: Guy de la Bedoyere
: Defying Rome The Rebels of Roman Britain
: The History Press
: 9781803999425
: 1
: CHF 1.30
:
: Altertum
: English
: 224
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The power of the Roman Empire was under constant challenge. Nowhere was this truer than in Britain, Rome's remotest and most recalcitrant province. A succession of idealists, chancers and reactionaries fomented dissent and rebellion. Some, like Caratacus and Boudica, were tribal chiefs wanting to expel Rome and recover lost power. Others were military opportunists such as Carausius and Allectus, who wanted to become emperor and were prepared to exploit everything Britain had to offer to support their bids for power. Each of these rebellions reads like a story in itself, combining archaeology with the dramatic testimony of the historical and epigraphic sources, and explains why Britain was such a hot-bed of dissent.

INTRODUCTION


We know from our own lives how much happens because of the dynamic of personalities, flawed individuals and their reaction to the unpredictable natural disasters and events that maintain the ebb and flow of prosperity and disaster. The prehistorian can know this in general but is powerless to reconstruct the people, episodes and phenomena that influenced events in the world he or she seeks to understand. Even Stonehenge is unavoidably relegated to the emotional neutrality of generalisations, detached forever by the illiteracy of its builders from the idiosyncratic minds that thought the building up and organised its execution, and the factors that had motivated them. But the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote around the beginning of the second century, knew only too well how unpredictable occasions impacted upon human history, and it was what helped provoke his interest in the way his world had been shaped.Eventusque rerum,qui plerumque fortuiti sunt, ‘events and affairs are generally due to chance’, he said, and amongst these were the rise and fall of idiosyncratic emperors, soldiers, rebels, chancers and even imperial impersonators (Histories i.4).

The rebels of Roman Britain attracted the attention of ancient historians for precisely the same reasons that we today look back at the personalities who defined the cataclysmic events of, say, the American War of Independence or the Second World War. Historians also use personalities as vehicles for opposing ideologies, or to present good against evil. The result is always a kind of caricature, and we can see this perfectly in the accounts of the Boudican Revolt of AD 60-1. Boudica, the woman with a man’s qualities, is juxtaposed by Tacitus and the third-century historian Dio Cassius against the decadent Roman leadership mainly in the person of Nero, presented as an effeminate pervert acting through his agent, the governor Suetonius Paullinus. It was typical of Roman narcissism that a remote provincial rebellion could be commemorated in history this way. Boudica became a moral lesson for the Roman world; indeed she may even have been created in the form we know as a literary device to that end. Her leadership, valour and determination symbolised the very qualities that had brought Rome the empire men like Nero nearly destroyed.

This book then is really a series of short stories. Most are historical accounts built around one of the more dramatic personalities in Roman Britain’s history, loosely drawn together because each of them in his or her own way rebelled against Roman power. They are necessarily short because the material we have is extremely limited. But compared to what normally survives from antiquity, these people are remark