of shock and awe in the south-east, the work of subduing a respectable chunk of the island turned out to be painful, bloody, and the work of decades: it was not until forty years later that the governor Agricola at least claimed to have completed the conquest of the whole of the island, and even then the northern highlands were let go almost at once. Suetonius’s biography describes Claudius’s Triumph: the emperor riding in a chariot while his wife, Messalina, followed in a covered carriage. Also in the parade were provincial governors, specially allowed permission to leave their posts for the occasion, and officers from the campaign, clad in purple-bordered togas. There would likely, too, have been captives, advancing ahead of the emperor in his chariot as the procession snaked its route from Mars Field to the Capitoline Hill, the steps of which Claudius climbed on his knees, according to Dio. There would perhaps also have been displays of booty: though unless the invaders had got their hands on some really spectacular Celtic gold, one imagines it may have been rather frugal – at least compared with what had been brought back from earlier campaigns in the rich eastern Mediterranean. One can only imagine the state of these putative British captives, presumably chained and unwilling actors in this piece of public ritual, yet paradoxically its star attractions, as they wended their way to an uncertain fate – perhaps death, perhaps imprisonment, perhaps slavery. And then there were other lavish celebrations mounted by Claudius in Rome’s theatres: horse races, bear baiting, athletics, and boys brought from Asia to perform the Pyrrhic dance, a war dance in full armour. Claudius was given the honorary title Britannicus, as was his son, who came always to be known by the name. (Britannicus was to die just short of his fourteenth birthday, reputedly poisoned at a dinner party by his elder stepbrother Nero, who by then had succeeded Claudius as emperor.) The triumphal arch Claudius erected in Rome in AD 51 records that he received the surrender of ‘11 British kings’. Britain had turned Claudius into what he needed to be: a great military leader.
One crucial aspect of Claudius’s conquest that it is sometimes convenient to brush over from the Roman side, and perhaps even more so from a later, British, patriotic viewpoint, is the extent to which, in different parts of the country, the Roman takeover was, if not actually welcomed, then greeted with alliance-making and acceptance rather than military resistance. The great northern fastness of the Brigantes tribe, ruled by Queen Cartimandua, was friendly to Rome; so too was the East Anglian territory of Prasutagus, king of the Iceni – at least to begin with. There is an intriguing, if speculative hint of what might have become of such friendly client rulers, as these allied but subservient figures are known by historians. At Fishbourne, a little outside Chichester in Sussex, a workman cutting a water-main trench across a field in 1960 happened upon a mass of ancient building material. The following summer, and until 1968, the site was excavated by a team led by the young archaeologist Barry Cunliffe (now Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe).
The result of the investigations was the discovery of a stupendously large and palatial villa building, begun in the AD 60s and reworked, altered and extended on successive occasions until, in the late third century, a wing of the villa burned down. It is anomalous in the history of Roman Britain because, unlike so many of the other great villa complexes of the province, most of which flourished in the fourth century, it is so early: it was begun barely twenty years after conquest, on the site of what was probably a military depot or supply base dating from the time of the invasion.
More strikingly still, it is simply not the kind of building that anyone had expected to find: there is nothing provincial at all about these buildings. At their height, they ranged round elegant central gardens in the Mediterranean style: one of the most striking aspects of Fishbourne is the fact that the elaborate geometric bedding trenches for formal hedges were discovered (and indeed have been replanted – they are the kind of complex arrangement that would not do a French chateau disservice). A tiny fragment of painted plaster survives, suggesting that the western wall of the garden was painted with a beautiful trompe l’oeil design of plants and foliage; also in the museum at Fishbourne is a shard of frescoed wall, showing a landscape with the sea
in the background. The last time I had seen such work was in the Roman houses of the Bay of Naples, their exquisite interior decoration preserved by the catastrophe of Mount Vesuvius’s eruption. This is imperial glamour in all its Mediterranean splendour.
Despite the wealth of the mosaics in the palace, the evident scale and majesty of the rooms, there is no clue as to who lived here. Any guess is just that: a guess. Some think it must have been an official building belonging to the Roman administration. But others are convinced that Fishbourne belonged to a British client king called Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus (or Togidubnus); he makes an appearance in Tacitus’s Agricola and on an inscription recording the building of a temple to Minerva and Neptune that was found under Chichester’s North Street in 1723 (it is now fixed to the side of the town’s Assembly Rooms, not far from its beautiful medieval market cross). Fishbourne is perhaps Britain’s most magnificent recent example of the capacity of the sleeping earth to throw up anomalies, puzzles that disrupt the sense of what should be found. Perhaps one day a piece of evidence will arise to tell us more about those who used this array of rooms. Until then, the notion that it belonged to a client king is an intriguing but unprovable hypothesis.
The reverberations of Claudius’s victory were meant to be felt far beyond Britain, and far beyond Italy. Coins were minted, showing his no doubt idealised profile on one side, and on the other a British war chariot. The victory was marked right at the opposite end of the empire, in the Sebasteion in the city of Aphrodisias, in modern Turkey. The Sebasteion was a grand collection of edifices: a temple to the deified emperors and to the goddess Aphrodite, flanked by two long porticoes. It was probably begun under the emperor Tiberius, Claudius’s predecessor-but-one, and finished under his successor, Nero. The porticoes were decorated with relief panels: of gods, mythological scenes and emperors. One of them shows Claudius. He is heroically naked but for the sword belt strapped across his chest and a cloak that swirls dramatically behind him. One arm is lifted above his head, poised to strike the figure he is pinioning to the ground with his knee: Britannia, the female personification of the fledgling province. She is naked, too, or nearly – her dress falls off her shoulders in tatters – but this is the forlorn and abject nakedness of the defeated, not the glorious nudity of the hero. The Aphrodisias relief is Britannia’s first-known appearance, a far cry from the figure who was reclaimed as ruling the waves by a later age, and who graced the coinage from the seventeenth century until her image was removed from the fifty-pence piece in 2008. (She still has her discreet place on the paper money issued by the Bank of England.) As an image, she is double-edged – both for the Sebasteion sculptor, in whose hands she is rendered far from contemptible; and in her modern incarnation, when she will always be Britannia who was once ravished and ruled.
‘More than Britain’s oldest recorded town,’ proclaim signs at the railway station. Modern Colchester wears its antiquity self-consciously. It has little choice. Its Roman remains are everywhere; the encircling Roman wall, built probably in the early second century ad, binds the town to itself. Over the centuries, portions have been rebuilt or heavily patched; much of it, though, is still the original Roman heft, with pinkish layers of brick tiles sandwiched through the grey stone at regular intervals. During the English Civil War, the town, playing reluctant host to a Royalist army, was besieged within these walls by Fairfax’s forces for eleven weeks. By the end, all there was left to eat were horses, dogs and tallow candles.
Colchester people are forever, and inescapably, walking over, through and past the wreckage of their history. The Roman Balkerne Gate through the town walls still has twin arches standing, and people hurry beneath them on the way to the shops or the Mercury Theatre. I imagine the gates as they might once have been: proud, and marble-faced. Now their straight lines have fallen in on themselves, the angles collapsed into softness like a face in old age. Standing under the arches is a little like being in a grotto or a cave. Ferns have sent out roots in the Roman mortar. Next to the gate is a pub called The Hole in the Wall, which is an accurate description of its position. A friend of mine, a Colchester native, remembers sitting in this pub in her punk years, ‘engulfed in a miasma of Players No. 6’, flirting with the soldiers. If Roman Colchester began as a fort, and in AD 49 became a colony for Roman army veterans, then it has also been a garrison town since the Napoleonic wars. I imagine my friend with her barbaric hair and forbidding facepaint, teasing the squaddies: a woad-covered Briton.
Walk through the Balkerne Gate, and all the architecture around seems to want to echo it: the arches of the red-brick water tower that loom above; the rather sad pastiche of Roman angles and curves that is the entrance to Balkerne Gardens, a gated housing development. Down the high street the arches march: here in the facade of a bank, there in that of a bookshop. At the bottom of the high street, in the park, stands the Norman castle, now Colchester Museum. It is a solid, comfortable building in warm sand-coloured stone. After the First World War, the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, excavating in the vaults, discovered that the foundations of the castle were Roman: they are thought to be the base of the temple that, according to Tacitus, was erected to the deified Claudius. It was only in the eighteenth century that Colchester was confidently associated with ancient Camulodunum; Maldon, some miles to the south-east, had been an early contender. In 1748, the antiquary Philip Morant argued: ‘By laying all the circumstances together, it may appear to any unprejudiced person, that Colchester hath a better right to reclaim Camulodunum than any other place where it had been fixed by writers ancient and modern.’
The authority on Colchester’s archaeology is Philip Crummy, a small, wiry Scot with a bleakly pessimistic sense of humour belying his ferocious commitment to the town’s Roman history. As we stood together outside the castle, he told me he imagined Eudo Dapifer, companion knight to William the Conqueror, ordering the temple ruins, perhaps still substantial, to be cleared away and then his castle built from the existing masonry. ‘It is,’ he says, ‘a building hewn out of the Roman ruins. It’s a statement that he’s the new boss around here. This is the traditional centre of power, and he’s appropriating it.’ He pointed out the rubbly grey material at the base of the building: Roman. Then, about two thirds of the way up the walls, a line of vertical tiles stuck together with pink mortar. These are, says Crummy, pilae stacks on their side – pilae stacks being the little pillars supporting a Roman floor, around which the hot air of a hypocaust heating system would swirl. So many of these stacks were reused in the fabric of the castle that they must have come from a large public baths complex, he thinks – and a town like Camulodunum will certainly have had big public baths, though they have never been discovered.
In the museum is the tombstone of a centurion of the 20th Legion, a northern Italian called Marcus Favonius Facilis: he stands staring out of his niche, an elegant figure in full armour, his left hand resting on his sword hilt. Nearby is a memorial to Longinus Sdapeze, an officer of the first cavalry regiment of Thracians from Sardica – modern Sofia. It is altogether less polished, less classical in its form, than the northern Italian’s gravestone. The officer sits proud on his high-stepping horse, his armour rendered roughly, so that it resembles a coat of feathers. Trampled beneath the animal’s hooves is a naked, cowering bearded man, the barbarian – the Briton? – whom the Roman has brought low. I was transfixed, too, by a case of luxurious marbles, brightly coloured and exotically named. Here was giallo antico from Africa; pavonazetto from Asia Minor; green porphyry from Greece. Elsewhere were wine jars from Crete and Gaza, a fish-sauce container from Spain, chalcedony beads from Hungary. In assuming Roman-ness, Camulodunum had become a small vein in an arterial system of commerce and trade that stretched from here to Tunisia to Palestine.
Crummy took me to Colchester’s Victorian army garrison, where he and his team have been able to excavate because the barracks – with their imperial-sounding names, such as Hyderabad and Meanee – have been sold off for housing. One
day Crummy and his team came upon the foundations of what seemed to be a road – and another identical one, running parallel with it, some seventy metres away. It was only when a press officer for the housing developer made a joke about the chances of their finding a chariot (which would be good PR, as opposed to roads, which are too dull to make headlines) that, said Crummy, ‘the penny dropped’. The identical stretch of ‘road’ was, he surmised, in fact the opposite side of a chariot-racing track. His hunch turned out to be right – or, rather, was eventually established after nearly two years of slow and steady work. Beneath the garden of the now empty sergeants’ mess, where, when Crummy walked me here, beds of overblown roses bloomed amid the untamed grass, two of the perhaps eight starting gates for the chariots had been discovered. Towards the centre of the track, up against the turning posts, the soil was found to be compacted and rutted: evidence, thought the archaeologists, of the charioteers’ tactics of angling around them as tightly as possible. A local campaign had secured some of the land on which the circus stood, and there were plans for an interpretation centre and a café. ‘Ben Hur in Colchester?’ ran the headline in the Guardian when the discovery was announced.
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