THE ROAD TO HADRIAN’S WALL

Rob Attar: The journey to the construction of Hadrian’s Wall began almost 200 years earlier with the first campaigns of Julius Caesar. What inspired him to launch his expeditions to Britain in 55 and 54 BC?

Richard Hingley: Caesar was already a senior Roman general and politician at this point and he’d spent three years conquering Gaul. To Caesar, Britain was even more remarkable than Gaul because it was almost entirely unknown to the Romans. The islands of Britain had been tied into trade with the continent and we know traders from the Mediterranean in previous decades and centuries had travelled up the Atlantic coast and to Britain. But Britain itself, Caesar wrote, was a mystery to the Romans. The only thing they did know was that the Britons were highly “barbaric”, in their own classical terms, lacking urban civilisation.

Caesar also wrote that he was really keen to explore Britain to add to his reputation. One reason for that was that Britain lies in the sea. The Romans inherited a concept about the ocean from the classical Greeks, that the world was an island surrounded by an endless ocean, and the remarkable thing about Britain was that it was set within the waters of this ocean. So Caesar wanted to go to Britain to increase his own status and his image in Rome as somebody who was exploring new lands.

The other thing we’re told, by Caesar, is that the Britons had been helping the Gauls to fight him in Gaul itself. He therefore had that twin motivation: exploring, doing something really remarkable; and also punishing people who had been fighting him.

Conquering Gaul was to take eight years so to dream of conquering Britain as well would have been too much for Caesar. I suspect he never had any