The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
the government had reckoned on being able to take back the greater part of the troops sent to the island, after it had been occupied, this hope was not fulfilled; only one of the four legions sent thither was, as we have seen, recalled under Domitian; the three others must have been indispensable, for no attempt was ever made to shift them. To these fall to be added the auxiliaries, who were called out apparently in larger proportion than the burgess–troops for the far from inviting service in the remote island of the North Sea. In the battle at the Graupian Mount in 84 there fought, besides the four legions, 8000 infantry and 3000 horsemen of the auxiliary soldiers. For the time of Trajan and Hadrian, when of these there were stationed in Britain six alae and twenty–one cohorts, together about 15,000 men, we shall have to estimate the whole British army at about 30,000 men. Britain was from the outset a field of command of the first rank, inferior to the two Rhenish commands and to the Syrian perhaps in rank, but not in importance, towards the end of the second century probably the most highly esteemed of all the governorships. It was owing only to the great distance that the British legions appear in the second rank amidst the rival armies of the earlier imperial period; in the soldiers’ war after the extinction of the Antonine house they fought in the first rank. But it was one of the consequences of the victory of Severus that the governorship was divided. Thenceforth the two legions of Isca and Deva were placed under the legate of the upper province, the legion of Eburacum and the troops at the walls—consequently the main body of the auxiliaries—under the legate of the lower province.114 Probably the transference of the whole garrison to the north, which, as was above remarked, would doubtless have been appropriate on mere military grounds, was not carried out—partly because it would have put three legions into the hands of one governor.
Taxation and levy.
That financially the province cost more than it brought in (p. 172), can accordingly excite no surprise. For the military strength of the empire, on the other hand, Britain was of considerable account; the balance of proportion between taxation and levy must have had its application also to the island, and the British troops were reckoned alongside of the Illyrian as the flower of the army. At the very beginning seven cohorts were raised from the natives there, and these were constantly increased onward to the time of Hadrian; after the latter had brought in the system of recruiting the troops as far as possible from their garrison–districts, Britain appears to have furnished the supply, at least in great part, for its strong garrison. There was an earnest and brave spirit in the people; they bore willingly the taxes and the levy, but not the arrogance and brutality of the officials.
Communal organisation.
As a basis for the internal organisation of Britain, the cantonal constitution existing there at the time of the conquest offered itself, which differed, as we have already remarked, from that of the Celts of the continent essentially only in the fact that the several tribes of the island, apparently all of them, were under princes (iv. 233)[iv. 222.]. But this organisation seems not to have been retained, and the canton (civitas) to have become in Britain as in Spain a geographical conception; at least we can hardly otherwise explain the facts that the Britannic tribes, taken in the strict sense, disappear as soon as they fall under Roman rule, and of the individual cantons after their subjugation there is virtually no mention at all. Probably the several principalities, as they were subdued and annexed, were broken up into smaller communities; this was facilitated by the fact that there did not exist on the island, as there did on the continent, a cantonal constitution organised without a monarchic head. With this is doubtless connected the circumstance that, while the Gallic cantons possessed a common capital and in it a political and religious collective representation, nothing similar is stated as to Britain. The province was not without a concilium and a common cultus of the emperor; but, if the altar of Claudius in Camalodunum115 had been even approximately what that of Augustus was in Lugudunum, something would doubtless have been heard of it. The free and great political remodelling, which was given to the Gallic country by Caesar and confirmed by his son, no longer fits into the framework of the later imperial policy.
We have already mentioned the founding, nearly contemporary with the invasion of Britain, of the colony Camalodunum (p. 176), as it has also been already noticed that the Italian urban constitution was early introduced into a series of British townships. Herein, too, Britain was treated more after the model of Spain than after that of the Celtic continent.
Prosperity.
The internal condition of Britain must, in spite of the general faults of the imperial government, have been, at least in comparison with other regions, not unfavourable. If the people in the north knew only hunting and pasturing, and the inhabitants there as well as those adjoining them were always ready for feud and rapine, the south developed itself in an undisturbed state of peace, especially by means of agriculture, and along with it by cattle–rearing and the working of mines, to a moderate prosperity. The Gallic orators of Diocletian’s time praise the wealth of the fertile island, and often enough the Rhine–legions received their corn from Britain.
Roads.
The network of roads in the island, which was uncommonly developed, and for which in particular Hadrian did much in connection with the building of his wall, was of course primarily subservient to military ends; but alongside of, and in fact taking precedence over the legionary camps Londinium occupies in that respect a place which brings clearly into view its leading position in traffic. Only in Wales were these imperial roads solely in the immediate neighbourhood of the Roman camps, from Isca to Nidum (Neath) and from Deva to the point of crossing to Mona.
Roman manners and culture.
In respect of Romanisation, Britain seems to have been very similar to northern and central Gaul. The national deities, the Mars Belatucadrus or Cocidius, the goddess Sulis treated as equivalent to Minerva, after whom the modern city of Bath was named, still received much worship on the island even in the Latin language. The language and manners that penetrated thither from Italy were yet more an exotic growth on the island than on the continent; still towards the close of the first century the families of note there shunned as well the Latin language as the Latin dress. The great urban centres, the seats proper of the new culture, were more weakly developed in Britain; we do not precisely know what English town served as seat for the concilium of the province and for the common worship of the emperor, or in which of the three legion–camps the governor of the province resided; if, as it seems, the civil capital of Britain was Camalodunum, and the military capital Eburacum,116 the latter can as little measure itself with Mentz as the former with Lyons. The ruined sites even of places of note, of the Claudian veteran–town Camalodunum, and the populous mercantile town Londinium, and not less the camps of the legions for several hundred years, at Deva, Isca, Eburacum, present inscribed stones only in trifling number; towns of name with Roman rights like the colony Glevum (Gloucester), and the municipium Verulamium, have hitherto yielded not a single one; the custom of setting up memorial–stones, on the results of which we are for such questions largely dependent, never really prevailed in Britain. In the interior of Wales and in other less accessible districts no Roman monuments at all have come to light. But there exist withal clear traces of the stirring commerce and traffic brought into prominence by Tacitus, such as the numerous drinking–cups which have come out of the ruins of London, and the London network of roads. If Agricola exerted himself to transplant municipal emulation in the embellishment of one’s native city by buildings and monuments to Britain, as it had been transferred from Italy to Africa and Spain, and to induce the islanders of note to adorn the markets of their home and to erect temples and palaces, as this was usual elsewhere, he was but in a slight degree successful as regards the public buildings. But it was otherwise as regards private economics; the stately country–houses constructed and embellished in Roman fashion, of which now nothing is left but the mosaic pavements, are found in southern Britain—so far north as the region of York117—as frequently as in the land of the Rhine. The higher scholastic training of youth penetrated gradually from Gaul into Britain. It is specified among Agricola’s administrative successes that the Roman tutor began to find his way into the leading houses of the island. In Hadrian’s time Britain is described as a region conquered by the Gallic schoolmasters, and “even Thule speaks of hiring a professor for itself.” These schoolmasters were in the first instance Latin, but Greeks also came; Plutarch tells of a conversation which he held