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CONQUEST BY THE ROMANS.

Previously to the year 55 before Christ, the British Islands, in common with the whole of northern and western Europe, were occupied by barbarous tribes, who bore nearly the same relation to the civilized nations of Greece and Italy, which the North American Indians of the present day bear to the inhabitants of Great Britain and the United States. The Romans, who for ages had been extending their power over their rude neighbors, had concluded the conquest of Gaul, now called France, when, in the year just mentioned, their celebrated commander, Julius Cæsar, learning from the merchants of that country that there was another fertile land on the opposite side of the narrow sea now termed the British Channel, resolved to proceed thither, and subject it also to the Roman arms. Disembarking at the place since called Deal, he soon overawed the savage natives, though they were naturally warlike, and averse to a foreign yoke. He did not, however, gain a firm footing in Britain till the succeeding year, when he employed no fewer than 800 vessels to convey his troops from Gaul. Except along the coasts, where some tillage prevailed, the British tribes lived exactly as the Indians now do, upon animals caught in hunting, and fruits which grew spontaneously. They stained and tattooed their bodies, and had no religion but a bloody idolatry called Druidism. The people of Ireland were in much the same condition.

Little was done on this occasion to establish the Roman power in Britain; but about a century afterwards—namely, in the year of Christ 43, when the emperor Claudius was reigning at Rome—another large army invaded the island, and reduced a considerable part of it. A British prince called Caradoc, or Caractacus, who had made a noble defense against their arms, was finally taken and sent prisoner to Rome, where he was regarded with the same wonder as we should bestow upon a North American chief who had greatly obstructed the progress of settlements in this quarter of the world. In the year 61, an officer named Suetonius did much to reduce the Britons, by destroying the numerous Druidical temples in the Isle of Anglesea; religion having in this case, as in many others since, been a great support to the patriotic cause. He soon after overthrew the celebrated British princess Boadicéa, who had raised an almost general insurrection against the Roman power.

In the year 79, Agricola, a still greater general, extended the influence of Rome to the Firths of Forth and Clyde, which he formed into a frontier, by connecting them with a chain of forts. It was his policy, after he had subdued part of the country, to render it permanently attached to Rome, by introducing the pleasures and luxuries of the Capital. He was the first to sail round the island. In the year 84, having gone beyond the Forth, he was opposed by a great concourse of the rude inhabitants of the north, under a chief name Galgacus, whom he completely overthrew at Mons Grampius, or the Grampian Mountain; a spot about which there are many disputes, but which was probably at Ardoch in Perthshire, where there are still magnificent remains of a Roman camp. Tacitus, a writer related to