Roman Depth Study: Ruling Roman Britain, AD 43-c.128

Why did Claudius invade Britain in AD 43?

1. 01Set aside the obvious

   Strategic necessity is a weak explanation: Britain posed no serious threat to Gaul, and the province would require a permanent garrison of several legions, making it an expense rather than a gain for most of its history.

2. 02Give the domestic explanation

   Claudius had been raised by the praetorians in AD 41, had held no military command and was treated with contempt in senatorial circles. A conquest - especially of the island Caesar had famously visited and not held - supplied the one thing his position lacked.

3. 03Add the pretext and opportunity

   Our sources record an appeal from an expelled British ruler, the conventional justification for intervention; the death of Cunobelinus and the resulting instability in the south-east made the moment favourable.

4. 04Test with the commemoration

   The triumph, the title Britannicus, the arch at Rome and the coinage show how heavily the victory was exploited at Rome. The scale of the celebration relative to the strategic value is itself evidence about the motive.

5. 05Judge

   Conclude that the invasion is best explained as a political decision taken at Rome for prestige, made practicable by instability in Britain - a conclusion drawn from the pattern of commemoration as much as from what the narratives assert.

Result: An explanation that weighs strategic against political motives and uses the commemoration as evidence.

What can the historian legitimately do with the speech Tacitus gives to Caratacus at Rome?

1. 01Establish that it is composed

   Ancient historiography routinely supplied speeches appropriate to the speaker and occasion. No verbatim record of a British prisoner's words existed, and Tacitus was writing decades later; the speech is his composition.

2. 02Refuse the illegitimate use

   It therefore cannot be used as evidence for what Caratacus believed, for British attitudes to Rome, or for how the British understood their own resistance.

3. 03Identify the legitimate use

   It is direct evidence for Tacitus: for his willingness to put an articulate critique of empire into an enemy's mouth, for the themes he associates with Roman rule - conquest, clemency, the pride of the ruler - and for what a senatorial readership would find striking rather than offensive.

4. 04Connect to a wider pattern

   Tacitus does the same elsewhere, most famously in the speech he gives a British leader before Mons Graupius. Recognising the pattern strengthens the analysis: this is a device by which a Roman historian examines the moral cost of empire.

5. 05State the conclusion

   Conclude that the passage is highly valuable for Roman attitudes to conquest and of no value for British ones - and that saying so precisely is a stronger answer than either quoting it as testimony or dismissing it as invention.

Result: A precise reassignment of a famous passage from the evidence it cannot supply to the evidence it can.

How far do the ancient sources and the archaeological evidence together establish what happened in the Boudican revolt?

1. 01Set out the literary evidence

   Tacitus, writing some fifty years later with access to good information including his father-in-law's service in Britain, gives the fullest account; Cassius Dio, writing much later, adds the detail about recalled loans and differs on Boudicca's death.

2. 02Set out the material evidence

   Excavation at all three named towns has produced destruction deposits of burning dated to the mid first century, with evidence of intense fire. This evidence was generated by the event itself and carries no authorial purpose.

3. 03State what they establish together

   The destruction of Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium at about this date is established beyond reasonable doubt: two independent kinds of evidence agree. The general severity is also secure.

4. 04State what remains uncertain

   Numbers killed, the site of the final battle, the exact sequence of causes, what Boudicca said or intended, and how she died all rest on the literary tradition alone - and on two accounts that disagree at the end.

5. 05Judge

   Conclude that the revolt is one of the best-evidenced events in Roman Britain for its outline and one of the least secure for its detail, and that a strong answer says which of its claims sit in which category.

Result: An integration that grades confidence claim by claim, using the material record for the outline and naming what only the texts assert.

How far can Tacitus' Agricola be trusted as an account of the governorship?

1. 01Identify the work

   A short biography of Tacitus' father-in-law, published soon after Domitian's death, combining family piety, an argument about how to serve honourably under a bad emperor, and genuine information from a man who had been in Britain.

2. 02State the built-in bias

   The purpose requires Agricola to be exemplary: every campaign succeeds, every winter is well spent, and the recall must be explained by imperial jealousy rather than by any limit to his achievement.

3. 03Test with archaeology

   Excavation confirms a network of Flavian forts pushed far to the north, which supports the scale of the advance; it also shows those positions, including a legionary fortress under construction, abandoned within a few years - which qualifies the picture of a conquest completed.

4. 04Test with strategy

   The withdrawal of a legion from Britain in the mid 80s and the pressure on the Danube supply a sufficient explanation for both the recall and the retreat, independent of any imperial emotion.

5. 05Judge

   Conclude that the Agricola is reliable in outline for the campaigns and the administration, unreliable on motive and on the permanence of the achievement, and that the archaeology is what allows the two to be separated.

Result: A judgement in which the material record does the work of testing a literary source's claims and its silences.

What can the Vindolanda writing tablets tell us that Tacitus cannot?

1. 01Establish what they are

   Thin wooden leaves written in ink, preserved by waterlogging at an auxiliary fort near the northern frontier, dating to roughly AD 90-120: duty rosters, accounts, official correspondence and private letters.

2. 02Identify their special character

   They were written for immediate practical purposes and were never intended to survive. There is no authorial shaping, no audience beyond the recipient, and no interest in how posterity would judge - which removes almost every distortion that affects literary sources.

3. 03State what they establish

   Garrison strength and the distribution of men on detachment; supply and diet; the level of literacy among soldiers and officers; the presence of women and children at a frontier fort; social relations between officers' households; and even Roman attitudes to the local population expressed casually rather than rhetorically.

4. 04Contrast with Tacitus

   Tacitus writes about governors, campaigns and the politics of empire from Rome; he has nothing to say about what a garrison ate, who wrote to whom, or how a unit was actually distributed. The two bodies of evidence barely overlap, which is what makes them complementary.

5. 05Judge

   Conclude that the tablets are of the highest value for the daily working of the army and frontier society and of no value for the politics of the province, and that an answer on Roman rule which uses both is arguing from two independent directions.

Result: An evaluation that identifies the tablets' unique freedom from authorial purpose and assigns them precisely the questions they can answer.

Assess the purposes of Hadrian's Wall using the available evidence.

1. 01State the evidential situation

   The literary evidence is a single sentence in a late and unreliable Life of Hadrian; the material evidence is a monument surviving over many miles, together with building inscriptions and the record of its garrisons. The argument must therefore be built from the structure.

2. 02Read the structure

   Milecastles at regular intervals with gateways indicate controlled crossing points rather than a sealed barrier; turrets between them indicate observation; the addition of forts on the line during construction indicates a decision to base troops for movement through and beyond it; the Vallum to the south suggests a controlled military zone.

3. 03Derive the functions

   Together these support a combination: regulation and taxation of movement, surveillance and rapid response to raiding, and a base for operating north of the line - rather than a defensive wall to be manned against assault, which the garrison numbers could not have sustained along eighty miles.

4. 04Add the political function

   The Wall was also a statement. It made visible, in the most permanent medium available, the decision that Roman expansion in Britain had stopped, and it fits Hadrian's general policy of consolidation attested elsewhere in the empire.

5. 05Judge

   Conclude that the purposes were plural and mainly administrative and political rather than narrowly defensive, and note that this conclusion rests on the monument itself - a demonstration that material evidence can carry an argument where the texts are almost silent.

Result: An argument built primarily from a monument, with the weak literary testimony placed accurately rather than leaned on.