On Sunday, I'm putting on a 'demo' of AVGVSTVS to AVRELIAN at Partizan. It's going to be 'Early Imperial' Romans against Britons, and the basic premise behind the game is that it's set in the early stages of Agricola's campaigns in the North - a precursor to conquering Caledonia. I suppose I'll call the game 'Bashing the Brigantes'. Any of you are more than welcome to come and say hello - or even to stay a while, push some lead around and roll a few dice.
And I fell to wondering, as I am apt to do when thinking about a wargame, about the history behind the game. I wonder why Rome didn't finish the job of conquering Caledonia. In a way I'm glad they didn't, or I wouldn't have been able to have had a lifetime of pleasure from visiting one of the world's greatest monuments to 'failure': Hadrian's Wall.
I'm 'thinking aloud' here. And I haven't started to research this properly, to see whether or not the ideas hold water. There are a number of 'theories' as to why Rome didn't conquer the whole of this island. One is that it was simply too hard - it's mountainous, boggy, and the peoples (Caledones and others) were simply too nasty to accept Roman rule. And yet Agricola virtually managed it - or so his son-in-law biographer/apologist, Tacitus, would have us believe. The excuse given for not finishing the job seems to me a little 'thin' - that Domitian was uneasy about Agricola's success (possibly true, Domitian does seem to have been paranoid), but it's hardly conclusive - if that was the sole reason, why not simply order the next governor to finish the job - if the tribes had been so comprehensively defeated, it wouldn't have been too much of a stretch to have finished the job in the next campaigning season would it?
Perhaps the real reason was a lack of troops? I doubt that would have stopped the Romans - expanding the army rarely seems to have been a problem. It does look as though they intended to stay - the legionary fortress at Inchtuthil being perhaps the strongest evidence for that. And yet the 'proto-province' was abandoned, and the fortress razed to the ground, even before it was finished.
I wonder whether, having got that far, and spent some time scouting around, the Romans realised that, in economic terms, holding Scotland was never going to 'pay' - the cost of holding it was going to outweigh the income from it. The southern part of the island (the province of Britannia) was quite rich in grain, iron, lead and other 'exports', and yet is seen by many historians as having been barely worth the trouble of holding, apart from the 'kudos' of 'owning' land beyond the edge of the world. So maybe Caledonia simply wasn't a viable province and that's all there was too it?