An authoritative new history of the Roman conquest of Britain
Why did Julius Caesar come to Britain? His own account suggests that he
invaded to quell a resistance of Gallic sympathizers in the region of
modern-day Kent -- but there must have been personal and divine
aspirations behind the expeditions in 55 and 54 BCE. To the ancients,
the Ocean was a body of water that circumscribed the known world,
separating places like Britain from terra cognita, and no one, not even
Alexander the Great, had crossed it. While Caesar came and saw, he did
not conquer. In the words of the historian Tacitus, "he revealed, rather
than bequeathed, Britain to Rome." For the next five hundred years,
Caesar's revelation was Rome's remotest imperial bequest.
Conquering the Ocean provides a new narrative of the Roman conquest of
Britain, from the two campaigns of Caesar up until the construction of
Hadrian's Wall across the Tyne-Solway isthmus during the 120s CE. Much
of the ancient literary record portrays this period as a long march of
Roman progress but recent archaeological discoveries reveal that there
existed a strong resistance in Britain, Boudica's short lived revolt
being the most celebrated of them, and that Roman success was by no
means inevitable. Richard Hingley here draws upon an impressive array of
new information from archaeological research and recent scholarship on
the classical sources to provide a balanced picture of the military
activities and strategies that led to the conquest and subjugation of
Britain. Conquering the Ocean is the fullest picture to date of a
chapter in Roman military history that continues to captivate the
public.
