The Works of Tacitus
tr. by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb
[1864-1877]
Tacitus: Annals Book 14 [30]
30. On the shore stood the opposing army with its dense array of armed warriors,
while between the ranks dashed women, in black attire like the Furies, with
hair dishevelled, waving brands. All around, the Druids, lifting up their hands
to heaven, and pouring forth dreadful imprecations, scared our soldiers by the
unfamiliar sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralysed, they stood motionless,
and exposed to wounds. Then urged by their general’s appeals and mutual encouragements
not to quail before a troop of frenzied women, they bore the standards onwards,
smote down all resistance, and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands.
A force was next set over the conquered, and their groves, devoted to inhuman
superstitions, were destroyed. They deemed it indeed a duty to cover their altars
with the blood of captives and to consult their deities through human entrails.
31. Suetonius while thus occupied received tidings of the sudden revolt of
the province. Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, famed for his long prosperity,
had made the emperor his heir along with his two daughters, under the impression
that this token of submission would put his kingdom and his house out of the
reach of wrong. But the reverse was the result, so much so that his kingdom
was plundered by centurions, his house by slaves, as if they were the spoils
of war. First, his wife Boudicea was scourged, and his daughters outraged. All
the chief men of the Iceni, as if Rome had received the whole country as a gift,
were stript of their ancestral possessions, and the king’s relatives were made
slaves. Roused by these insults and the dread of worse, reduced as they now
were into the condition of a province, they flew to arms and stirred to revolt
the Trinobantes and others who, not yet cowed by slavery, had agreed in secret
conspiracy to reclaim their freedom. It was against the veterans that their
hatred was most intense. For these new settlers in the colony of Camulodunum
drove people out of their houses, ejected them from their farms, called them
captives and slaves, and the lawlessness of the veterans was encouraged by the
soldiers, who lived a similar life and hoped for similar licence. A temple also
erected to the Divine Claudius was ever before their eyes, a citadel, as it
seemed, of perpetual tyranny. Men chosen as priests had to squander their whole
fortunes under the pretence of a religious ceremonial. It appeared too no difficult
matter to destroy the colony, undefended as it was by fortifications, a precaution
neglected by our generals, while they thought more of what was agreeable than
of what was expedient.
32. Meanwhile, without any evident cause, the statue of Victory at Camulodunum
fell prostrate and turned its back to the enemy, as though it fled before them.
Women excited to frenzy prophesied impending destruction; ravings in a strange
tongue, it was said, were heard in their Senate-house; their theatre resounded
with wailings, and in the estuary of the Tamesa had been seen the appearance
of an overthrown town; even the ocean had worn the aspect of blood, and, when
the tide ebbed, there had been left the likenesses of human forms, marvels interpreted
by the Britons, as hopeful, by the veterans, as alarming. But as Suetonius was
far away, they implored aid from the procurator, Catus Decianus. All he did
was to send two hundred men, and no more, without regular arms, and there was
in the place but a small military force. Trusting to the protection of the temple,
hindered too by secret accomplices in the revolt, who embarrassed their plans,
they had constructed neither fosse nor rampart; nor had they removed their old
men and women, leaving their youth alone to face the foe. Surprised, as it were,
in the midst of peace, they were surrounded by an immense host of the barbarians.
All else was plundered or fired in the onslaught; the temple where the soldiers
had assembled, was stormed after a two days’ siege. The victorious enemy met
Petilius Cerialis, commander of the ninth legion, as he was coming to the rescue,
routed his troops, and destroyed all his infantry. Cerialis escaped with some
cavalry into the camp, and was saved by its fortifications. Alarmed by this
disaster and by the fury of the province which he had goaded into war by his
rapacity, the procurator Catus crossed over into Gaul.
33. Suetonius, however, with wonderful resolution, marched amidst a hostile
population to Londinium, which, though undistinguished by the name of a colony,
was much frequented by a number of merchants and trading vessels. Uncertain
whether he should choose it as a seat of war, as he looked round on his scanty
force of soldiers, and remembered with what a serious warning the rashness of
Petilius had been punished, he resolved to save the province at the cost of
a single town. Nor did the tears and weeping of the people, as they implored
his aid, deter him from giving the signal of departure and receiving into his
army all who would go with him. Those who were chained to the spot by the weakness
of their sex, or the infirmity of age, or the attractions of the place, were
cut off by the enemy. Like ruin fell on the town of Verulamium, for the barbarians,
who delighted in plunder and were indifferent to all else, passed by the fortresses
with military garrisons, and attacked whatever offered most wealth to the spoiler,
and was unsafe for defence. About seventy thousand citizens and allies, it appeared,
fell in the places which I have mentioned. For it was not on making prisoners
and selling them, or on any of the barter of war, that the enemy was bent, but
on slaughter, on the gibbet, the fire and the cross, like men soon about to
pay the penalty, and meanwhile snatching at instant vengeance.
34. Suetonius had the fourteenth legion with the veterans of the twentieth,
and auxiliaries from the neighbourhood, to the number of about ten thousand
armed men, when he prepared to break off delay and fight a battle. He chose
a position approached by a narrow defile, closed in at the rear by a forest,
having first ascertained that there was not a soldier of the enemy except in
his front, where an open plain extended without any danger from ambuscades.
His legions were in close array; round them, the light-armed troops, and the
cavalry in dense array on the wings. On the other side, the army of the Britons,
with its masses of infantry and cavalry, was confidently exulting, a vaster
host than ever had assembled, and so fierce in spirit that they actually brought
with them, to witness the victory, their wives riding in waggons, which they
had placed on the extreme border of the plain.
35. Boudicea, with her daughters before her in a chariot, went up to tribe
after tribe, protesting that it was indeed usual for Britons to fight under
the leadership of women. “But now,” she said, “it is not as a woman descended
from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom,
my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters. Roman lust has gone
so far that not our very persons, nor even age or virginity, are left unpolluted.
But heaven is on the side of a righteous vengeance; a legion which dared to
fight has perished; the rest are hiding themselves in their camp, or are thinking
anxiously of flight. They will not sustain even the din and the shout of so
many thousands, much less our charge and our blows. If you weigh well the strength
of the armies, and the causes of the war, you will see that in this battle you
must conquer or die. This is a woman’s resolve; as for men, they may live and
be slaves.”
36. Nor was Suetonius silent at such a crisis. Though he confided in the
valour of his men, he yet mingled encouragements and entreaties to disdain the
clamours and empty threats of the barbarians. “There,” he said, “you see more
women than warriors. Unwarlike, unarmed, they will give way the moment they
have recognised that sword and that courage of their conquerors, which have
so often routed them. Even among many legions, it is a few who really decide
the battle, and it will enhance their glory that a small force should earn the
renown of an entire army. Only close up the ranks, and having discharged your
javelins, then with shields and swords continue the work of bloodshed and destruction,
without a thought of plunder. When once the victory has been won, everything
will be in your power.” Such was the enthusiasm which followed the general’s
address, and so promptly did the veteran soldiery, with their long experience
of battles, prepare for the hurling of the javelins, that it was with confidence
in the result that Suetonius gave the signal of battle.
37. At first, the legion kept its position, clinging to the narrow defile
as a defence; when they had exhausted their missiles, which they discharged
with unerring aim on the closely approaching foe, they rushed out in a wedge-like
column. Similar was the onset of the auxiliaries, while the cavalry with extended
lances broke through all who offered a strong resistance. The rest turned their
back in flight, and flight proved difficult, because the surrounding waggons
had blocked retreat. Our soldiers spared not to slay even the women, while the
very beasts of burden, transfixed by the missiles, swelled the piles of bodies.
Great glory, equal to that of our old victories, was won on that day. Some indeed
say that there fell little less than eighty thousand of the Britons, with a
loss to our soldiers of about four hundred, and only as many wounded. Boudicea
put an end to her life by poison. Poenius Postumus too, camp-prefect of the
second legion, when he knew of the success of the men of the fourteenth and
twentieth, feeling that he had cheated his legion out of like glory, and had
contrary to all military usage disregarded the general’s orders, threw himself
on his sword.
38. The whole army was then brought together and kept under canvas to finish
the remainder of the war. The emperor strengthened the forces by sending from
Germany two thousand legionaries, eight cohorts of auxiliaries, and a thousand
cavalry. On their arrival the men of the ninth had their number made up with
legionary soldiers. The allied infantry and cavalry were placed in new winter
quarters, and whatever tribes still wavered or were hostile were ravaged with
fire and sword. Nothing however distressed the enemy so much as famine, for
they had been careless about sowing corn, people of every age having gone to
the war, while they reckoned on our supplies as their own. Nations, too, so
high-spirited inclined the more slowly to peace, because Julius Classicanus,
who had been sent as successor to Catus and was at variance with Suetonius,
let private animosities interfere with the public interest, and had spread an
idea that they ought to wait for a new governor who, having neither the anger
of an enemy nor the pride of a conqueror, would deal mercifully with those who
had surrendered. At the same time he stated in a despatch to Rome that no cessation
of fighting must be expected, unless Suetonius were superseded, attributing
that general’s disasters to perverseness and his successes to good luck.
39. Accordingly one of the imperial freedmen, Polyclitus, was sent to survey
the state of Britain, Nero having great hopes that his influence would be able
not only to establish a good understanding between the governor and the pro-curator,
but also to pacify the rebellious spirit of the barbarians. And Polyclitus,
who with his enormous suite had been a burden to Italy and Gaul, failed not,
as soon as he had crossed the ocean, to make his progresses a terror even to
our soldiers. But to the enemy he was a laughing-stock, for they still retained
some of the fire of liberty, knowing nothing yet of the power of freedmen, and
so they marvelled to see a general and an army who had finished such a war cringing
to slaves. Everything, however, was softened down for the emperor’s ears, and
Suetonius was retained in the government; but as he subsequently lost a few
vessels on the shore with the crews, he was ordered, as though the war continued,
to hand over his army to Petronius Turpilianus, who had just resigned his consulship.
Petronius neither challenged the enemy nor was himself molested, and veiled
this tame inaction under the honourable name of peace.
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