But would his soldiers do as commanded? Mona was crammed with refugees; and these, crowding the shoreline, howled and chanted to such baleful effect that the legionaries found themselves briefly frozen with terror. There were women brandishing torches, who, with their black robes and tangled hair, looked like nothing so much as Furies; and there were Druids. But then, summoning up their courage, Suetonius’s men began to make for the opposite shore. In the event, it proved a walkover. Soon the defenders were being set ablaze with the flames of their own torches. Charred corpses were left scattered across the beaches. Then it was the turn of the island’s sacred groves to be felled: for Mona was dreaded by the invaders as the chief shrine of the Druids, and of the terrifying spirits appeased by their murderous rites. The defeat of barbarian savagery and the purging of shrines festooned with human entrails – Suetonius had achieved a double exorcism. The news of his feat, when it was reported back in Rome, served as a stirring reminder to the inhabitants of the capital that there still existed, in the remote corners of the world, thrilling dimensions of heroism and sorcery. Nowhere, it seemed, no matter how distant, lay beyond the reach of the Roman people.
A message that Nero, despite his own complete lack of military experience, was naturally keen to promote. Why should the blaze of his charisma not find reflection even in the darkest wastes of the North? A particular triumph was achieved when one of his event managers, sent to source amber directly from the Baltic, returned laden with spoils. The agent had made such a success of his mission that he brought back riches sufficient to adorn an entire arena. Nets; weapons; even the stretchers used to remove dead gladiators: all were made to gleam the colour of Poppaea’s hair. ‘So globalised has everything become,’ wrote Seneca in wonder, ‘that nothing is left in its accustomed place.’36 Whether in Nero’s amphitheatre, with its glint of amber and its bears set to hunt seals, or amid the bustle of markets selling goods from as far afield as India, or on the hill above the Campus, where a great map illustrated for the benefit of passing citizens the full, dazzling extent of their sway, reminders of Rome’s status as the ultimate in world cities were inescapable.*2 All roads led there, and all roads led from there. In the Forum, to mark the official spot where they began and ended, Augustus had erected a milestone sheathed in bronze: the centre of the world. Contemplating the immense spider’s web that Roman greatness had succeeded in spinning across mountains, forests and seas, some still wondered just how far its threads might end up reaching. ‘Perhaps, in time to come, an age will dawn when the Ocean loosens the bonds of things, when the full breadth of the earth will stand revealed, when new worlds will be disclosed, and when Thule itself serve merely as a way-stop to other lands.’37
Seneca, when he imagined Roman ships powering their way to as yet undiscovered continents, did not necessarily approve. As a philosopher, he saw nothing to celebrate in perpetual motion. The prosperity that was the mark of a great empire was, in his opinion, a treacherous and soul-destroying thing, characterised by perpetual restlessness, and destined only to torment itself. Yet even as he praised the delights of poverty, he could not help but be swept along by what he condemned. Nero’s matricide, far from shocking Seneca into resignation, had only confirmed him in his determination to cling to power. The less inclined the youthful Caesar was to take his advice, the more of a responsibility he felt to continue providing it. So Seneca remained at Nero’s side; and by staying there found himself prey to the manifold temptations that power on a global scale presented. ‘The wise man has no need to send legates overseas, to mark out camps on enemy shores, to decide where best to plant garrisons and forts.’38 No doubt – and yet Seneca himself, as Nero’s most trusted advisor, had little choice but to immerse himself in precisely such details. He was up to date on reports from the British front, and alert to conditions on the island. He had convinced himself that there existed, in the ambition of its chieftains to conform to the new order, a rare investment opportunity; and so he had lent them the funds they required to build, to dress and to live like Romans. But he had miscalculated. The Britons had little understanding of the workings of finance, nor were they in any position to pay back the hefty interest being charged on their borrowings. Adding to Seneca’s discomfort was his growing awareness of how great a drain on Roman manpower the conquest of the island was proving to be. Access to British hoodies and hunting dogs hardly compensated for the huge expense of keeping four legions in the field. There had even been talk of cutting Rome’s losses and withdrawing altogether.*3 Seneca, better placed than anyone to do a spot of insider dealing, duly ordered his agents in Britain to call in his loans.
The timing proved unfortunate. Debt collectors were already out in force across the new province. Officials with responsibility for its finances, determined to screw out such income as they could, had begun to exact demands of tribal leaders who ranked legally, not as subjects, but as allies of Rome. One such was Prasutagas, king of the Iceni, a tribe in the flat and rolling lands to the north of Camulodunum. Anxious to safeguard the interests of his daughters, he had named them as his heirs alongside Nero. On his death, though, the Roman authorities had moved to annex everything. The entire kingdom was stripped bare. Prasutagas’s two daughters, far from being treated with the respect due their rank, were both raped, and his wife, a flame-haired warrior queen named Boudicca, bound to a whipping post and lashed. It was to prove a fatal error.
Seneca, had he been present, would not have been surprised, for he had no illusions as to the nature of human rapacity. ‘Were a true representation of our lives to be flashed before your mind’s eye, you would think yourself watching a city just taken by storm, in which all regard for modesty and right had been abandoned, and the only counsel was that of force.’39 Yet Seneca himself was hardly innocent of what he condemned. Two years earlier, Suillius Rufus, the muckraking prosecutor who had helped to bring down Valerius Asiaticus, had publicly charged him with draining the provinces dry; and even though Seneca, pulling strings, had arranged for his accuser to be convicted of embezzlement, and sent into exile, the allegation had stung. After all, seated as he was at the heart of the great web of Roman power, he had only to tug upon a single thread of it for villages at the far end of the world to be trampled down by soldiers, and women left bruised and bleeding. For all his scruples, and even if he had not intended it, Seneca too had played his part in the harrowing of the Icenian tribal lands. Doubtless this was why the gods, when they warned, in the wake of the whipping given to Boudicca, of imminent and terrible calamity, chose to send portents both to Britain and to Rome. Even as flood-tides in the Thames estuary turned to blood, leaving shapes like corpses on the beaches, so was barbarous laughter heard coming from the empty Senate House, and screams from Nero’s amphitheatre. The world had shrunk for ill as well as good.
News that Boudicca, with the scars still fresh on her back, had summoned the Iceni to revolt and was sweeping all before her, reached Suetonius even as he was catching his breath after the capture of Mona. Mustering a squad of cavalry, he climbed back into his saddle at once. Then, instructing the two legions under his immediate command to follow as fast as they could, he made directly for the eye of the storm. The nightmare that had never ceased to haunt the invaders since their first arrival in Britain, the dread that their occupation would end as Roman rule beyond the Rhine had ended, amid slaughter, fire and ruin, appeared on the verge of fulfilment. Camulodunum, rebuilt in the wake of its capture by Claudius as a showcase of what Roman town-planners could achieve, had been levelled to the ground. Littering the debris were the corpses of butchered prisoners and the bronze fragments of dismembered Caesars. High-born women, their severed breasts sewn to their mouths, rotted on spikes. Meanwhile, of the two legions not serving in Wales, one had already been ambushed and almost completely wiped out, while the second, summoned by Suetonius to join him, was ordered by its own acting commander to stay in barracks. Many senior officials, rather than risk the fate of Varus’s men, had already fled to Gaul. A single error by Suetonius, and Britain would be lost for good.