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The Roman conquest of Britain by Claudius

The Roman conquest of Britain by Claudius' legions in A.D. 43 illustrates several aspects of the process of expansion of the Roman empire. The Roman attitude toward the barbarian world, the ever-increasing political importance of expansion, the dependence of the emperors on the armies, and manner in which conquest was a self-generating process can all be seen in a brief examination of the circumstances surrounding the conquest of Britain.

The poets and historians of the Augustan age reinforced the growing belief that there was no part of the known world that Rome was not intended to rule. As the historian Livy noted, Jupiter himself had said, "it is the gods' will that my Rome shall be capital of the world [and] no human forces can resist Roman arms" (quoted by Wells 76). Livy knew, of course, that Augustus' adoptive father Julius Caesar had tried twice (55-54 B.C.) to conquer Britain. He had some success but had given up in the face of bad weather, bad luck, and pressing business on the mainland. Britain was clearly a special case and its conquest would take a special kind of leader. Augustus himself had understood this when, after defeating Pompey and further securing the northeastern frontier of Italy, he made sure that the grateful Romans knew that he planned to embark on "far reaching plans of conquest, inherited from Caesar" (Wells 23). He even wanted the Romans to believe that he was about to begin a campaign to conquer mysterious Britain. Of course Augustus was only interested in the coming war of succession with Antony and probably had little intention of going so far away from Rome. What he wished to evoke, however, was a sense of his own fearlessness in relation to this land considered to be "at the end of the earth, or beyond it" (Wells 23).

Caesar's conquest of Gaul had certainly set the standard for the empire in the west. But Augustus' own career made the expansion of the empire inevitable in many ways....

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The Roman conquest of Britain by Claudius. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:04, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692889.html