The Rest is Controversial?

I am often preoccupied by the question of how we know what we know — and the related question of whether we might unwittingly be misled by an ill-informed source.

This came to mind today, as I was listening to a podcast recommended by my (non-archaeologist) son. It is called “The Roman Conquest of Britain: To the Ends of the Earth”, and forms part of The Rest Is History, in which historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook (according to the blurb) “interrogate the past and attempt to de-tangle the present”.

Their jolly approach to each topic makes the whole enterprise very entertaining.

On a more serious note, their methodology rests on the assumption that, for any given subject, there will be a body of agreed facts that have been handily gathered together in an easily accessible textbook. Can we trust that they have chosen the right book? Does this matter? Is there a danger that misconceptions might thereby be given a new lease of life amongst an unsuspecting audience?

This particular episode seeks to cover events in Britain from AD 69 until AD 84, a period that ought to be familiar to Romano-British archaeologists and historians (and let us be clear at the outset that neither presenter falls into either of these categories). It is also a period close to my heart, as aspects of it were discussed in my undergraduate dissertation in 1983, and (much later) in my book Mons Graupius AD 83 (2010).

In assuming the role of “expert” for this episode, Holland relies on David Mattingly’s An Imperial Possession (2006), which at one point he describes as “a brilliant book”. (It is definitely an interesting take on the subject, and one that sticks in my mind for its repeated use of the quaint word “specie” where coinage would surely have sufficed, but a few footnotes wouldn’t have gone amiss, to signal where fact becomes theory.)

Rome and the Brigantes

Holland introduces the character of Cartimandua, pro-Roman queen of the Brigantes, whose wide territories encompassed northern England, from coast to coast. (In fact, we met her here last March.) Listeners are informed that she resided in “an extraordinary stronghold in north Yorkshire”, which (I feel) conveys the wrong impression of Stanwick. The great ramparts (see picture) which Holland mentions (“four miles long in length”) were surely a prestige project, as they would have been impossible to defend effectively.

Incidentally, full marks to Holland for presuming that Stanwick was Cartimandua’s capital, an identification that Historic England, as custodians of the site, still warily tiptoe around (but then, they also recommend Cartimandua: Queen of the Brigantes as further reading, a book that left me singularly unimpressed). For what it’s worth, Mattingly dodges the issue as well.

Holland then explains that “ten years earlier, Venutius and Cartimandua had had a massive bust-up”. (Venutius, by the way, was the queen’s consort.) In Holland’s words, “Cartimandua had kicked him out after he’d gone to war with her; the Romans had come to her rescue; but Venutius was still lurking there on the margins, keen to make a come-back”. For ten years? “And he’s all the more aggravated as Cartimandua has massively sassed Venutius by having an affair with his armour-bearer, a man called Vellocatus”.

Certainly the last bit happens to be true (as far as we know), but the entire falling-out was surely a matter of months, not years, and may (or may not) have been precipitated by the queen’s infidelity. There is no need to imagine Venutius going to war for some unspecified reason, and certainly not ten or twelve years earlier. Of course, Holland is not alone in accepting this bizarre sequence of events. He probably found it in Mattingly, but any one of the rival modern accounts carries the same unlikely narrative, up to and including Richard Hingley’s Conquering the Ocean (2022).

The reason for the confusion is that the Roman historian Tacitus — he is the sole source of information for these events — records the whole thing under AD 69 in his Histories (which he was writing around AD 105), and then gives a similar account, but with slightly different details, under the mid-50s in his Annals (which he wrote a decade or more later).

Few historians have bothered to question — or even investigate — this glaring coincidence.

The Annals account — written later, but describing an earlier period — relates Cartimandua’s role in surrendering the renegade Caratacus to the Romans in AD 51, and since Tacitus admits that he has briefly departed from his chronological scheme here, it is reasonable to assume that he simply wished to round off the Cartimandua episode by including the events of AD 69, which already appeared in the Histories.

Personally, I have always preferred Stephen Mitchell’s explanation, which he published in Liverpool Classical Monthly in 1978 and which I gratefully incorporated into my 1983 dissertation. It has the enormous benefit of removing that awkward decade-or-more of limbo to which Venutius is consigned, only to reappear as Cartimandua’s husband again, and fall out with her again, requiring the queen’s rescue by the Romans again. And I was gratified to see that the Tacitus scholar Herbert Benario at least noted (in the same year as my dissertation) that “it has been suggested that these two narratives refer to the same sequence of events, which are properly placed in the year 69”.

Coming back to the podcast, “Venutius is really furious”, Holland continues, “and he takes full advantage of the turmoil in AD 69 to have another crack at Cartimandua, to finish off his ex-wife”. Or, in my opinion, a first crack at her. So much for Cartimandua and the Brigantes.

Agricola

The second half of the podcast concerns Julius Agricola, the most famous governor of Britain and the subject of a biography by Tacitus, who happens to have been his son-in-law.

Holland’s discussion of this biography is very interesting, although I wouldn’t necessarily agree with Sandbrook’s summary of it, that “the mission which the emperor Vespasian has given him [is] the conquest of Caledonia”. After all, he was still sorting out the mess in northern England, and Vespasian (who died in June AD 79, right at the start of Agricola’s third season) may never have heard the news that Agricola had finally encountered new peoples in his drive north into present-day Scotland.

Holland is sure that the emperor Titus similarly shared this desire to conquer Scotland (although it is during Titus’ reign that Agricola calls a halt at the Forth–Clyde isthmus — even Mattingly concedes this). Be that as it may.

Incidentally, Holland’s suggestion that the name Caledonia means “hard men, hard land” (probably actually “rocky land”), and that the inhabitants are “orange-haired” (properly “reddish golden”, the same adjective used to describe the Golden Fleece), at least gives Sandbrook the opportunity to affect an amusing Glaswegian-style accent.

It all makes a jolly splendid chat, and we probably shouldn’t get too worked up by Holland’s shaky grasp of the archaeology (Inchtuthil, for example, is definitely not “the best preserved legionary fortress to be seen anywhere in the Roman empire”).

Or his inaccurate but stirring version of the Battle of Mons Graupius as a two-day affair — “shennanigans with chariots zipping up and down”, and then, on the following day “the cavalry finish them off after the legions have cut them to pieces” (the legions famously took no part in the battle).

The podcast format, of course, requires a more relaxed, informal discussion of history, but the original model, Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, ensured that the listeners received top-notch information by involving three knowledgeable academics in each episode. Of course, for the Roman conquest of northern Britain, there’s a very good book that any interested listeners can turn to.