Legions of Rome (48 page)

Obviously, Otho was more interested in setting an example that dissuaded legionaries from killing their officers than in encouraging them to put down revolts against their emperor. The unfortunate loyal legionaries of the 7th Claudia Legion and 11th Claudia Legion were beheaded in Otho’s presence. At least Otho had no power to take away the legions’ new titles. Suetonius was to say that Otho’s act may have furthered his reputation as a disciplinarian, but it put him out of favor at the Palatium once it became known that he had executed the very same legionaries who had been rewarded by the emperor. [Ibid.]

AD
43
XVII. INVADING BRITAIN
Four legions versus the Britons

In the spring of
AD
43, alarm spread through the Celtic tribes of southern Britain after Gallic merchants trading across the English Channel warned their British cousins that a Roman army and fleet were assembling at the port of Bononia, modern-day Boulogne (originally called Gesoriacum). The talk at Bononia, said the merchants, was of a Roman invasion of Britain. These warnings would have been given credibility by the sighting of Roman warships scouting the coast of Kent (Roman Cantium) that spring.

Stirred into action, the tribal chiefs sent the call around their villages, summoning their warriors. None of the British tribes maintained a standing army as the Romans did. Their chiefs all had permanent troops of bodyguards, some of them Celtic mercenaries or levies. Every British nobleman also maintained a war chariot drawn by a team of two horses. In combat, the standing nobleman rode with a seated driver, hurling javelins then jumping down from the chariot to do battle on foot while the driver waited nearby to provide a quick getaway.

On news of the impending Roman invasion, tens of thousands of tribesmen answered the call to arms, taking up their weapons and congregating on the coast of Kent. Their chiefs waited for weeks, keeping a constant watch on the Channel, as the tribesmen sat impatiently in camp worrying about their crops and their families back home. From their cousins in Gaul, the chiefs knew that the Romans always launched their new military campaigns at the beginning of spring. Finally, when no invasion fleet put in an appearance and it looked as if this was going to be a repeat of the emperor Caligula’s British “invasion” of four years before (which had turned out to be a farcical non-event—Caligula had ordered his artillery to fire into the sea from the French coast, and had his legionaries collect seashells as war trophies), the British tribesmen went home.

The warnings had been based on fact. Four legions and dozens of auxiliary cavalry and light infantry units had marched to the assembly point at Bononia on the orders of the new emperor Claudius, with the intent of crossing the Channel to invade Britain. A Roman invasion of Britain had been on the cards ever since Julius Caesar’s two expeditions there in 55 and 54
BC
. The emperor Tiberius had contemplated it.
Caligula had toyed with it. Now Claudius, the least martial of the emperors, was carrying it forward, encouraged by a fugitive British tribal ruler named Bericus. [Dio,
LX
, 19]

By early spring, the legions had assembled at Bononia, among them the 2nd Augusta Legion, which came from Argentoratum (Strasbourg) on the Upper Rhine, their base for the past twenty-five years. Its commander was 33-year-old Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the future emperor Vespasian, who was of praetor rank at this time. As a prefect, Vespasian had commanded a unit of Thracian auxiliaries during his rise up the promotional ladder. According to the Roman biographer Suetonius, Vespasian owed his 2nd Augusta command to his friendship with Narcissus, freedman chief secretary to the emperor. [Suet.,
X
, 4]

Vespasian’s son Titus would eventually have a connection with his father’s legion, commanding a cohort of auxiliaries attached to the 2nd Augusta in Britain twenty years later. Vespasian’s third-in-command of the 2nd Augusta at the time of the invasion was camp-prefect Publius Anicius Maximus, a native of the city of Antioch in Pisidia, a mountainous region in southern Turkey which was then part of the province of Galatia. Anicius would come out of this campaign highly decorated.

The 2nd Augusta was joined at Bononia by another legion from the Upper Rhine, the 14th Gemina, which had been based at Mogontiacum, and the 20th Legion, from the Novaesium (Neuss) base of the army of the Lower Rhine. The fourth legion earmarked for the force, the 9th Hispana, the legion sent to Africa during the Tacfarinas Revolt, marched all the way from its Pannonian base at Siscia, accompanied by the general given overall command of the task force by Claudius, Aulus Plautius. A consul in
AD
29, Plautius had been governor of Pannonia at the time of this new appointment.

By this period, praetors were increasingly receiving legion commands, and two of Vespasian’s fellow legion commanders in the British task force were also praetors—Vespasian’s elder bother Flavius Sabinus, and Gnaeus Hosidius Geta. Geta, who had some six years seniority on Vespasian, had just the previous year led a relatively small force in the province of Mauretania which had twice defeated an army of rebellious Moors. Accordingly, Geta came to this operation with an excellent military reputation.

The auxiliary units involved in the operation included eight cohorts of Batavian light infantry from present-day Holland which supported the 14th Gemina Legion, and among their prefects, almost certainly, was Gaius Julius Civilis, a member of the
old royal house of the Batavi tribe, who would have been in his midtwenties. An Equestrian from a wealthy and influential family, Civilis was a soldier with a good tactical mind. Eloquent and confident, he was to become a friend of Vespasian.

The auxiliary cavalry units assigned to the operation included the Batavian Horse, probably the most famous mounted unit in the Roman army. There were also wings of the Thracian Horse, which had become a multinational cavalry unit despite its title, and the Vettonian Horse, a Spanish
equitatae
unit made up of both cavalry and infantry. The Vettonians were commanded by the prefect Didius Gallus, a future governor of Britain.

Claudius’ Palatium had made elaborate arrangements for this operation. A troop of elephants stationed at Laurentum outside Rome was even put on standby, for possible use against the British war chariots. Whether the elephants were actually brought up to the staging area at Bononia is unclear. Some modern-day writers have offered colorful descriptions of these elephants in action in Britain, but there is no evidence that they were actually conveyed across the Channel—the marshy conditions and numerous river crossings in the invasion area would have rendered them useless, and this was no doubt realized by task force commander Plautius, who left them behind.

A fleet of transports and a convoy escort of warships had to be built specifically for the job of taking the troops and their horses to Britain, and shipbuilders were brought up to the Channel ports from the Mediterranean for the task. With some 40,000 troops, several thousand cavalry horses, and at least 5,000 baggage animals, hundreds of vessels were required. These ships would form the Roman navy’s new Britannic Fleet.

Just as spring began, despite the detailed logistics and efficient arrangements, the operation became bogged down for a very human reason. Rumors spread among the highly superstitious legionaries that unimaginable terrors awaited them in Britain, a place then beyond the outer limits of the known world. Plautius urgently advised Rome that his army had gone on strike as a result. The invasion force sat in camp on the French coast, its rank and file refusing to budge, which was why the waiting Britons saw no invasion fleet off their shore that spring.

Claudius ordered his chief of staff, the freedman Narcissus, to journey to Bononia from Rome to resolve the problem. Plautius called an assembly of all the troops when Narcissus arrived at the embarkation camp. Standing beside Plautius on the general’s
tribunal, Narcissus began a speech designed to convince the soldiers to proceed with the operation, but he was immediately shouted down. The legionaries knew who Narcissus was, and knew that he was a one-time slave. Someone called out, “Hooray for the Saturnalia!,” a cry taken up by all the soldiers, and soon their chorus drowned out the chief secretary. [Ibid.]

The Saturnalia was the Roman religious festival in late December later adopted and adapted by the Christian world to become Christmas. During the Saturnalia, patrons gave their clients gifts, and slaves could wear the same dress as their masters and enjoy other liberties usually confined to free members of the population. At Bononia, the legions made it clear they would not be lectured by a former slave just because he wore the clothes of a free man.

Embarrassed and frustrated, Narcissus stepped down from the tribunal, with the laughter of the legionaries ringing in his ears. General Plautius then addressed the throng. Narcissus had probably intended to tell the men that the emperor had authorized him to offer the legions a substantial bonus if they undertook this operation. In his stead, Plautius would have informed his troops of the offer. Whatever he said to the troops, it worked. The legions agreed to go ahead with the invasion. By the summer—it was “late in the [campaigning] season” according to Dio—and with the tribes of southern Britain off their guard, the legions’ delayed invasion finally got under way. [Dio,
LX
, 19]

On the evening tide, the fleet began to pull out from Bononia, passing the giant stone lighthouse that Caligula had built on a point outside the town. Modeled on the Pharos of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Bononia lighthouse had been the one good thing to come out of Caligula’s visit here in
AD
39 for his abortive invasion.

Dio wrote that Plautius’ legions “were sent over in three divisions, in order that they should not be hindered in landing, as might happen to a single force.” [Ibid.] In the night, the fleet sailed up through the Strait of Dover, following the long, low stretch of Kent coastline beyond Dover and its white cliffs, passing Deal, where Julius Caesar is believed to have made his landings, and headed for the Isle of Thanet, near Ramsgate. Plautius’ invasion troops are believed to have hit the beaches in the vicinity of Pegwell Bay. [W&D, 3, 1–2] (In those times, Thanet really was an island. Over the centuries the Wantsum Channel, the narrow waterway between it and the mainland, silted up and the sheltered harbor there disappeared.)

With dawn’s first light the ships of the first wave grounded in the shallows, and the troops jumped over the sides and went splashing to shore. Soon the entire force had landed, with the 2nd Augusta occupying the left flank, and the 20th most probably on the right—it would later take the right flank of the advance up into East Anglia—and the 14th Gemina and 9th Hispana in the center. With his first priority that of securing the beachhead, Plautius had his troops dig entrenchments to protect the landing zone. A camp, traces of which can still be seen, was built beside the River Stour, in the vicinity of modern Richborough. Troops defending the landing site were housed here, along with the supplies that came ashore from Roman transports plying back and forth between the Gallic and British coasts from then on. This safe harbor would be named Rutupiae and would be used as a Roman supply base for another thirty years. [Ibid.]

One of the four legions, the 9th Hispana, was apparently left behind here to both protect the Roman rear and act as a reserve. Meanwhile, Plautius wasted no time in moving inland with the bulk of his force. Just as Roman commanders such as Germanicus had frequently followed in the recorded footsteps of earlier expeditions when they invaded foreign territory, Plautius would have used Julius Caesar’s published and widely read history of his two British campaigns as a guide, for he followed in Caesar’s footsteps toward the River Thames—the Tamesa as the Celts called it.

With cavalry scouts and light infantry out in front, the three legions moved west across flat marshlands toward the site of modern-day Canterbury. The invaders had by this time been spotted by the people of the local tribe, the Cantiaci, who fearfully hung back in the forests bordering the marshlands, observing the Roman progress while they sent messengers galloping around the other tribes of southern England with the news that the Romans had landed.

Plautius, leading his invasion force inland from the beachhead, saw no signs of the locals, and “had a deal of trouble in searching them out.” [Dio,
LX
, 20] All the while, the tribes were gathering. When the British did finally commit to combat, it was under the command of two brothers, sons of the late Cunobelinus, king of the powerful Catuvellauni tribe. The grandfather of Cunobelinus, King Cassivellaunus, had paid tribute to Julius Caesar after his brief invasions a century earlier. One of these brothers was King Togodumnus, who ruled that part of his father’s former kingdom north of the Thames which occupied today’s Essex.

The site of the old Catuvellauni capital is occupied by today’s city of Colchester, called Camulodunum by the Romans after the Celtic god Camulos, whose shrine the town contained. The Celtic name of the second brother was Caradoc, whom history came to know as King Caratacus, sometimes spelled Caractacus. He ruled the western part of his father’s former kingdom from his capital, which the Romans named Calleva Attrebatum, next to the present village of Silchester in Hampshire, in the tribal heartland of the Atrebates people.