Victims and/or beneficiaries

‘Roman Britain,’ I asked a friend of mine, a committed pacifist and the veteran of endless marches against the war in Iraq, ‘a Good or Bad Thing?’ ‘Oh, good,’ my friend answered, not even deigning to ponder the question. Startled by the knee-jerk speed of her response, I asked her to explain. ‘Well, the roads, of course. And the baths and the central-heating.’ She paused. ‘And the peace.’

I knew exactly where she was coming from. When I pressed her, it turned out that her hazy sense of Roman Britain derived in large part from a Ladybird book that I too had read when I was young. It was the pictures I chiefly remembered. There was Boadicea, of course, a thrilling dominatrix shaking her spear amid a burning ring of fire; but there was also a fresh-faced Roman governor, the very image of a head boy in a toga, conscientiously building civic amenities for the hairy but by now appreciative Britons. This was illustrative less of any historical reality, of course, than of how, as late as the Fifties, when the Ladybird book was written, notions of Roman Britain, and of the civilising mission that Rome had supposedly brought to her own north-west frontier, derived principally from Kipling.

Even today, as David Mattingly points out in his exemplary addition to the new Penguin History of Britain, ‘we have a curious and ambiguous relationship with our Roman heritage, which is difficult to reconcile with the hard facts of Roman conquest and domination’. To be sure, empathy with the colonised Britons is much more pronounced today than it was 60 years ago, when Ian Richmond published the volume which Mattingly’s has been written to replace. The most celebrated recent dramatisation of the Romans in Britain showed them shafting the natives, after all.