A.D. 43.] INVASION BY CLAUDIUS. 11 without talent or courage, sate in his gorgeous chariot and ascended the Sacred Way amid as jubilant acclamations as when the whole population "Climbed up to walls and battlements, To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome." But there was another reason for impressing the people with feelings of joy and pride on account of the annexation of our poor and thinly peopled isle. The conquest, barren as it might be of political or commercial results, was a fulfilment of the intentions of the founder of the imperial race, whose ambition was as unfailingly the inheritance of his successors as his name. It was enough to justify any enterprise that it had entered into the designs of Julius; and although his triumphs and aggressions were the expiring efforts of the old republic and the cause of its final overthrow, it was considered indispensable to show that the empire had equal power in adding to the Roman territory. Some few admirers of the vanished form of government might deplore the extinction of liberty, barbaric and ignorant as it was, even in the instance of so remote an island as Britain; but the cultivated and uncomplaining populations of the subject states felt an alleviation of their own dependent condition when they saw another people brought within the sphere of polished life and owning the same master with themselves. 12 BOOK II. THE ROMAN OCCUPATION. FROM A.D. 44 To A.D. 418. § 1. The Roman Empire.-§ 2. Vespasian. Advance of the Romans into Hampshire and the interior.-§ 3. Ostorius Scapula. His advance to the Severn. The Romans establish themselves.-§ 4. Caractacus defeated and taken prisoner.—§ 5. Reign of Nero. Paulinus Suetonius appointed Proprætor. Isle of Anglesey. Opposition of the Druids. § 6. Religious toleration of the Romans. Their slaughters. -87. Boadicea. Defeated and slain.-§ 8. Extension of the Roman conquests from the Castle of Richborough, in Kent, to the fortresses on the Forth and the Clyde.-§ 9. Agricola. His high character and victorious career.-§ 10. The Roman language and literature. Introduction of Christianity.-§ 11. Roman arts and improvements. The four great Roman roads.-§ 12. The Caledonians defeated by Agricola. -§ 13. Peaceful rule of the Romans. The Picts' wall built by the Romans. Albinus. § 14. The Rebel Carausius. § 15. Pudens, the noble British lady, and a Christian. Roman Pantheism and Civilization.-§ 16. Constantius. His son Constantine the Great.-§ 17. General state of Britain. Exposed to the attacks of the northern barbarians.-§ 18. Roman Remains. § 1. THE Roman Empire at this time presents a double aspect to the historic student. At home the spirit of the grand old people who had subdued the world was totally destroyed. The populace who crowded the forum, and howled their gratification at the bloodstained scenes of the arena, were ruled over by a succession of monsters in human form, whose vices and even whose cruelties endeared them to the congenial minds of the degraded multitude. The vast city, with all its palaces and towers, and the great recollections which made its name something sacred and ennobling in the ears of the most distant populations, was itself a prey to the wildest A.D. 44.] THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 13 licentiousness and suffering. The Emperor was an embodied terror, before which all men quailed. His words were listened to with dread by the greatest of his chiefs, for a whisper, or a wave of his hand, or a nod of his head, might doom them to death. There was no safety except in his protection, and the inhabitants of the city, from the highest to the lowest, seemed given up to the caprices and exactions of the basest and most pitiless of mankind. But abroad, where the majestic eagles pursued their flight, and the strong-disciplined legions carried the irresistible sword which had conquered in so many fields-where law followed their settlement, secured by distance from the arbitrary interference of the despot who had placed himself above all laws, human or divine—the name of Rome and of the Emperor was a guarantee for unnumbered blessings. The throne of the whole earth, in the awe-struck imagination of a Gael or Briton, was filled by the most beneficent of powers. At his command hills were levelled, bridges built, rivers embanked, towers constructed, towns made free, violence checked, the weak protected, the ignorant taught. A magnificent language, containing the garnered up thoughts and incidents of seven hundred years, spread its refining influences wherever the Roman camp was pitched. The imperial treasury poured out its wealth to support the armies of the State, and a religion purified by poetry from the grosser parts of its superstition, and elevated by the belief it inculcated of a just and superintending providence, enriched the populations, on whom Vespasian now inflicted the benefit of a conquest, with higher thoughts as much as with imported. coin. This was the period at which began the system of permanent fortifications, of which the strange ruins still remain to us in the shape of grass mounds and sunken ditches. Where you see a large square space, in open meadows or on the slope of gentle elevations, enclosed in rounded walls. of green turf, with a large opening at the sides and at each end, and a sinking of the ground all round at a considerable distance from the walls, you may safely conclude that it is the situation of one of the old Roman encampments, with which many parts of the country are thickly overspread. Wherever the soldiers rested for the night, some fence of this sort was drawn round them to prevent surprise. According to the size of the enclosure we can calculate the numbers of the troops, for the camp-measurers invariably assigned ten thousand square feet (or one hundred feet square) to the tents of a hundred and twenty men. § 2. Marching down the coast, from Kent to Hampshire, Vespasian, the general-in-chief after the Emperor's departure, secured his footing as he advanced by these temporary, though enduring forts. Aulus Plautius, the next in command, directed his attention to the more inland tribes, and left marks of his progress in grassy hillock and sunken trench all the way through Surrey, Berkshire, and Wilts. The beautiful Isle of Wight yielded to the arms of Vespasian, and still retains on its southern shores unmistakeable marks of the Roman possession. Cinerary urns-vessels of crockery warecontaining the bones of Roman garrisons, have frequently been found near the romantic village of Bonchurch, and even the names of places in that neighbourhood recal the ancient race. But Aulus and Vespasian were soon withdrawn from their obscure proceedings at this outskirt of the world; and Vespasian, as if to show the extent of the territory of the Empire, next emerges into fame at the famous siege of Jerusalem, in the year 69. § 3. Ostorius Scapula, the successor of those commanders in Britain, stretched his power to the Severn, and introduced the system, never afterwards relinquished, of retaining his acquisitions by the erection of strong castles and easilydefended walls. To this sagacious general we are indebted for the first specimens of those military and guarded stations which, from the Roman name castra, a camp, have retained the terminations of "chester," and other cognate sounds. Stretch A.D. 50.] CARACTACU3. 15 ing his lines and fortresses from the Thames, near London, to Gloucester, he extended his protection to the gentler and more commercial tribes who inhabited the south and southeast of that boundary. Ever subduing as he advanced, ever softening and elevating where he subdued, we may trace the progressive stream of Roman energy and refinement by following his line of buildings. Beacons to direct the course of approaching vessels from Gaul, and strongholds to defend the peaceful soil from the unsubdued savages outside-towers and high enclosures of unequalled Roman masonry-began from an early period to stud the coast and boundaries of the Roman power. Steadily spreading as the advantages of Roman government were perceived, the great circle included tribes and families whose names it is useless to record and whose true appellations it is impossible to guess at in the disguise of a Latin pronunciation; but before Ostorius had been three years in command, his entrenchments extended as far north-east as the Iceni, or the counties of Suffolk and Norfolk, and on the west offended the pride of the Silures, or inhabitants of South Wales. § 4. Dimly emerging from the mist of antiquity and the Romanized form of his family name, Caractacus stands forth a hero of that time, whose Cambrian countrymen proudly boast of his achievements under his native title of Caradoc. A great battle, fought in the year 50, brought the contest to a fatal issue for the noble chieftain. He was taken prisoner, and sent in chains to make a holiday for the Romans. For once the sanguinary appetite of those remorseless enemies of every virtue but their own, was satisfied without the blood and suffering of the conquered king, and Caradoc disappears from history as pardoned by the tyrant Claudius for the crime of venturing to defend his wife and children, and what he considered the liberties of his native land. Others, however, rose up in his place. Combats followed in quick succession, where the wild defiles and jutting precipices of the country. |