In the event, though, the province was saved. Suetonius, after taking the pulse of the insurrection in person, retreated, successfully made a rendezvous with his advancing legions and then waited to meet the firestorm. Two more Roman settlements were left as smoking rubble before the fateful moment came. The Britons, rather than adopt the tactics of Arminius and melt into the landscape the better to wage guerilla warfare, opted instead for a full-frontal assault. The result, secured in the teeth of satisfyingly massive odds, was a massacre. When the casualty figures were published, it was claimed that some eighty thousand Britons had perished for the loss of only four hundred Roman dead. Boudicca, whose gender and general savagery had made her seem to her adversaries an Amazon unleashed from the realms of myth, committed suicide. So too, brought the news of Suetonius’s victory, did the legionary commander who had refused his summons to battle. It was all thoroughly stirring: ‘a day of great glory, redolent of some victory won in ancient times’.40 The Roman people, thrilling to the dispatches from the British front and revelling in how disaster had been averted, could enjoy the reassurance that they remained the same people they had ever been.
Not that martial virtue alone had ever been sufficient to explain their rise to greatness. The genius granted them by the gods was for peace as well as war. When the reprisals launched by Suetonius threatened to get out of hand, Nero was sufficiently perturbed to send one of his freedmen to report back to him on the situation; and sure enough, soon afterwards, Boudicca’s conqueror was recalled. From the earliest days of their city, Rome’s leaders had appreciated that generosity in victory was the surest way of securing their ends: ‘for little is gained by conquest if it is followed by oppression’.41 Romulus’s abduction of the Sabine women, although inevitably it had led their outraged fathers and brothers to descend on Rome vowing vengeance, had culminated, not in slaughter, but in a peace treaty, and in the Sabines becoming Roman. Since then, many other Italian peoples had followed along the same path. The Marsians, the Samnites, the Etruscans: all had come to rank as the fellow citizens of their conquerors. No longer, though, were Rome’s horizons confined to lands south of the Alps. If Italy could end up Roman, then why not the world? It was her mission, some had begun to claim, ‘to unite previously distinct powers, to soften patterns of behaviour, to provide a common language to the numerous peoples hitherto divided by their savage tongues, to civilise mankind – in short, to unite all the peoples of the world, and to serve them as their fatherland’.42
Amid the charred fields of Britain, such a claim might have seemed grotesque; except that the official appointed by Nero to stabilise the shattered province’s administration, and who had first called for Suetonius to be replaced, was not an Italian but a Gaul. Julius Classicianus served as a living reassurance to the Britons that Roman rule offered more than simple oppression. Citizen of Rome, yet married to the daughter of a Gallic chieftain, he was ideally placed to mediate between conquerors and conquered. Rather than tighten the screws on his subjects, he opted to build bridges. The Britons, having been brutally taught the price of resistance, were now graced by Classicianus with the benefits of submission. The policy proved strikingly effective. Wounds began to heal, the embers of insurrection to fade. Soon, even with memories of Boudicca’s revolt still raw, it was being decided in Nero’s councils to reduce the garrison in Britain from four legions to three. The Ocean remained to Rome.
Naturally, there were limits to what could plausibly be achieved. No matter how successful the process of pacification, chieftains as barbarous as those of the Britons could never hope to share in the rule of the world. There were many in Rome who felt the same about Classicianus and his kind. Although the aristocrats of southern Gaul had been under Roman rule for almost two centuries, and had bred, in the flamboyant form of Valerius Asiaticus, a man who had briefly aspired to rule as Caesar, resentment at their presence in the Senate House had never entirely faded. In AD 48, in a debate on whether to admit chieftains from the central and northern reaches of Gaul, opposition to the prospect had been ferocious. Allow the descendants of men who had fought Julius Caesar, worn trousers and dripped gravy from their facial hair, into the Senate House? ‘Why, it would be to import hordes of foreigners, in the manner of a slave-dealer.’43 In truth, though, such complaints about Gallic savagery were disingenuous. It was not the backwardness of the Gauls that provoked the true resentment but the opposite: their growing wealth. Many a senator, denied the opportunity to boost his fortunes as his ancestors had once done, by looting barbarians, found himself impoverished by comparison with Gallic magnates.
Yet this, to those with an eye to the future, was precisely what made it so pressing to recruit them into the ranks of the Roman elite. Gaul, with its fertile soil and manpower, was already richer than many regions of Italy. Its aristocracy could not possibly be permitted to go their own way. Claudius, with the perspective that came from his deep reading in history, had made this argument with typical subtlety and erudition. ‘Everything we now believe to be the essence of tradition,’ he had reminded his fellow senators, ‘was a novelty once.’44 Why, Clausus, his own ancestor, the founder of the Claudian line, had been an immigrant. Senators had duly approved Claudius’s speech. Gauls had been admitted into their ranks. The Senate House had ended up just that little bit more multi-ethnic.
Meanwhile, beyond its walls, in the teeming streets of a city whose population now numbered well over a million, many had begun to wonder what precisely it meant to talk of the Roman people. Rome, as Claudius had reminded the Senate in his speech, had been founded on immigration. Exotic languages had been heard in the city for centuries. Street names still bore witness to the settlement of foreigners on them in ancient times: the Vicus Tuscus, where Etruscans had once congregated, and the Vicus Africus. Yet even as many Romans saw in their city’s diversity the homage paid by the world to its greatness, and a potent source of renewal, so others were less convinced. All very well to host immigrants, so long as they ended up Roman; but what if they preserved their barbarous ways, infecting decent citizens with their superstitions? ‘In the capital, appalling customs and disgraceful practices from across the world are forever cross-pollinating and becoming fashionable.’45 A sobering reflection, to be sure: that to serve as the capital of the world might render Rome less Roman.
Such an anxiety was nothing new. Back in the first century of the Republic, a mania for outlandish cults had seen the Senate legislate to ensure that only the traditional gods be worshipped, and only with traditional rites. Since then, there had been numerous attempts to purge the city of alien ways. In 186 BC, the Senate had even launched a campaign of suppression against the worship of Liber, on the grounds that a Greek soothsayer had perverted its rituals and fostered unspeakable orgies. Egyptians and astrologers from Mesopotamia also tended to be regarded by most right-thinking citizens with profound suspicion. More alarming yet were the Syrians, with their devotion to a goddess, lion-flanked and jewel-adorned, whose cult, sinister as only a Syrian cult could be, had long been a thing of revulsion to every decent Roman. There was no value so fundamental, no propriety so settled, that her worshippers might not trample on them, and howl in exultant frenzy as they did so. Appearing to slaves in visions, the Syrian Goddess had been known to encourage them to rebel; driving mad her most frenzied devotees, she would inspire them to make a sacrifice of their testicles. Galli, these self-castrated priests were called: wretches who, abandoning the privileges and responsibilities of manhood, had willingly chosen to become women. With their painted faces and their feminine robes, their depilated bodies and their braided hair dyed blonde, they could not possibly have been more offensive to Roman sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, then, the authorities had done all they could to prevent their fellow citizens from joining their ranks, banning the practice of self-castration outright at first, and then, from 101 BC, permitting it only under the tightest of regulations. Yet this had done nothing to diminish the popularity of the cult: disturbingly, it had turned out, some Romans quite fancied living as women. By the time that Claudius, surrendering to the inevitable, finally lifted all legal restrictions on citizens becoming Galli, processions in honour of the Syrian Goddess, complete with flutes, tambourines and spectacular displays of self-laceration, had become a common sight in Rome. Naturally, those who held fast to traditional values continued to find it all revolting. ‘If a god desires worship of this kind,’ Seneca declared flatly, ‘then she does not deserve to be worshipped in the first place.’46 For those on the cutting edge of fashion, however, a protestation of devotion to the Syrian Goddess had become an easy and entertaining way to shock. Rumour had it, for instance, that she was the only deity for whose cult Nero had any respect.