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    Roman Britain
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ROMAN BRITAIN
    The Myth of the Civilizing Empire
    Unlike most imperial projects, Roman Britain began with a formal,
    premeditated state-sponsored invasion. Emperor Claudius’s most
    likely pretext for sending forty thousand legionnaires and auxiliaries
    across the English Channel in a.d. 43 was to restore the exiled king
    and Roman client Verica to power. The emperor’s bid to conquer a cold,
    remote land that the Romans knew very little about also served pragmatic personal ends. Coming to the imperial purple with the backing
    of the Praetorian Guard, Claudius needed a heroic victory to establish
    his legitimacy and to pay off his military backers. Julius Caesar had
    led a pair of speculative expeditions to the island in 56 and 54 b.c.,
    and Claudius’s predecessor Gaius (Caligula) had aborted an invasion
    in a.d. 40. Britain was thus one of the last unconquered territories in
    western Europe. By adding it to the Roman Empire, Claudius sought
    to win over the army, burnish his imperial credentials, and answer
    critics in the Senate by accomplishing what his more distinguished
    predecessors could not.
    Political considerations aside, Britain’s actual value was less clear.
    The extractive worth of the island’s population remains a matter of
    debate. Modern historians have alternately depicted southern Britain as either a rich commercial and agricultural region with a dense
    population and considerable tax potential or a mist-shrouded land
    that Emperor Augustus deemed too undeveloped to warrant the cost
    of conquest. The Greek geographer Strabo recorded that Caesar’s
    military expeditions intimidated the Britons into paying tribute
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    22 THE RULE OF EMPIRES
    and returned with slaves and plunder. Yet he also suggested that the
    overall value of the island was not worth the cost of permanent occupation.
    This may have been why Claudius’s legions initially refused to cross
    the channel. The Greek historian Cassius Dio recorded that Claudius’s
    freedman Narcissus convinced them to board the ships by appealing
    to their pride, but the promise of extra pay and plunder was probably
    the real inducement. Claudius delegated command of the four-legion
    invasion force, drawn primarily from the German provinces, to Aulus
    Plautius, whom Dio considered a “senator of great renown.” There
    was no initial opposition to the Roman landings. Most Britons probably viewed the invasion as another short-term military expedition
    and hoped that the Claudian army would follow Caesar’s example
    by withdrawing with its loot. They therefore avoided direct combat,
    gathering for battle only when it became apparent that the Romans
    were not leaving. Organized by the Catuvellaunian brothers Caratacus and Togodumnus, a British confederation fought the Romans and
    lost on the banks of the river Medway in southeastern England. Dio
    recorded that eleven British kings surrendered after Togodumnus
    died in the fi ghting and Caratacus retreated northward.
    With southern Britain in Roman hands, Claudius arrived to claim
    the fruits of victory and founded a colony near Camulodunum, the
    closest thing to a British capital at the time. The emperor then left for
    Rome with a parting order to Plautius to “subjugate the remaining
    [British] districts.” By a.d. 82, the legions had overrun all of modern
    England and Wales and most of lowland Scotland.1
    Claudius’s imperial adventure helps to explain why modern
    debates about the nature and utility of empire invariably begin with
    Rome. The Roman Empire’s scope, power, cultural accomplishments,
    and longevity made it the standard by which westerners measured
    all other imperial states. The Romans’ spectacular art, architecture,
    engineering, and literature refl ected the wealth and sophistication of
    their empire, but the passage of time obscures the reality that ruthless extraction made these achievements possible. Ancient generals
    sought the