A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors by Anthony Blond

means of boats was both too risky and beneath the dignity of a Roman Commander,’ he wrote – a very Caesarean sentiment and turn of phrase – so he built a bridge just outside
modern Coblenz.
    A model of this bridge, constructed by the Italian School of Military Engineers, is on display in the Museum of Roman Civilization in Eur, a bleak high-tech town without pedestrians, outside
Rome. Caesar was proud of his bridge which he describes in such detail that it was easy for the descendants of his engineers to reproduce it. (‘. . . the wholestructure
was so rigid that, in accordance with the laws of physics, the greater the force of the current the more tightly were the piles held in position.’) He crossed the bridge, built in ten days,
burned the villages, farms and crops of the offending Sugambri, recrossed the bridge, destroying it behind him, and considered, having spent a total of eighteen days behind the Rhine, ‘that
he had done all that honour or interest required’. When one reflects on the palaver about crossing the Rhine in the Second World War this is quite a classy comment.
    The Roman soldier was trained to be flexible; he was first a navvy, breaking stones and building roads being the principal occupation of the ordinary recruit, but he might specialize in
operating engines of war, like the battering ram, whose business end was indeed a mass of iron in the shape of a ram’s head, or the gigantic catapult, which Caesar designed himself, or the
portable siege tower, or the harpoon which he used in a sea battle against the Veneti, a tribe on the Atlantic coast of Brittany who had dared to kill his ambassadors. Their tall ships with sails
and rigging out-manoeuvred the Romans in their oar-powered flat-bottomed boats but in the middle of the battle the wind dropped – Caesar’s luck – and as Caesar commented
‘after that it was a soldiers’ battle’ which the Romans won. The punishment he meted out was severe; their leaders were executed and the entire population sold into slavery.
    Caesar used the same ships to invade Britain in 55 BC . The Brits heard him coming and offered hostages, usually a ploy to gain time. He sent Commius, whom he had made
King of the Atrebates, and who, like the Belgae, occupied territory on both sides of the channel (the ‘ocean’ as the Romans called it), roughly Normandy, and Wilts and Berks, to
announce his imminence. He landed at Dover. Caesar wrote in
De Bello
Gallico:
‘The natives sent in their cavalry and chariots, which frightened the Romans
who were quite unaccustomed to this kind of fighting.’ (How odd to hear Caesar crying ‘foul’.) But the Romans’ oar-powered boats, which
they
had not seen, frightened
the Britons even more. Then Commius returned with a message that the opposition to Caesar’s disembarkation had all been a terrible mistake, the fault of the common people, who had now all
been sent home to tend to their fields. Peace was proposed and hostages offered. Like Genghis Khan, Caesar often conquered through his advancing reputation, so much more economic than troops.
Caesar returned to Gaul having experienced difficulties with the unfamiliar high tides, so different from the Mediterranean, dealt with the Morini (Pas-de-Calais), who had thought to profit from
his reported problems, and sent a suitable despatch to the Senate, who decreed a holiday of twenty days. In fact the expedition had been a failure; only two of the tribes ever sent hostages.
    Next year’s invasion was better arranged. In 54 BC , with five legions and 2,000 cavalry, he landed at Deal and found a worthy opponent in Cassivellaunus
(Cadwallader?), King of Herts, Essex and Middlesex, who had been elected to command – the British were then democratically organized. Again Caesar complains that the British deployed their
chariots in an ‘unfamiliar, daring and unnerving’ manner. In retaliation the Roman soldiers plodded on, burning the countryside, while their