[61 A.D.] The great capitalists of the city, wealthy courtiers, and prosperous freedmen, advanced the sums they called for at exorbitant interest; from year to year they found themselves less able to meet their obligations, and mortgaged property and person to their unrelenting creditors. Among the immediate causes of the insurrection which followed, is mentioned the sudden calling in by Seneca, the richest of philosophers, of the large investments he had made, which he seemed in danger of losing altogether.

But the oppression of the Romans was not confined to these transactions. Prasutagus, in the hope of propitiating the provincial government to his family, had bequeathed his dominions to the republic. He expected perhaps that his wife and his children, who were also females, if not allowed to exercise even a nominal sovereignty after him, would at least be treated in consequence with the respect due to their rank, and. secured in the enjoyment of ample means and consideration. This was the fairest lot that remained to the families of the dependent chieftains, and the Romans had not often grudged it them. But an insolent official, placed in charge of these new acquisitions after the death of Prasutagus, forgot in their instance what was due to the birth and even the sex of the wretched princesses. He suspected them perhaps of secreting a portion of their patrimony, and did not scruple to employ stripes to recover it from the mother, while he surrendered her tender children to even worse indignities.

The War with Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni

Boadicea, the widowed queen of the Iceni, was a woman of masculine spirit. Far from succumbing under the cruelty of her tyrants and hiding the shame of her family, she went forth into the public places, exhibited the scars of her wounds and the fainting forms of her abused daughters, and adjured her people to take a desperate revenge. The Iceni were stung to frenzy at their sovereign's wrongs, at their own humiliation. The danger, the madness, of the attempt was considered by none for a moment. They rose as one man; there was no power at hand to control them; the Roman officials fled, or, if arrested, were slaughtered; and a vast multitude, armed and unarmed, rolled southward to overwhelm and extirpate the intruders. To the Colne, to the Thames, to the sea, the country lay entirely open. The legions were all removed to a distance, the towns were unenclosed, the Roman traders settled in them were untrained to arms. Even the Claudian colony was undefended. The procurator, Catus Decianus, was at the moment absent, and being pressed for succour, could send no more than two hundred soldiers for its protection. Little reliance could be placed on the strength of a few worn-out veterans: the natives, however specious their assurances, were not unjustly distrusted, for they too, like the Iceni, had suffered their share of insolence and ill-treatment. The great temple of Claudius was a standing monument of their humiliation; for its foundation their estates had been confiscated, for its support their tribute was required, and they regarded the native chiefs who had been enrolled in its service as victims or traitors.

Whatever alarm they might feel at the indiscriminate fury of the hordes descending upon them, they smiled grimly at the panic which more justly seized the Romans. The guilty objects of national vengeance discovered the direst prodigies in every event around them. The wailings of their women, the neighing of their horses, were interpreted as evil omens. Their theatre was said to have resounded with uncouth noises; the buildings of

[61 A.D.]

the colony had been seen inversely reflected in the waters of their estuary; and on the ebbing of the tide ghastly remains of human bodies had been discovered in the ooze. Above all, the statue of Victory, erected to face the enemies of the republic, had turned its back to the advancing barbarians and fallen prostrate before them. When the colonists proposed to throw up hasty entrenchments they were dissuaded from the work, or impeded in it by the natives, who persisted in declaring that they had no cause for fear; it was not till the Iceni were actually in sight, and the treachery of the Trinobantes no longer doubtful, that they retreated tumultuously within the precincts of the temple, and strengthened its slender defences to support a sudden attack till succour could arrive. But the impetuosity of the assault overcame all resistance. The stronghold was stormed on the second day, and all who had sought refuge in it, armed and unarmed, given up to slaughter.

Meanwhile the report of this fearful movement had travelled far and wide through the country. It reached Petilius Cerealis, the commander of the Ninth legion, which we suppose to have been stationed near the Wash, and he broke up promptly from his camp to hang on the rear of the insurgents. It reached the Twentieth legion at Deva, which awaited the orders of Suetonius himself, as soon as he should learn on the banks of the Menai the perils in which the province was involved. The proprætor withdrew the Fourteenth legion from the smoking groves of Mona, and urged it with redoubled speed along the highway of Watling street, picking out the best troops from the Twentieth as he rushed by, and summoning the Second from Isca to join him in the south. But Pænius Postumus, who commanded this latter division, neglected to obey his orders, and crouched in terror behind his fortifications. The Iceni turned boldly upon Cerialis, who was hanging close upon their heels, and routed his wearied battalions with great slaughter. The infantry of the Ninth legion was cut to pieces, and the cavalry alone escaped within their entrenchments. But the barbarians had not skill nor patience to conduct the siege of a Roman camp. They left the squadron of Cerialis unmolested, nor did they attempt to force the scattered posts of the Romans around them. After giving Camulodunum to the flames, they dispersed throughout the country, plundering and destroying.

Suetonius, unappalled by the frightful accounts which thronged upon him, held on his course steadfastly with his single legion, broke through the scattered bands of the enemy, and reached Londinium without a check. This place was crowded with Roman residents, crowded still more at this moment with fugitives from the country towns and villas: but it was undefended by walls, its population of traders was untrained to arms, and Suetonius sternly determined to leave it, with all the wealth of the province which it harboured, to the barbarians, rather than sacrifice his soldiers in a vain attempt to save it. The policy of the Roman commander was to secure his communications with Gaul: but he was resolved not to abandon the country, nor surrender the detachments hemmed in at various points by the general rising of the Britons.

The precise direction of his movements we can only conjecture. Had he retired to the southern bank of the Thames, he would probably have defended the passage of that river; or had the Britons crossed it unresisted, the historians would not have failed to signalise so important a success. But the situation of Camulodunum, enclosed in its old British lines, and backed by the sea, would offer him a secure retreat where he might defy attack and await reinforcements; and the insurgents, after their recent triumphs, had

[61 A.D.] abandoned their first conquests to wreak their fury upon other seats of Roman civilisation. While, therefore, the Iceni sacked and burned first Verulamium, and next Londinium, Suetonius probably made a flank march towards Camulodunum, and kept ahead of their pursuit, till he could choose his own position to await their attack. In a valley between undulating hills, with woods in the rear and the ramparts of the British oppidum not far perhaps on his right flank, he had every advantage for marshalling his slender forces; and these were increased in number more than in strength by the fugitives capable of bearing arms, whom he had allowed to cling to his fortunes. Ten thousand resolute men drew their swords for the Roman Empire in Britain. The natives, many times their number, spread far and wide over the open plain before them; but the narrow front of the Romans could be assailed by only few battalions at once, and the wagons, which conveyed their accumulated booty and bore their wives and children, thronged the rear and cut off almost the possibility of retreat.

But flushed with victory, impatient for the slaughter, animated with desperate resolution to die or conquer, the Britons cast no look or thought behind them. Boadicea herself drove from rank to rank, from nation to nation, with her daughters beside her, attesting the outrage she had endured, the vengeance she had already taken, proclaiming the gallant deeds of the queens before her, under whom British warriors had so often triumphed, denouncing as intolerable the yoke of Roman insolence, and declaring that whatever the men might determine, the women would now be free or perish. The harangue of Suetonius, on the other hand, was blunt and sarcastic. He told his men not to mind the multitudes before them, nor the noise they made; there were more women among them than men ; as for their own numbers, let them remember that in all battles a few good swordsmen really did the work; the half-armed and dastard crowds before them would break and fly when they saw again the prowess of the Roman primipiles.

The

Thus encouraged, the legionaries could with difficulty be restrained to await the onset; and as soon as the assailants had exhausted their missiles, bore down upon them in the wedge-shaped column which had so often broken Greeks, Gauls, and Carthaginians. The auxiliaries followed with no less impetuosity. The horsemen, lance in hand, pierced through the ranks which still kept their ground. But a single charge was enough. Britons were in a moment shattered and routed. In another moment, the Romans had reached the long circumvallation of wagons, among which the fugitives were scrambling in dismay, slew the cattle and the women. without remorse, and traced with a line of corpses and carcasses the limits of the British position. We may believe that the massacre was enormous. The Romans declared that eighty thousand of their enemies perished, while of their own force they lost only four hundred slain, and about as many wounded. Boadicea put an end to her life by poison; we could have wished to hear that the brave barbarian had fallen on a Roman pike. Suetonius had won the greatest victory of the imperial history; to complete his triumph, the coward, Postumus, who had shrunk from his assistance, threw himself, in shame and mortification, on his own sword.

By this utter defeat the British insurrection was paralysed. Throughout the remainder of the season the Romans kept the field; they received reinforcements from the German camps, and their scattered cohorts were gradually brought together in a force which overawed all resistance. The revolted districts were chastised with fire and sword, and the systematic devastation inflicted upon them, suffering as they already were from the

[61 A.D.]

neglect of tillage during the brief intoxication of their success, produced a famine which swept off the seeds of future insurrections. On both sides a fearful amount of destruction had been committed. Amidst the overthrow of the great cities of southern Britain, not less than seventy thousand Roman colonists had perished. The work of twenty years was in a moment undone. Far and wide every vestige of Roman civilisation was trodden into the soil. At this day the workmen who dig through the foundations of the Norman and the Saxon London, strike beneath them upon the traces of a double Roman city, between which lies a mass of charred and broken rubbish, attesting the conflagration of the terrible Boadicea.

Britain again a Peaceful Province

The temper of Suetonius, as may be supposed from what has been already recorded of him, was stern and unbending, even beyond the ordinary type of his nation. No other officer, perhaps, in the Roman armies could have so turned disaster into victory, and recovered a province at a blow; but it was not in his character to soothe the conquered, to conciliate angry passions, to restore the charm of moral superiority. Classicianus, who succeeded Catus as procurator, complained of him to the emperor, as wishing to protract hostilities against the exasperated Britons, when every end might be obtained by conciliation.

A freedman of the court, named Polycletus, was sent on the delicate mission, to judge between the civil and the military chief, and to take the measures most fitting for securing peace and obedience. Polycletus brought with him a large force from Italy and Gaul, and was no less surprised perhaps than the legions he commanded, to see himself at the head of a Roman army. Even the barbarians, we are told, derided the victorious warriors who bowed in submission to the orders of a bondman. But Polycletus could make himself obeyed at least, if not respected. The loss of a few vessels on the coast furnished him with a pretext for removing Suetonius from his command, and transferring it to a consular, Petronius Turpilianus, whose temper and policy inclined equally to peace.

From the lenity of this proprætor the happiest consequences evidently ensued. The southern Britons acquiesced in the dominion of Rome, while the northern were awed into deference to her superior influence. Her manners, her arts, her commerce, penetrated far into regions yet unconquered by the sword. Her establishments at Londinium, Verulamium, and Camulodunum rose again from their ashes. Never was the peaceful enterprise of her citizens more vigorous and elastic than at this period. The luxuries of Italy and the provinces, rapidly increasing, required the extension to the utmost of all her resources. Manufactures and commerce were pushed forward with unexampled activity.

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The products of Britain, rude as they were, consisting of raw materials chiefly, were demanded with an insatiable appetite by the cities of Gaul and Germany, and exchanged for arts and letters, which at least decked her servitude with silken fetters. The best of the Roman commanders, and there were some, we may believe, among them both thoughtful and humane, - while they acknowledged they had no right to conquer, yet believed that their conquests were a blessing. The best of the native chiefs- and some too of them may have wished for the real happiness of their countrymen,— acknowledged, perhaps, that while freedom is the noblest instrument of virtue, it only degrades the vicious to the lowest depths of barbarism.e

H. W.-VOL. VI. O

BURRUS AND SENECA

[59-62 A.D.]

In Rome meanwhile the public evils grew daily more oppressive, and the means of redress were decreasing. It was now that Burrus died (62 A.D.), whether by poison or disease is uncertain; that it was disease was inferred from the fact that, his throat gradually swelling internally and the passage being closed up, he ceased to breathe. Many asserted that, by the order of Nero, under colour of applying a remedy, his palate was anointed with a poisonous drug, and that Burrus, having discovered the treachery, when the prince came to visit him, turned his face and eyes another way, and to his

NERO

repeated inquiries about his health, made no other answer than this: "I am well." At Rome the sense of his loss was deep and lasting, as well from the memory of his virtue as from the spiritless simplicity of one of his successors, and the flaming enormities and adulteries of the other. For Nero had created two captains of the prætorian guards-namely, Fenius Rufus for his popularity, in consequence of his administration of the public stores without deriving any profit from it; and Sophonius Tigellinus, purely from partiality to the inveterate lewdness and infamy of the man; and their influence was according to their known manner of life. Tigellinus held greater sway over the mind of Nero, and was admitted to share in his most secret debaucheries; Rufus flourished in the good opinion of the people and soldiery, which he found a denial to him with the emperor.

The death of Burrus made an inroad upon the influence of Seneca; as good counsels had no longer the same force now that one of the champions of virtue was removed; and Nero naturally inclined to follow the more depraved, who assailed Seneca with various imputations: that he had already accumulated enormous wealth, far surpassing the measure of a citizen, and was still increasing it; that he was alienating from the emperor and diverting to himself the affections of the citizens; that he sought to outdo the prince in the elegance of his gardens and the splendour of his villas. They laid to his charge also that he claimed a monopoly in the glory of eloquence; and that after Nero conceived a passion for versifying, he had employed himself in it with unusual assiduity; for, to the recreations of the prince he was an open enemydisparaged his vigour in the managing of horses, ridiculed his vocal powers whenever he sang; with what view did he endeavour to effect that in the whole republic nothing should go down which was not the product of his ingenuity? Surely Nero was past weakness of childhood, and arrived at the prime of youth; he ought now to discard his pedagogue, furnished as he was with instructors the most accomplished, even his own ancestors.