Estranging the Familiar—Rome’s Ambivalent Approach to Britain

Abstract

On the eve of the Roman invasion of Britain, reports Dio, there arose a mutiny among the troops stationed in Gaul, on the banks of the Atlantic Ocean. The soldiers, we are told, were resentful at the thought of conducting a campaign ‘outside the limits of the known world’.1 Whether or not that was the reason for the mutiny, or whether a mutiny took place at all, the fact remains that, to contemporary historians and, by implication, to their readers, there would have been nothing exceptional in perceiving Britain as lying outside the limits of the known world in the year 43 CE. Indeed, to the audience which regularly fed off imperial propaganda—whether in Rome or elsewhere in the empire—that same perception would not have seemed exceptional even later, since Claudius persisted throughout his reign in celebrating his British achievement as one won in unknown, primitive regions of the world.2 However, a substantial body of evidence speaks strongly for an intense direct relationship between Rome and Britain, the outset of which corresponds to Caesar’s invasions of the island in 55 and 54 BCE. This article sets out this long-enduring Roman ambivalence regarding Britain, and ultimately aims to explain a whole century of atypical imperial inaction. The suggestion that Caesar’s two campaigns on the island left no enduring impression on the relationship between Rome and Britain was made by Strabo,