nm0050: what i could do first of all while this is being set up is just er show 
you something that i promised i would show you last time before we get going 
and that is the way that er Agricola bottled up the er the entrances to the 
glens which i would do if i had something that would s-, there we are er this 
is the entrance to the small glen and there is an Agricolan fort as you can see 
bottling it up so that's what he did really all the way along the highland er 
massif 
nm0050: well as you can see we've got er you've heard of Jaws two this is yawn 
two today this is for the er the Internet version so we'll put the whole world 
to sleep not just the er the video public er we saw last time er the history of 
Agricola within Britain through what i hope was the medium of the 
archaeological record in so far as he set out er the camps er in his progress 
northwards and then into the lowlands of Scotland and up the east coast of 
Scotland and we saw that in some cases it's rather difficult to distinguish 
between an Agricolan er foundation and say somewhere that had been established 
by Cerialis or Frontinus so there is a problem in viewing Agricola's 
campaigning er career through the medium of archaeology which is many ways is a 
pity because Agricola is probably the most significant er Roman governor er who 
ever came to Britain certainly we know more about him than we do about any 
other governor of Roman Britain and yet what we do know remains 
extraordinarily patchy and this itself has a lot to say about the state of our 
information concerning other significant governors who came and went before 
Agricola of course there was Petilius Cerialis and we hear from Tacitus in the 
Agricola that it was Cerialis who largely defeated the Brigantes yet apart from 
that passing reference almost within Tacitus we know very little about ker-, 
the details of Cerialis' campaigns within the province so when we come to 
somebody like Agricola about whom there is a certain degree of information in 
terms of archeological remains and in terms especially of literary remains we 
have to be careful first of all we have to be careful that we don't focus in 
upon Agricola and use the very fact that we know more about him to take his 
achievements beyond their natural limits and secondly we have to be careful 
about how we approach those sources in the first place the very fact that there 
are sources 
tends to lull us in to a false sense of security and to accept them at face 
value simply because they're there and to view Agricola as the great figure 
that certainly his son-in-law Tacitus paints him as what i want to do is 
actually to look at the literary record today and to see whether in fact er 
there are dangers within it that we need to to bear in mind when we look at 
Agricola as a historical figure the first thing to bear in mind is that this 
particular work was written in the period shortly after ninety-eight in the 
opening at the opening of the reign of the emperor Trajan this means that the 
information that Tacitus is is giving us here is a decade old by the time he 
gets writing it's over a decade old in in in many ways it's also to be borne in 
mind that for a number of years Tacitus and Agricola did not meet prior to 
Agricola's death and therefore we immediately need to be aware of the fact that 
the information that Tacitus is putting over here is 
not fresh information it's not hot off the press it's not straight from the 
lips of Agricola himself Agricola left Britain round about eighty-three this is 
being written round about ninety-eight so there's immediate problem about the 
accuracy of the work in terms of access to first-hand information undoubtedly 
there would have been records within Rome of Agricola's period within Britain 
but to some extent it's clear that Tacitus may well be relying upon his own 
memory and that is notoriously a weak point with everybody the next thing to 
bear in mind of course this is this er biography of Agricola has its own agenda 
it is not being written by somebody who is totally er unaffected by the topic 
that he's dealing with it's his own father-in-law at the same time think about 
the circumstances under which it was being written it's written after a period 
of tyranny within Rome not to put er too fine a point on it the end the the 
final years of the emperor Domitian 
the emperor who under whom Agricola's greatest victory was won the victory at 
Mons Graupius was to turn into a monster in some ways a justified monster since 
he was the subject of er a number of attempted assassinations but the work is 
being written against the background of a monster under whom er er Agricola 
lived his final years and whose memory was undergoing a process of damnation in 
the minds of the ruling elites that is the the senate in Rome er in the period 
after his his assassination the the successful attempt er in ninety-six 
Domitian had been followed by Nerva er who's mentioned in this work and then in 
ninety-eight by Trajan who again is mention it setting the composition of the 
work into a context and it ha-, has been suggested by a number of people that 
part of the whole purpose of the Agricola is actually to justify the survival 
of those members of the senate who did survive the reign of Domitian whereas 
better men more er er patriotic and more 
heroic figures died or were forced into suicide so it's not just a biography 
it's not a dispassionate view of Agricola's life and his career it has extra 
dimensions to it and you'll find these well set out in Ogilvie and Richmond's 
er edition of the work in the introduction there we needn't worry about the 
initial chapters of the work they simply set the scene Agricola himself doesn't 
begin to appear until chapter four when we're told about his early years his 
birth at Fréjus or Forum Julii in southern Gaul of how his education was 
steered away from that un-Roman topic of study philosophy and philosophy in the 
reign of the emperors from Nero on er was something to be avoided since 
philosophers regularly became the object of suspicion in other words they 
thought and thinking was a dangerous occupation in chapter five he comes t-, er 
Tacitus comes to er the early years of Agricola's er military political career 
and this is all a build up to the 
time when Agricola becomes governor of Britain itself it's from Tacitus that we 
learn about Agricola's two earlier periods of office within Britain the first 
of them the military apprenticeship would have been as senior tribune in one of 
the legions under the governor Suetonius Paulinus and he immediately rings a 
bell with us because he was the man who had to sort out the Boudiccan rebellion 
so this indicates that s-, Agricola's first posting in a military position puts 
him right at the centre of the greatest crisis that the province of Britain had 
actually suffered he came through it well at least alive and with some military 
distinction Tacitus is eager to show that his father-in-law even then ran 
counter to what w-, might be regarded as the norm though how far it was the 
norm er leaves certain questions in our minds he says that er Agricola was no 
loose young subbleton to turn his military career into a life of gaiety he 
wouldn't make his self-captaincy 
as-, and his inexperience an excuse for idly enjoying himself and continually 
going on leave giving us the impression that the norm for senior tribunes was 
basically to use their period of supposed military service as a long and 
extended holiday where they could go off from their station and engage in 
extended hunting trips no according to Tacitus that was not the case and this 
kind of special pleading for Agricola continues right through the work one wo-, 
begins to wonder in fact how true it actually is well it may have been true 
then Agricola returns to Rome gets married the next stage is his election to 
the post of quaestor which gives him financial responsibility for taxes within 
one of the provinces and the province he's given is Asia another good thing 
about this particular work is it gives us a very good idea of the progression 
for a military political young man destined for high office and a senatorial 
career er as he moves through it he goes to be 
quaestor in Asia and Asia a notorious province it had been notorious even in 
republican times notorious for the potential for making money on the side for 
corruption anybody with any responsibility for financial dealings in Asia which 
is a very rich province was immediately presented with the prospect of making a 
killing by putting money into his own pocket that shouldn't be there according 
to Tacitus Agricola avoided this there was the temptation of the governor 
colluding with lower officials to their mutual benefit he avoided this he then 
leaves the quaestorship and becomes a tribune of the people this in the time of 
Nero a time which according to Tacitus was one for keeping your head below the 
parapet and your mouth shut apparently Agricola did just that he understood the 
age of Nero in which inactivity was tantamount to wisdom is this special 
pleading for somebody who shifted with the wind who knew where his best 
interests lay is it 
Agricola doing essentially what the whole senate that survived Domitian could 
be accused of doing of keeping quiet and staying alive from the tribuneshit of 
the er ship of the people he goes into the praetorship praetorship having a 
legalistic aspect to it but in Agricola's case that legal side never 
materialized he was responsible though for the ordering of public games a 
notoriously easy way of losing money in Rome one tended to buy favour by 
putting on spectacular games according to Tacitus Agricola compromised between 
economy and excess this is a man we are presented with who knew the right 
proportions and exercised the right proportions right through his career now 
that can be seen and Tacitus obviously wants it to be seen as a virtue but is 
it a virtue or is it the sign of weakness then following the death of 
Agricola's mother in the civil wars that followed the er suicide of Nero he's 
returned to Britain this time as a legionary commander put in charge of the 
twentieth legion which Tacitus says had been wavering in its allegiance to the 
new emperor Vespasian according to to to Tacitus as soon as Vespasian made a 
move for imperial power Agricola took his side well is it true or is it not 
certainly i think we can take it that there must have been some kind of 
connection between Agricola and Vespasian if you remember Vespasian had himself 
seen service in Britain though at an earlier period from that of Agricola in 
any case the wavering nature of loyalty on the part of the twentieth legion was 
sorted out by Agricola but in a way again that shows or that Tacitus wants us 
to believe shows a light hand a sensible hand in dealing with things that 
Agricola was not sent in or when he went in did not er prove to be a strict 
disciplinarian items that could simply be er papered over minor faults he 
tended not to look at 
nm0050: in some respects it's the same kind of treatment that Tacitus himself 
had criticized when it was 
engaged in by Petronius Turpilianus and Trebellius Maximus immediately 
following the Boudiccan rebellion allowing things to settle down allowing 
people to see the sense of their the situation here is Agricola doing the same 
kind of thing but here it's taken as wisdom and in their case it's taken as 
sloth then the governorships of Bolanus and Cerialis as i said before Cerialis 
is known to have been a significant figure within Romano-British history and 
yet the actual er level of knowledge that we have of this man is minuscule and 
is largely due to Tacitus who gives us a couple of sentences and that's it it's 
Tacitus who tells us about the defeats er inflicted upon the Brigantes and this 
again is in part to bolster Agricola rather than to bolster Cerialis in fact 
all of the this preliminary material downplays previous achievements in order 
to emphasize Agricola's own achievements in the eighties 
nm0050: returning to Rome from his second round of duty in Britain 
Agricola is made a full governor of the province of Aquitania now this was e-, 
essentially a civilian er province one that did not have a military aspect to 
it but it was an important stage because it gave Agricola experience of the 
kind of administration that he would have to put into effect when he eventually 
did return to Britain including the exercising of legal power as the final er 
court of appeal for non-citizens and the last but one in the case of citizens 
in this section we come across another aspect of the governor's responsibility 
something that has already been seen within a Romano-British context and that 
is the potential for trouble between a governor and the procurator remember in 
the time of Suetonius Paulinus er Tacitus er refers to the enmity between 
Paulinus and the new procurator Classicianus exactly how er troublesome 
relations could be between these two officials we shall never really know we 
only get snippets of information here 
and there and very often those snippets of information have an ulterior motive 
if you look at the way that the source deals with Suetonius Paulinus and s-, 
Classicianus it's perfectly clear that Tacitus takes the side of the military 
figure because Suetonius Paulinus is atta-, is attached in terms of career to 
Agricola but is that the exception certainly for the smooth running of any 
province the cooperation the active cooperation of these two er figures must 
have been the norm rather than the exception and in fact there's a er a note in 
the most recent edition er volume of the journal er Britannia which should just 
have gone into the library which you might care to read on the matter following 
this came the consulship and after the consulship appointment to Britain as its 
governor and this brings us into the immediate context of the whole course but 
before Tacitus gets to er Agricola's er career within Britain as governor he's 
sucked in to what one 
might call the genre expectations of writing about Britain those kind of topics 
that virtually every writer on Britain has to engage in its geography its 
climate its peoples and so on and so from chapter ten on we're given details 
about the shape of Britain its po-, its geographoc-, geographical position vis-
à-vis the rest of the er empire we get this strange view of Britain as being 
somewhere to the east of Spain basically because Spain's supposed to sweep up 
er to lie west of Britain with Ireland in between the shape of Britain a double 
headed axe an elongated diamond a rhombus all these shapes have been 
interpreted from what Tacitus tells us then from the north of Britain which i 
suppose if you were to draw straight lines would be a rhombus you get the tract 
of of Scotland itself running northwards well running northwards to a certain 
extent because Tacitus like many other writers in antiquity had a strange view 
of k-, of Scotland as well Scotland 
seems to have gone through a ninety degree turn so that the north of Scotland 
actually faced towards Germany whereas the west coast was essentially er 
pointing northwards he refers to islands in the far north the Orkneys which we 
know Agricola explored not in person but he s-, actually sent a fleet round the 
north of Scotland simply to establish that Britain was an island and not a 
continent that went on forever Thule too was sighted in Tacitus' day Thule is 
undoubtedly the Shetland islands of course back in the days of Pythias of 
Massilia in the fourth century B-C Thule could have been anything from Norway 
to Iceland to North America the mention too of the seas in this area is 
something that again fascinates the Roman mind it fascinated Caesar because 
he'd never a-, experienced anything like the tides in the the channel the seas 
to the north of Britain were something totally unknown it was open sea open 
ocean in many ways in the time of er of Pythias of 
Massilia we hear about the sea being like a jelly which some people have ins-, 
er have interpreted as the kind of er ice flow mush that you can get in the 
higher latitudes Tacitus repeats this he must there must have been some 
evidence from that circumnavigation of the north of Scotland er that is the 
basis of what Tacitus says here he says that the sea is sluggish and heavy to 
the oar and even in a high wind doesn't rise as other seas do what he's af-, 
seeming to mean here is that with the vast openness of the northern sea you 
don't get the er the close packed er peaks of waves that you do when you're 
close to land that the waves are very much wider apart i think that's what he's 
dealing with there that in fact you do get er open sea with a peculiar type of 
wave pattern 
nm0050: he goes onto the first inhabitants of Britain deriving them either from 
Spain and con-, er when one considers the geographic pos-, er relative 
geographic position of Britain and Spain one can see why he's doing 
this or from Gaul itself which is perfectly reasonable he goes onto the 
fighting strength of the tribes in Britain again the fascination with the 
chariot though unlike Caesar Tacitus says it's the nobleman who does the 
driving and the retainer who does the fighting Caesar gives us the im-, 
impression that it's quite the other way around well it doesn't really matter i 
suppose but what we do get is the realization as we've already seen that the 
main advantage that the Romans have in dealing with the the British tribes is 
the disunity of those tr-, er of those tribes that they rarely act in concert 
and so by the process of divide and conquer they are picked off one at a time 
he then goes on to the perennial interesting topics of British weather the 
climate is wretched is i think as relevant today as it was then but there is no 
extreme cold which well sometimes is true [sniff] then a strange view of the 
extreme light summers in the north of Britain i'll read out the 
translation their day is longer than in our part of the world the nights are 
light and in the extreme north so short that evening and morning twilight are 
scarcely distinguishable if no clouds block the view the sun's glow it is said 
can be seen all night long it doesn't ri-, er set and rise but simply passes 
along the horizon the reason must be that the flat extremities of the earth 
cast low shadows and don't raise the darkness to any height night therefore 
fails to reach the sky and its stars now that actually can be demonstrated in a 
strange kind of way if one accepts that the world is flat as Tacitus did flat 
earth Rome is there Britain is there and in the summertime the sun is there 
what causes night according to Tacitus is shadow the shadow stretching up to 
the sky in Britain that shadow doesn't actually reach as high as the stars and 
therefore the stars are not seen at night because the sky is light in Rome the 
stars fall within the shadow and therefore you have night it's a 
rationalization based on a fallacy but an interesting one he then goes on to 
the kinds of crops that Britain produces will produce everything that's good 
except olives and vines and the other produce of warmer lands the produce 
though is slow to ripen though it shoots up quickly because of the wetness of 
the ground Britain yields gold silver and other metals to make it worth 
conquering the economic factor to the conquest of Claudius he goes on to 
mention the production of pearls within Britain these are freshwater pearls of 
course er or perhaps some mussel pear-, pearls on the shores they are bluish 
grey in colour we hear of pearls also in the context of Julius Caesar some of 
our sources say that one of the reasons that Caesar came to Britain was for the 
sake of pearls and that he actually dedicated a breastplate 
covered in British pearls er to the gods of Rome then he turns to previous 
governors for a very short er survey of their achi-, of their accomplishments 
Caesar is put into context remember the contemporary er reaction to Caesar's ek-
, er expedition in fifty-five twenty days public thanksgiving an unprecedented 
length of time and five days longer than the thanksgiving he got for the more 
tangible conquest of the whole of Gaul yet to Tacitus it boils down to he may 
fairly be said to merely to have drawn attention to the island it wasn't his to 
bequeath which i think is very much er more realistic but you have to take it 
of course in the context of post- Claudian conquest then the careers of Aulus 
Plautius the mention of Cogidubnus the most famous and the most loyal of the 
client kings who according to Tacitus survived down to our times well since 
Tacitus was born just after the mid-fifties it could be simply a reference to 
survival to that point i don't think it's a 
reference to the survival down to the nineties that would have made Cogidubnus 
extremely old when he died reference then to Suetonius Paulinus and the 
Boudiccan rebellion it has to be brought in in a certain er with a certain 
magnitude because it of course figures in the career of er Agricola himself and 
here we get the first instance of Tacitus the historian but the historian in a 
Roman rhetorical mould with the insertion into the narrative of the inevitable 
speech the speech from the Britons outlining their complaints against the 
Romans now such speeches are of course are total fictions there is no way that 
Tacitus could have known what was said or even if anything was said but part of 
the education of a person like Tacitus of h-, all high ranking Roman males was 
rhetoric the ability to put into the mouth of a mythical figure arguments that 
would be appropriate to the situation and that is what Tacitus is doing here 
he's giving his audience what they want rhetoric 
as well as history 
nm0050: he goes on to deal with er Petronius Turpilianus and Trebellius Maximus 
whom he belittles simply because they were consolidatary emperors er not 
emperors governors rather than great military figures then to Vettius Bolanus 
who again is played down though there are other bits of evidence literary 
evidence which suggest that Bolanus was not totally inactive within Britain and 
that he may have taken some preliminary er steps against the Brigantes because 
he of course was governor at the time when the er feud between Cartimandua 
Queen of the Brigantes and her divorced husband Venutius flared up once again 
then Petilius Cerialis but only a sentence or two for the whole defeat of the 
Brigantes themselves after a series of battles some of them by no means 
bloodless Petilius had overrun if not actually conquered the major part of 
their territory the very reference to a number of battles and not bloodless 
suggests that this was serious campaigning 
and yet the details of it we know nothing and at that point we're ready to see 
the career of Agricola himself within Britain on the revised dating we begin in 
the year s-, er seventy-seven the arrival of Agricola within Britain and his 
immediate actions against the Ordovices who had according to Tacitus almost 
wiped out a squadron of the cavalry stationed in their territory and you 
remember last time i asked the question why would a squadron of cavalry be 
stationed in Ordovican territory if not because Agricola's predecessor Julius 
Frontinus had begun campaigning against them Tacitus gives us the evidence that 
this was not a new move by Agricola that his first actions in coming to Britain 
though they may have been e-, unexpected in the context of seventy-seven were 
not unprepared for that he was continuing a process and it's perfectly clear 
why Agricola was chosen for the purposes of governing Britain his experience 
twice before within the 
province made him the ideal person for what Vespasian was contemplating at this 
point and that is a radical expansion of the provincial boundaries it had begun 
under Cerialis it had been er continued by Frontinus and now Agricola had been 
sent to continue it yet again the difference comes in the scale of the 
continuation that Agricola was able to achieve and the time that he was 
actually given to do it a double period six years rather than the normal three 
Agricola's achievement is graphically set out he cut to pieces almost the whole 
fighting force of the tribe this is akin to genocide he has removed the 
Ordovices as a fighting force altogether so we can take it that no-, that Wales 
is now effectively pacified meaning that the major push into the annexation of 
Brigantia is not likely to er meet with any setback er to the south 
nm0050: before that though we're given by Tacitus some evidence and some 
information about the non-military aspects of a governor's er control of a 
province you remember when i dealt when i dealt with administration i mentioned 
that there were several different aspects to what a governor actually did in 
the summer he would be out comp-, campaigning if that was required by central 
er authorities by Rome itself the winter months were given over to civil 
administration to the administration of law cases to ensuring that the 
romanization of a province went ahead that towns were established that the 
trappings of Romin Roman life were set up and this is actually well set out by 
Tacitus though whether in fact the picture that we get from Tacitus a-, of his 
father-in-law as an exception in doing this as somebody very energetic in his 
process of romanization is correct or whether it's just an exaggeration of what 
any governor was expected to do is something of a moot point first of all 
Tacitus continues the theme that he's already introduced of his father-in-law's 
sense of proportion overlooking minor 
offences but stamping down on major ones quite ruthlessly of preparing of 
preferring to accept repentance from somebody who regretted previous actions 
rather than having to discipline stamping out abuses this is something that 
Tacitus suggests was peculiar to Agricola yet it can't have been certainly 
abuses there must have been we know that we know it w-, the from way back in 
the time of of er Cicero in the first century B-C in his speeches against 
Verres who had er proven to be an extremely er corrupt governor the potential 
for corruption was there but each governor was no doubt supposed to deal with 
it what kinds of of er corruption might there be Tacitus actually gives us 
quite a good picture of two aspects two aspects concerned with the food supply 
which of course was an exceptionally important er part of any er civilian 
administration you remember when i dealt with taxation i men-, i mentioned that 
there was a direct tax upon the natives 
the Annona tax upon grain it was essentially a tax to feed the personnel of the 
administration and to feed the army to feed the garrison any such tax according 
to Tacitus ena-, wh-, enabled those er er enforcing it to extract profit for 
themselves how did they do it two ways according to Tacitus provincials were 
made to wait outside locked granaries in order to go through the farce of 
buying corn to deliver to the governor thus in fact being compelled to 
discharge their obligations by monied payments that's the first one what does 
it mean well the natives have to hand over a specific amount of grain to the 
Roman authorities they are paid a nominal amount for it but that nominal amount 
for er falls far short of the market value so it is effectively a tax in a bad 
year when they don't have enough grain to hand over without perhaps starving 
themselves to death during the winter they nevertheless have to hand over to 
the Romans X 
number of tons where does it come from this is not the time when one can simply 
go to Cannon Park and buy it from Tesco's the only supplier of large scale 
amounts of grain within Britain is the Roman army itself because the governor 
had to ensure that at each harvest each military station had enough grain to 
last it through to the next harvest with some in reserve just in case just in 
case for instance a particular fort had to take in additional troops so the 
army was a net stockpiler of grain and any tribe that fell short in its amount 
of grain to be delivered had only one source to buy it from and that was from 
the Romans so that's what's being referred to here the natives have to buy it 
from the Romans at market price in order to hand it back to the Romans by way 
of the Annona tax at nominal price net result a tax in actual monetary terms 
nm0050: another method of making a little bit on the side for any corrupt 
official delivery would be ordered to the 
to out of the way destinations at the other end of the country so that states 
or tribes which had permanent camps close to them were told to send supplies to 
remote and inaccessible spots the local official whose responsibility it was to 
accept the tribe's grain supply would insead instead insist that that grain be 
shipped to the other end of the country so a tribe from the deep south instead 
of being allowed to ship the grain cheaply to the nearest Roman stations would 
be se-, told to send it er up to Brigantia and to supply York instead what were 
the methods of bulk transportation at this period well either by water in other 
words using the navigable rivers or over land and eventually there is going to 
be an overland element to it from one river system to another overland 
transport by ox cart was A extremely slow since you could the the ox would 
progress at probably one mile an hour and secondly as a result extremely 
expensive so a tribe told to ex-, 
to to shift grain from A to B when that was a large distance would be fa-, 
would be faced by an extremely er heavy er amount of expenditure in achieving 
that however one can imagine the scenario if for a consideration er the er 
official might be prevailed upon to take the grain into a local er military 
stations then everybody would be happy the tribe would be happy well it would 
be happy in so far as it hadn't had to bleed itself dry er arranging for 
transportation costs er the army would be happy because they would have the 
grain and the official involved would be happy because he had had a backhander 
of no inconsiderable amount so that's the other form of corruption in the 
Annona tax that Tacitus mentions Agricola is presented as somebody who checks 
these forms of corruption having given us this civilian aspect he then goes on 
to deal with eighty-nine the push northwards the er annexation of Brigantia we 
saw last 
time the number of er camps within north Britain that can be attributed to 
Agricola we saw how they line themselves up with a double er double route of of 
er progress northwards an east route and a west route they that's basically 
referred to here a ring of garrisoned force was placed around them that's the 
Brigantes then before we get to seventy-nine yet another aspect of er the 
civilian activities that a governor might engage in during the er winter the 
romanization of the civilian population or at least the upper echelons of 
Romano-British society what Tacitus refers to as the demoralizing temptations 
of arcades baths and sumptuous banquets the unsuspecting Britons spoke of such 
novelties as civilization when in fact they were only a feature of their 
enslavement it's putting it in a rather negative way but this is the inevitable 
er process by which Rome absorbed the upper echelons of society into the Roman 
way of life and once these 
people had been romanized of course they were less likely as a result to want 
to throw off Roman rule and it's all part of course of the process by which 
authority for self-government for local government is shifted onto the natives 
thereby avoiding the expense to the central authority from there Tacitus goes 
on to the campaigns of seventy-nine the campaigns that take us to the end of 
the third year of Agricola's period in Britain the end of what would normally 
have been his period as governor it takes Agricola as far north as the River 
Tay he brings in southern Scotland and achieves a radical new expansion of 
Roman control 
nm0050: we're told that Agricola established a number of forts in the area not 
least along the line between the Forth and the Clyde yet as we saw last week 
the actual positioning of known Agricolan stations there is less numerous than 
Tacitus would have us believe the next year eighty is a consolidatory year the 
same with the year after and one asks 
the question why if Agricola is sent to Britain by Vespasian to engage in a 
major expansion of the province does he spend two years halted in southern 
Scotland engaged in consolidation certainly consolidation was a process that we 
might have expected but was it also to be seen in the context of Agricola not 
thinking that his period in office would last much longer and therefore not 
being willing to engage in major expansion fort-, er north of the Tay is it 
also a signal that there'd been a major shift in central Roman policy towards 
Britain after all in the year seventy-nine Vespasian had died and was succeeded 
by his elder son Titus that period of consolidation actually coincides with 
Titus' whole reign he died after all in eighty-one so is it this actually not 
Agricola's policy of consolidation but Titus' of not being willing to go 
further beyond the Tay but rather consolidating what had already been gained 
before venturing any further this perhaps is 
what what lies behind the opening statement of chapter twenty-three the fourth 
summer was spent in securing the district already overrun and if the valour of 
our army and the glory of r-, er of Rome had permitted such a thing a good 
place for halting the advance was found in Britain itself that's the Forth 
Clyde line where you get a narrowishness of land in between those two estuaries 
is that what the glory of Rome and the valour of the army is actually referring 
to a sh-, a policy shift actually back with the emperor the fifth campaign 
according to Tacitus is spent bringing in those areas of southern Scotland that 
had been bypassed the Galloway peninsula as we saw last time this is where it 
is that Agricola is said to have er had the pipe dream of invading Ireland one 
can understand why Agricola might want to bring in the Galloway peninsula after 
all it had not been touched by Rome er in the push northwards and if there was 
to be 
any further expansion north of the Tay then certainly er Agricola needed to 
make sure that there wasn't going to be any trouble behind him at that point i 
think we'll end for today but before before you all pack up and go away i just 
want as it were to set the scene a little bit from the point of view of the 
scale of our evidence for for Agricola altogether last time i dealt with the 
the various forms of camp this week and tomorrow i'm going to be dealing with 
Tacitus once you move beyond that once you move beyond as it were the the camps 
which tell a partial story because they're not they don't generally have an-, 
well they don't full stop have any er inscriptional evidence attached to them 
once one moves beyond the literary source of Tacitus there is virtually no 
evidence for Agricola at all in this country all that there re-, are er is in 
fact er are four inscriptions just clear the board er oh it won't clear oh dear 
never mind i think we need something wet for it no what we have are three lead 
pipes from Chester now they're not insignificant in their own in their own 
right because they they are part of the er process of romanization the 
establishment of towns and amenities within towns the very fact that they've 
got Agricola's name on them shows this is an official er an officially 
designated an officially sanctioned process so we've got three lead pipes from 
Chester and we have a fragmentary inscription from Saint Albans from the forum 
there dedicating the forum and if we put that on and er switch the light off 
and if you can see past the scribble on the board i've said this in the source 
book so you can see that the shaded parts here yes the shaded parts are 
actually the bits that exist the rest is restoration what have we got got a bit 
of the name of Vespasian a little bit of the name of Vespasian part of the 
fact that he was consul designate all we have three letters from Agricola's 
name G-R-I we have the name of the town well one letter and a part of another 
so we've got V-E and we have that bit there which is propraetorian legate and 
the fact that the Basilica was order-, er was er ornamented the only way we 
actually can establish that is the fact that many of these inscriptions are 
purely functional and go by rote there are so many formula in it that one can 
have a pretty good stab at restoring it but take it away and you can see that 
in terms of inscription Agricola is essentially a non-event within Romano-
British history so one really has to set the the sources within a tight 
parameter frame we are very limited even though we seem to have so much to deal 
with the er the career of Agricola and at that i'll leave you to er evaporate