To hand down to posterity the deeds and characters of famous men was a practice of old standing, and one our own age has not abandoned, careless though it is of its own, whenever some great and noble virtue has conquered and risen above the vice common to states small and great alike, the failure to know what is right, and envy. But among earlier generations, just as to do things worth recording lay readier and more open to view, so every man most distinguished in talent was drawn to publish the record of virtue by the reward of a good conscience alone, without favour or self-interest. And many judged that to narrate their own life argued confidence in their character rather than arrogance, and in Rutilius and Scaurus this met neither with disbelief nor with reproach: so true is it that virtues are best appreciated in the very ages that most readily produce them. But now, when I am about to narrate the life of a man already dead, I have had need of an indulgence I should not have sought were I setting out to accuse him: so savage and hostile to virtue are the times.

We have read that when Arulenus Rusticus praised Paetus Thrasea, and Herennius Senecio praised Helvidius Priscus, it was made a capital crime; and the savagery fell not only on the authors themselves but on their books as well, the task being assigned to the triumvirs of burning in the Comitium and the Forum the monuments of those most illustrious minds. By that fire, no doubt, they thought to abolish the voice of the Roman people, the freedom of the Senate, and the conscience of the human race—expelling besides the teachers of wisdom and driving every honourable art into exile, that nothing decent might anywhere meet the eye. We gave, in truth, a mighty proof of our endurance; and as an older age saw the utmost reach of freedom, so we saw the utmost of servitude, when even the commerce of speaking and listening was taken from us by the inquisitions. We should have lost memory itself along with our voice, had it been as much in our power to forget as to be silent.

Now at last our spirit returns. And although at the very first dawn of this most blessed age Nerva Caesar blended things once incompatible, the principate and liberty, and Nerva Trajan daily increases the happiness of the times, and the public security has taken up not merely hope and prayer but the assurance and strength of the prayer fulfilled—yet by the nature of human frailty remedies work more slowly than ills; and as our bodies grow slowly but are extinguished swiftly, so you may crush talents and their pursuits more easily than you may recall them: for the sweetness of idleness itself creeps in, and the sloth hated at first is in the end loved. What of it, when through fifteen years—a great span of a mortal life—many fell by chance mishaps, and all the most active men by the emperor’s savagery, while we few have survived not only others but, so to speak, our own selves, with so many years struck out of the midst of our life, through which we have come in silence, the young to old age, the old almost to the very bounds of their allotted span? Yet I shall not regret having composed, even in an unpolished and rough voice, a record of our former servitude and a testimony to our present blessings. This book, meanwhile, dedicated to the honour of Agricola, my father-in-law, will be either praised or excused for its profession of filial devotion.

Gnaeus Julius Agricola, born of the old and illustrious colony of Forum Julii, had both his grandfathers as imperial procurators—a rank that is the nobility of the equestrian order. His father, Julius Graecinus, of the senatorial order, was known for his devotion to eloquence and philosophy, and by those very merits earned the anger of Gaius Caesar: for, ordered to prosecute Marcus Silanus and refusing, he was put to death. His mother was Julia Procilla, a woman of rare virtue. Reared in her bosom and indulgence, he passed his boyhood and youth in the cultivation of every honourable art. What kept him from the enticements of the wayward—besides his own sound and upright nature—was that from earliest childhood he had Massilia for the seat and schoolmistress of his studies, a place well compounded of Greek refinement and provincial thrift. I remember that he used to tell how in his earliest youth he drank in the study of philosophy more keenly than was allowed to a Roman and a senator, had not his mother’s prudence checked his kindled and flaming spirit. Plainly his lofty and aspiring nature reached after the beauty and splendour of a great and exalted glory more passionately than warily. Soon reason and age tempered him, and he kept—what is hardest of all—from philosophy a sense of measure.

He served his first apprenticeship of camp in Britain, and won the approval of Suetonius Paulinus, a careful and temperate commander, who picked him out as a man to be appraised at close quarters in his retinue. Nor did Agricola, in the loose manner of young men who turn soldiering into licence, nor yet slackly, refer his title of tribune and his inexperience to pleasures and leaves of absence: rather he set himself to learn the province and to be known to the army, to learn from the experienced and follow the best, to seek nothing for display and refuse nothing out of fear, and to act at once warily and intently. Britain was at no other time more troubled or more in the balance: veterans massacred, colonies burned, armies cut off; then men fought for survival, soon for victory. And though all this was done by another’s planning and leadership, and the sum of the matter and the glory of the recovered province fell to the commander, it added to the young man skill, experience, and a spur; and there entered his soul a longing for military glory—unwelcome in times when a sinister construction was put upon the eminent, and there was no less danger from a great name than from a bad one.

From here, having come down to the city to take up office, he joined to himself Domitia Decidiana, born of a distinguished family; and that marriage was an ornament and a strength to a man striving for greater things. They lived in remarkable harmony, through mutual affection and each putting the other first—save that in a good wife the praise is as much the greater as in a bad one the blame is the more. The lot of the quaestorship gave him the province of Asia and, as proconsul, Salvius Titianus, by neither of whom was he corrupted, although the province was rich and ripe for wrongdoers, and the proconsul, prone to every greed, would by any degree of complaisance have purchased a mutual concealment of guilt. There a daughter was born to him, at once a support and a solace; for a son born earlier he soon lost. Then the span between his quaestorship and the tribunate of the plebs, and the very year of the tribunate itself, he passed in quiet and inactivity, understanding the times under Nero, in which inertia stood for wisdom. The same tenor and the same silence marked his praetorship; for no jurisdiction had fallen to him. The games and the empty shows of office he conducted on a middle path between thrift and abundance, as far from luxury so the nearer to good repute. Then, chosen by Galba to review the gifts of the temples, by a most diligent search he brought it about that the state should feel the sacrilege of no one other than Nero.

The following year struck his heart and his house with a grievous wound. For Otho’s fleet, roaming at large, while it ravaged Intimilium (a part of Liguria) as an enemy would, killed Agricola’s mother on her own estate, and plundered the estate itself and a great part of his patrimony—which had been the cause of the killing. So Agricola, having set out for the rites of filial duty, was overtaken by the news that Vespasian had reached for empire, and at once crossed over to his party. The beginnings of the principate and the state of the city Mucianus governed, Domitian being very young and seizing from his father’s fortune only licence. He set Agricola—sent to conduct levies, and conducting himself with integrity and vigour—over the Twentieth Legion, which had been slow to come over to its oath, where his predecessor was reported to be acting seditiously: for the legion was too much and too alarming even for consular legates, and a legate of praetorian rank was not strong enough to restrain it—uncertain whether by his own temper or the soldiers’. Thus, chosen at once as successor and avenger, with most rare restraint he preferred to seem to have found good men rather than to have made them.

Britain was then in the charge of Vettius Bolanus, more mildly than befits a fierce province. Agricola moderated his own force and curbed his ardour, lest it grow too great, skilled in compliance and trained to blend the useful with the honourable. Soon afterward Britain received the consular Petilius Cerialis. His virtues now had room to show their examples, but at first Cerialis shared with him only toils and dangers, soon his glory as well: often he set him over a part of the army by way of trial, sometimes, after the event, over larger forces. Nor did Agricola ever exult in his exploits to his own renown; as a subordinate he referred his fortune to his author and commander. Thus by his merit in obeying and his modesty in proclaiming it he was beyond envy, yet not beyond glory.

On his return from the command of the legion the deified Vespasian enrolled him among the patricians, and then set him over the province of Aquitania, a charge of especially splendid dignity, with the hope of the consulship to which he had marked him out. Most people believe that military temperaments lack subtlety, because justice in camp, being untroubled and blunter and conducting most things by the strong hand, does not exercise the cunning of the forum: Agricola, by his natural good sense, even among men of the gown, conducted himself with ease and justice. Moreover his times of business and of relaxation were kept apart: when the assizes and the courts required it, he was grave, intent, stern, and more often merciful; when his duty had been satisfied, there was no further mask of power—he had put off gloom and arrogance and greed. Nor in him—which is most rare—did affability diminish his authority, nor sternness the love his men bore him. To recount integrity and abstinence in so great a man would be to wrong his virtues. Not even fame, to which even good men often yield, did he court by parading his virtue or by artifice: far from rivalry against his colleagues, far from contention against the procurators, he thought it inglorious to win such struggles and degrading to be worn down by them. He was kept less than three years in that command, and then recalled at once to the hope of the consulship, attended by the opinion that Britain was to be given him as his province—no words of his own to that end, but because he seemed equal to it. Rumour is not always wrong; sometimes it even chooses well. As consul he betrothed to me, then a young man, his daughter of excellent promise, and after his consulship gave her to me in marriage; and at once he was set over Britain, with the priesthood of the pontificate added.

The lie of Britain and its peoples, recorded by many writers, I shall relate not in any rivalry of pains or talent, but because then for the first time it was thoroughly subdued. Thus what earlier writers, the facts not yet ascertained, embellished with eloquence shall now be handed down with fidelity to the truth. Britain, the greatest of the islands that Roman knowledge embraces, stretches in extent and in climate toward Germany in the east, toward Spain in the west; to the south it is even within sight of the Gauls; its northern parts, with no lands opposite, are beaten by a vast and open sea. The shape of the whole of Britain, Livy among the older writers and Fabius Rusticus among the more recent—the most eloquent of authors—likened to an elongated diamond or a double axe. And such indeed is the figure on this side of Caledonia, whence the report was extended to the whole; but to those who cross over, an immense and shapeless tract of land runs out at what is now the farthest shore, tapering as it were into a wedge. This coast of the farthest sea a Roman fleet then for the first time sailed round, and affirmed Britain to be an island, and at the same time discovered and subdued islands unknown until that time, which they call the Orcades. Thule too was sighted, since their orders reached only so far, and winter was drawing near. But they report the sea to be sluggish and heavy to the rowers, and not even raised by the winds as elsewhere—because, I suppose, lands and mountains, the cause and material of storms, are rarer there, and the deep mass of an unbroken sea is more slowly set in motion. To inquire into the nature of the Ocean and its tides is no part of this work, and many have reported on it: one thing only I would add—that nowhere does the sea hold wider sway, that it carries many currents this way and that, and does not merely rise and ebb along the shore, but flows deep inland and winds about, and threads itself even among ridges and mountains, as though in its own domain.

For the rest, what mortals first inhabited Britain, whether native-born or brought in, has, as among barbarians, been little ascertained. The build of their bodies is various, and from this come inferences. For the ruddy hair of the inhabitants of Caledonia and their large limbs assert a Germanic origin; the swarthy faces of the Silures, their hair for the most part curled, and Spain lying opposite, make it credible that the ancient Iberians crossed over and seized those seats; those nearest the Gauls are also like them, whether because the force of their common origin persists, or because, as the lands run out in opposite directions, the lie of the sky has given their bodies the same character. On the whole, however, to one who weighs the matter it is credible that the Gauls occupied the neighbouring island. You may detect their sacred rites and the convictions of their superstitions; their speech is not much different, the same boldness in courting dangers and, when the dangers have come, the same dread in shirking them. Yet the Britons display more ferocity, as men whom a long peace has not yet softened. For we have learned that the Gauls too once flourished in war; then sloth entered with ease, their valour lost together with their liberty. The same has befallen those of the Britons long since conquered: the rest remain such as the Gauls once were.

Their strength is in infantry; certain nations fight also from the chariot. The driver is the more honoured; his dependents do the fighting. Once they obeyed kings; now through their chiefs they are drawn into factions and partisanships. And against the strongest peoples nothing serves us better than that they take no counsel in common. Rarely do two or three states meet to ward off a common danger: so, fighting singly, they are conquered all together. The sky is foul with frequent rains and mists; the harshness of cold is absent. The length of the days is beyond the measure of our world; the night is bright and, in the farthest part of Britain, short, so that you may distinguish the end and the beginning of daylight by only a slight interval. And if clouds do not interfere, they affirm that the sun’s brightness is seen through the night, and that it does not set and rise again, but passes across. Plainly the flat extremities of the earth, with their low shadow, do not throw darkness upward, and night falls below the sky and the stars. The soil, save for the olive and the vine and the other things accustomed to spring up in warmer lands, is tolerant of crops and fruitful in livestock: these ripen slowly but spring up quickly; and the cause of both is the same, the great moisture of the land and the sky. Britain yields gold and silver and other metals, the prize of victory. The Ocean too breeds pearls, but dusky and livid. Some think the gatherers lack skill; for in the Red Sea the shells are torn living and breathing from the rocks, whereas in Britain they are gathered as they are cast up: for my part I would more readily believe that the fault lies with nature in the pearls than that greed is wanting in us.

The Britons themselves submit briskly to the levy, the tribute, and the duties imposed by empire, if wrongs are absent: these they bear ill, by now subdued so far as to obey, not yet so far as to be slaves. And so the deified Julius, the first of all the Romans to enter Britain with an army, although by a successful battle he terrified the inhabitants and gained the shore, may be seen to have pointed the island out to posterity rather than to have handed it over. Then came the civil wars, and the arms of leading men turned against the commonwealth, and a long forgetting of Britain even in time of peace: this the deified Augustus called policy, Tiberius a precept. That Gaius Caesar planned an invasion of Britain is well enough established—had not his mind, quick to fickle repentance, and his huge but fruitless efforts against Germany, come to nothing. The deified Claudius was the author of the work renewed: legions and auxiliaries were carried over and Vespasian taken into a share of the enterprise—which was the beginning of the fortune soon to come: peoples subdued, kings captured, and Vespasian marked out by the fates.

Of the consulars, Aulus Plautius was set in charge first, and presently Ostorius Scapula, each outstanding in war; and the nearest part of Britain was gradually reduced to the form of a province, with a colony of veterans added besides. Certain states were given to King Cogidumnus—who has remained most faithful down to our own memory—by the old and long-established custom of the Roman people, that it might have even kings as instruments of servitude. Then Didius Gallus held what his predecessors had won, with very few forts pushed forward into the farther country, by which the credit of an enlarged charge might be sought. Veranius succeeded Didius, and died within the year. After him Suetonius Paulinus had two years of success, peoples reduced and garrisons strengthened; in reliance on which he attacked the island of Mona, as supplying strength to the rebels, and so laid his rear open to opportunity.

For in the legate’s absence, their fear removed, the Britons began to debate among themselves the evils of servitude, to compare their wrongs and inflame them by interpretation: nothing was gained by submission except that heavier burdens were laid on them, as on men who bore them lightly. Once, they said, they had each a single king; now two were set over them, of whom the legate raged against their lifeblood, the procurator against their goods. The discord of their masters was as ruinous to the subjects as their concord. The agents of the one—centurions—and of the other—slaves—mingled violence with insult. Nothing now was exempt from their greed, nothing from their lust. In battle it is the braver man who plunders: now it was for the most part by cowards and weaklings that their homes were seized, their children dragged off, levies imposed on them—as though the one thing they did not know how to die for was their own country. For how few of the soldiers had crossed over, if the Britons should count their own numbers? On just such a reckoning the Germanies had shaken off the yoke—and they had only a river, not the Ocean, for their defence. For the Britons the causes of war were homeland, wives, and parents; for the Romans, greed and luxury. The Romans would withdraw, as the deified Julius had withdrawn, if only the Britons would emulate the valour of their forefathers. Nor should they take fright at the outcome of one battle or another: the prosperous have more dash, but the wretched the greater steadfastness. By now even the gods of the Britons were taking pity, who kept the Roman general away and the army penned on another island; by now they themselves were deliberating—which had once been the hardest thing of all. And besides, in counsels of this kind it was more dangerous to be caught than to dare.

Roused by these and like words in turn, with Boudicca—a woman of royal stock—for their leader (for they make no distinction of sex in command), they all together took up war; and hunting down the soldiers scattered among the forts, having stormed the garrisons, they fell upon the colony itself as the seat of their servitude, and anger in victory left untried no kind of cruelty that barbarians know. And had not Paulinus, on learning of the rising in the province, swiftly come to the rescue, Britain would have been lost; the fortune of a single battle restored it to its old submission, though many still kept their arms, men whom the consciousness of their revolt and a particular dread of the legate kept stirred up—lest he, however admirable otherwise, should deal arrogantly with those who surrendered and, as the avenger of each wrong as though it were his own, too harshly. So Petronius Turpilianus was sent, as more open to entreaty and, being a stranger to the enemy’s offences, the milder toward their repentance; having settled what had gone before, and daring nothing further, he handed the province over to Trebellius Maximus. Trebellius, more slothful and with no experience of camps, held the province by a certain affability of administration. By now even the barbarians had learned to pardon seductive vices, and the intervention of the civil wars furnished a fair excuse for inactivity: but there was trouble from discord, when the soldiery, accustomed to campaigns, grew wanton in idleness. Trebellius, having escaped the army’s anger by flight and hiding, disgraced and abased, thereafter held command on sufferance; and, as though by a bargain—the army’s licence for the general’s safety—the mutiny stood without bloodshed. Nor did Vettius Bolanus, while the civil wars still continued, trouble Britain with discipline: the same inertia toward the enemy, a like insolence in the camps—save that Bolanus, blameless and hated for no misdeeds, had won affection in place of authority.

But when, along with the rest of the world, Vespasian recovered Britain too, there came great generals and excellent armies, and the enemy’s hope was diminished. And Petilius Cerialis at once struck terror, by attacking the state of the Brigantes, which is reputed the most populous of the whole province. There were many battles, and some not bloodless; and a great part of the Brigantes he embraced either in victory or in war. And Cerialis indeed would have overshadowed the diligence and the fame of any other successor: yet Julius Frontinus took up and sustained the burden, a great man so far as was permitted, and by arms subdued the strong and warlike nation of the Silures, struggling through—beyond the valour of the enemy—the difficulties of the ground as well.

Such was the state of Britain, such the vicissitudes of war, that Agricola found when he crossed over in mid-summer, at a time when both the soldiers, as though the campaign were given up, were turning to ease, and the enemy to opportunity. The state of the Ordovices, not long before his arrival, had crushed almost entire a cavalry squadron operating in their territory, and at that beginning the province was roused. Those to whom war was welcome approved the precedent and waited to see the temper of the new legate, when Agricola—although the summer was past, the units scattered through the province, rest taken for granted among the soldiery for that year, all things slow and adverse to one about to begin a war, and most men thinking it better to keep watch over the suspected districts—resolved to go to meet the danger; and gathering detachments of the legions and a modest band of auxiliaries, since the Ordovices did not dare to come down into the level, he himself led the line up the slope before the column, that the rest might have a like courage in a like danger. And when almost the whole nation had been cut down, not unaware that he must press hard on his reputation, and that as his first acts turned out, so the rest would take their terror, he set his mind on reducing to his power the island of Mona, from possession of which I have recorded above that Paulinus was recalled by the rebellion of all Britain. But, as in sudden designs, ships were wanting: the resourcefulness and resolution of the general carried his men across. Laying aside all their baggage, he sent in suddenly the choicest of the auxiliaries, to whom the fords were known and that ancestral practice of swimming by which they control at once themselves, their arms, and their horses, so that the enemy, stunned—men who were looking for a fleet, for ships, for the sea—believed nothing hard or unconquerable for those who came to war in such a fashion. So, peace being sought and the island surrendered, Agricola was held famous and great, since to him, on first entering his province—a time that others pass in display and the canvassing of compliments—toil and danger had been welcome. Nor did Agricola turn his success to vanity: he would not call it a campaign or a victory to have held down the conquered; he did not even follow up his deeds with laurelled dispatches—but by the very concealment of his fame he increased his fame, men reckoning how great his hope of the future must be, that he kept silent over achievements so great.

For the rest, understanding the temper of the province, and taught besides by others’ experience that little was gained by arms if wrongs followed, he resolved to cut away the causes of wars. Beginning with himself and his own people, he first kept his own household in check—which for most men is no less hard than to govern a province. Nothing of public business did he transact through freedmen and slaves; he enrolled neither centurion nor soldier from private liking or on recommendation or entreaty, but reckoned each best man the most trustworthy. He would know everything, but not follow up everything. To small faults he granted pardon, to great ones sternness; and he was content not always with punishment, but more often with repentance; he preferred to set in offices and charges men who would not offend, rather than to condemn them once they had offended. The exaction of grain and tribute he softened by an equalizing of the burdens, cutting away those contrivances, devised for profit, that were borne more heavily than the tribute itself. For as a mockery the people had been compelled to wait beside locked granaries, and to buy grain into the bargain, and to pay a price to discharge the levy. By-ways of transport and the remoteness of districts were prescribed, so that states should carry their grain, past the nearest winter-quarters, into remote and trackless places, until what lay ready to hand for all became a source of profit to a few.

By repressing these abuses in the very first year he threw an excellent repute around peace, which, through the negligence or the oppressiveness of his predecessors, had been feared no less than war. But when summer came, the army assembled, he was everywhere on the march, praising good order, checking stragglers; he chose the sites for camps himself, himself reconnoitred the estuaries and forests; and meanwhile he allowed the enemy no quiet, but harried them with sudden raids; and when he had frightened them enough, by sparing them he would again hold out the allurements of peace. By these means many states, which up to that day had dealt with us on equal terms, gave hostages and laid aside their anger, and were ringed about with garrisons and forts, and with such method and care that no new part of Britain had ever before come over equally unmolested.

The following winter was spent on the most salutary measures. For, that men scattered and rude, and on that account prone to war, might grow accustomed through pleasures to quiet and ease, he exhorted them privately and helped them publicly to build temples, forums, and houses, praising the ready and chiding the slack: thus a competition for honour took the place of compulsion. Moreover he had the sons of the chiefs educated in the liberal arts, and preferred the native talent of the Britons to the trained skill of the Gauls, so that those who lately spurned the Latin tongue now coveted its eloquence. Hence too came esteem for our dress, and the toga was often seen; and little by little there was a slipping away to the seductions of vice—colonnades and baths and the elegance of banquets. And this, among the ignorant, was called civilization, when it was a part of their servitude.

The third year of campaigns opened up new peoples, the nations being laid waste as far as the Tanaus (the name of an estuary). By which terror the enemy were so cowed that, although the army had been buffeted by savage storms, they did not dare to harass it; and there was time besides for placing forts. Experienced men noted that no other general had chosen the advantages of ground more wisely. No fort placed by Agricola was ever either stormed by force of the enemy or given up by capitulation and flight; for against the delays of a siege they were secured with a year’s supplies. So winter there was without fear, sorties frequent, and each garrison a defence to itself, the enemy baffled and therefore in despair, because, accustomed for the most part to make good the losses of summer by winter’s successes, they were now being beaten back in summer and winter alike. Nor did Agricola ever greedily appropriate the deeds done by others: whether centurion or prefect, each found in him an untainted witness of his exploit. By some he was said to be rather harsh in his reproofs; and as he was genial to the good, so he was disagreeable toward the bad. But from his anger nothing remained held back in secret, so that you had no need to fear his silence: he thought it more honourable to give offence than to hate.

The fourth summer was spent in securing what he had overrun; and, had the valour of the armies and the glory of the Roman name allowed it, a boundary had been found within Britain itself. For the Clota and the Bodotria, carried far inland by the tides of opposite seas, are divided by a narrow neck of land: which was then secured with garrisons, and all the nearer reach was held, the enemy thrust back as though into another island.

In the fifth year of campaigns, crossing over in the leading ship, he subdued in battles at once frequent and successful peoples unknown until that time; and he lined with troops that part of Britain which faces Ireland, in hope rather than from fear—for Ireland, lying midway between Britain and Spain, and convenient to the Gallic sea besides, would have bound the most powerful part of the empire together in great mutual advantage. Its extent, set beside Britain, is the smaller, yet it surpasses the islands of our sea. Its soil and climate, and the dispositions and ways of its people, do not differ much from Britain; its approaches and harbours are better known, through trade and merchants. Agricola had taken in one of the petty kings of the nation, driven out by a domestic faction, and under the show of friendship was keeping him against an opportunity. I often heard him say that Ireland could be conquered and held with a single legion and a moderate force of auxiliaries; and that this would profit even against Britain, if Roman arms were everywhere and liberty were, as it were, taken out of sight.

For the rest, in the summer in which he began the sixth year of his office, embracing the states situated beyond the Bodotria, since a rising of all the peoples further on, and roads made dangerous by a hostile army, were feared, he explored the harbours with his fleet; which, first taken by Agricola into a share of his strength, followed in splendid array, the war being driven on at once by land and by sea. And often in the same camp foot-soldier and horseman and marine, their rations and their gladness mingled, would each exalt his own exploits, his own hazards; and—now the depths of forests and mountains, now the adversities of storms and waves; on this side the land and the enemy, on that the conquered Ocean—were matched in soldierly boasting. The Britons too, as was heard from captives, were stunned at the sight of the fleet, as though, the secret of their own sea laid open, the last refuge of the conquered were being closed. The peoples inhabiting Caledonia, turning to arms and to the close fight with great preparation—greater, as is the way with things unknown, by report—having set out of their own accord to attack a fort, had added to the alarm by playing the challengers; and the cowardly, under the look of the prudent, were urging a retreat to this side of the Bodotria, and withdrawal rather than expulsion, when meanwhile he learns that the enemy were about to break in in several columns. And lest he be surrounded by their superior numbers and knowledge of the country, he too divided his army into three parts and advanced.

When this became known to the enemy, with a sudden change of plan they all together fell upon the Ninth Legion, as the weakest, by night, and bursting in amid sleep and panic cut down the sentries. And already the fight was within the camp itself, when Agricola, informed of the enemy’s route by his scouts and following on their tracks, orders the swiftest of his horse and foot to charge the rear of the combatants, and presently a shout to be raised by the whole force; and as daylight neared the standards gleamed. So the Britons were terrified by a double peril; and to the men of the Ninth their spirit returned, and, safe now, they strove for glory and no longer for survival. Indeed they even charged out of their own accord, and there was a savage battle in the very narrows of the gates, until the enemy were driven off, both armies vying—the one that it might be seen to have brought aid, the other that it might not be seen to have needed it. And had not marshes and woods covered the fleeing, that victory would have ended the war.

The army, made fierce by the knowledge and the report of this, clamoured that nothing was barred to their valour—that Caledonia must be penetrated and the boundary of Britain found at last by an unbroken course of battles. And those who lately had been cautious and prudent were now, after the event, forward and loud. This is the most unjust condition of wars: successes all men claim for themselves, reverses are charged to one alone. But the Britons, judging themselves beaten not by valour but by the general’s opportunity and craft, abated nothing of their arrogance, but went on arming their youth, removing their wives and children to safe places, and ratifying the conspiracy of their states by assemblies and sacrifices. And so the two parted, their tempers inflamed on either side.

In the same summer a cohort of the Usipi, levied in the Germanies and sent across into Britain, dared a great and memorable deed. Having killed the centurion and the soldiers who, mingled among the companies to impart discipline, were held for their model and guides, they boarded three light galleys, the helmsmen forced aboard by violence; and with one of them rowing—the other two suspected and on that account killed—before the rumour had yet got abroad they sailed past like an apparition. Presently, when they had put in to plunder water and supplies, falling to battle with numbers of the Britons defending their own, and often victors, sometimes beaten back, they came at last to such an extremity of want that they fed upon the weakest of their own, and then upon men drawn by lot. And so, having sailed round Britain, their ships lost through want of skill in steering, taken for pirates, they were cut off first by the Suebi, then by the Frisii. And there were some whom—sold through traders and brought, by the passing from buyer to buyer, as far as our own bank of the river—the disclosure of so great an adventure made famous.

At the beginning of summer Agricola, struck by a domestic wound, lost a son born the year before. This blow he bore neither ostentatiously, as most brave men do, nor yet, by laments and mourning, in a womanish way; and in his grief war was among his remedies. So, sending the fleet ahead—which, plundering in many places, might spread a great and uncertain terror—and with an army in light order, to which he had added the bravest of the Britons, proved by a long peace, he reached Mount Graupius, which the enemy had already occupied. For the Britons, in no way broken by the outcome of the earlier battle, and looking for either revenge or enslavement, and taught at last that a common danger must be repelled by concord, had by embassies and treaties called out the forces of all their states. And already more than thirty thousand armed men were in view, and still all the youth was streaming in, and men whose old age was fresh and green, famous in war and each wearing his own decorations, when, among the several leaders, one pre-eminent in valour and in birth, by name Calgacus, before the assembled multitude as it clamoured for battle, is reported to have spoken after this manner:

"Whenever I survey the causes of this war and our necessity, a great conviction rises in me that this day and your unanimity will be the beginning of freedom for the whole of Britain: for you have all come together, and you are strangers to servitude, and there are no lands beyond, and not even the sea is safe, with the Roman fleet hanging over us. And so battle and arms, which to the brave are honourable, are to the very cowards the safest course as well. Earlier battles, in which men contended against the Romans with varying fortune, had their hope and their reserve in our hands, because we, the noblest of all Britain and therefore set in its inmost sanctuary, looking upon no shores of slaves, kept even our eyes unviolated by the touch of tyranny. Us, the farthest dwellers of the earth and of freedom, our very remoteness and the obscurity of our name have defended until this day: now the boundary of Britain lies open, and everything unknown passes for magnificent. But now there is no nation beyond, nothing but waves and rocks, and—deadlier still—the Romans, whose arrogance you would vainly seek to escape by submission and self-effacement. Plunderers of the world, now that the earth has failed their all-ravaging hands, they ransack the sea: if the enemy is rich, they are greedy; if poor, hungry for glory—men whom neither East nor West has glutted; alone of all mankind they covet wealth and poverty with equal passion. To rob, to slaughter, to plunder, they give the lying name of empire; and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.

"Nature has willed that each man’s children and kindred be his dearest: these are carried off by the levy to be slaves elsewhere; our wives and our sisters, even if they have escaped the enemy’s lust, are defiled under the name of friends and guests. Our goods and fortunes are ground down into tribute, our land and its yearly yield into grain, our very bodies and hands are worn out clearing forests and embanking marshes, amid blows and insults. Slaves born to servitude are sold but once, and are fed besides at their masters’ cost: Britain buys her own servitude every day, and every day feeds it. And as in a household the newest of the slaves is a mockery even to his fellow-slaves, so in this old bondage of the world we, the newcomers and the worthless, are marked out for destruction; for we have neither fields nor mines nor harbours, in the working of which we might be kept alive. Furthermore, the courage and high spirit of subjects are unwelcome to their masters; and remoteness, our very seclusion, the safer it makes us, the more it draws suspicion. So, all hope of pardon laid aside, take heart at last, you to whom safety is dearest no less than you to whom glory is. The Brigantes, with a woman for their leader, could burn a colony and storm a camp, and, had not success turned into sloth, could have thrown off the yoke: let us, unbroken and untamed, and going to fight for freedom and not for a second chance to repent, show at the very first encounter what men Caledonia has held in reserve.

"Or do you believe the Romans have the same valour in war as the wantonness they show in peace? It is by our quarrels and discords that they have grown famous; they turn the vices of their enemies into the glory of their own army—an army gathered from the most diverse nations, which success holds together and reverses will dissolve. Unless, that is, you suppose that Gauls and Germans and—shame to say it—most of the Britons, though they lend their blood to a foreign tyranny, are held by loyalty and affection, when they have been its enemies longer than its slaves. Fear and terror are feeble bonds of affection; remove them, and those who have ceased to fear will begin to hate. Everything that spurs to victory is on our side: no wives fire the Romans on, no parents stand by to reproach their flight; most of them have either no homeland, or another one. Few in number, fearful through ignorance, gazing around at the very sky and sea and forests, all of it strange to them—shut in, after a fashion, and shackled, the gods have delivered them into our hands. Let not the empty show alarm you, the glitter of gold and silver, which neither shields nor wounds. In the enemy’s own line we shall find hands of our own: the Britons will recognize their own cause, the Gauls will recall their former freedom, and the rest of the Germans will desert them, just as lately the Usipi abandoned them. Nor is there anything more to dread beyond: empty forts, colonies of old men, sickly and discordant towns caught between those who obey ill and those who rule unjustly. Here a leader, here an army: there, tribute and mines and all the other penalties of slaves, which it rests with this field either to bear forever or to avenge at once. Therefore, as you go into the line, think both of your ancestors and of your descendants."

They received the speech eagerly, as is the way of barbarians, with roaring and singing and discordant shouts. And now there were columns in motion and the gleam of arms, as the boldest ran ahead; the line was forming, when Agricola, judging that the soldiery—though elated and scarcely to be held within the rampart—still needed kindling, spoke thus: "This is the seventh year, fellow-soldiers, since by the valour and the auspices of the Roman empire, by your loyalty and your labour, you conquered Britain. In so many campaigns, so many battles, whether courage was wanted against the enemy or endurance and toil almost against the very nature of things, neither have I had cause to regret my soldiers, nor you your general. And so we have passed beyond—I the bounds of former legates, you those of former armies—and we hold the end of Britain not by report or rumour but by our camps and our arms: Britain found and subdued. Often, on the march, when marshes or mountains or rivers wore you out, I would hear the cry of every bravest man: ’When shall the enemy be given us? When will he come to our hands?’ They come, driven out from their lairs; your prayers and your valour are in the open field; and all things favour the victors and are adverse to the vanquished. For as it is fine and glorious, while we advance, to have surmounted so long a march, to have come clear of the forests, to have crossed the estuaries, so to men in flight what today are our greatest advantages are most perilous; for we have neither the same knowledge of the country nor the same abundance of supplies, but our hands and our weapons—and in these, everything. As for me, I resolved long ago that neither for an army nor for a general is the back a safe place. And so an honourable death is better than a base life, and safety and honour are lodged in the same place; nor would it be inglorious to have fallen at the very end of the earth and of nature.

"If new peoples and an unknown battle-line stood before you, I would hearten you with the example of other armies: as it is, recount your own honours, question your own eyes. These are the men whom last year, when they attacked a single legion by the stealth of night, you routed with a shout; these are the most runaway of all the Britons, and for that reason so long survivors. Just as, to men penetrating forests and glades, the bravest beasts charge headlong to meet them, while the timid and the sluggish are driven off by the mere sound of the column, so the keenest of the Britons have long since fallen, and what is left is a tally of cowards and weaklings. That you have found them at last means not that they have stood their ground, but that they have been overtaken; their desperate case and their utmost fear have fixed their line, rooted by numbness, on the very spot where you shall win a fair and notable victory. Make an end of campaigning, set a great day’s seal upon fifty years, prove to the commonwealth that the army could never have been charged with either the protraction of the war or the causes of rebellion."

And while Agricola was still speaking the soldiers’ ardour shone forth, and a vast eagerness followed the close of his speech, and at once there was a rush to arms. He so disposed them, kindled and onrushing, that the auxiliary infantry, which numbered eight thousand, should make firm the centre of the line, while three thousand horse were spread along the wings. The legions stood before the rampart, a great glory to the victory if it were won without Roman blood, and a reserve if the auxiliaries were repulsed. The British line had taken its stand on the higher ground, at once for show and for terror, in such fashion that the front rank stood on the level, while the rest, linked along the rising slope, seemed to mount up one above another; the charioteers and horsemen filled the middle of the plain with their din and galloping. Then Agricola, since the enemy’s numbers were the greater, fearing that the battle might be fought against the front and the flanks of his men at once, drew out his ranks; and although the line would thereby be over-extended, and many urged that the legions be called up, readier in hope and steady in adversity he dismissed his horse and took his stand on foot before the standards.

At the first encounter the fighting was at long range; the Britons, with steadiness and with skill alike, with their huge swords and short shields parried or struck aside our missiles, and themselves poured down a great volley of weapons, until Agricola called on four cohorts of the Batavi and two of the Tungri to bring the matter to sword-point and hand-to-hand: a thing practised by them through their long service, and awkward for the enemy, who carried small shields and unwieldy swords; for the Britons’ swords, having no point, could not endure a grapple of arms and a fight in close quarters. So when the Batavi began to rain down blows, to strike with their shield-bosses, to stab at faces, and—having cut down those who stood on the level—to push the line up the slopes, the other cohorts, straining in rivalry and onset, cut down all who were nearest; and many, half-dead or unwounded, were left behind in the haste of victory. Meanwhile the squadrons of horse, as the charioteers fled, mingled themselves in the infantry battle. And although they had brought a fresh terror, yet they stuck fast in the dense ranks of the enemy and on the uneven ground; and the look of the battle was now by no means in our favour, when our men, scarcely keeping their footing on the slope, were at the same time jostled by the bodies of the horses; and often the stray chariots, the horses terrified and riderless, as panic bore each along, came charging in upon them sideways or head-on.

And the Britons who, still untried by the fighting, had occupied the hilltops and at their leisure were despising the fewness of our men, had begun to come down little by little and to encircle the rear of the victors, had not Agricola, fearing this very thing, set against their advance four squadrons of horse that he had kept back for the emergencies of battle, and, the more fiercely they had charged, the more sharply driven them back and scattered them in flight. So the Britons’ own design was turned against themselves, and the squadrons, riding across at the general’s command from the front of the combatants, fell on the enemy’s line from behind. Then indeed, in the open ground, a great and grim spectacle: to pursue, to wound, to capture, and to slaughter the captured as others were offered up. Now of the enemy, as each man’s temper served, whole bands of armed men turned their backs to fewer pursuers, while some, unarmed, ran forward of their own will and offered themselves to death. Everywhere weapons and bodies and mangled limbs and bloodied ground; and at times, even in the conquered, anger and valour. For when they had drawn near the woods, they rallied and, knowing the ground, hemmed in the foremost of the pursuers, who were off their guard. And had not Agricola, present everywhere, ordered strong and unencumbered cohorts to beat the ground like a hunt, and, wherever the way was narrower, part of the horse to dismount, while where the woods were thinner the cavalry should range through them, some wound would have been taken through over-confidence. But when they saw our men take up the pursuit again in firm order, they turned to flight—no longer in columns, as before, nor with any regard for one another: scattered, and shunning each other, they made for distant and trackless places. Night and satiety were the end of the pursuit. Of the enemy about ten thousand were slain; of our men three hundred and sixty fell, among them Aulus Atticus, a prefect of a cohort, carried into the enemy by youthful ardour and the mettle of his horse.

The night, indeed, was glad for the victors with their joy and their plunder: the Britons, straggling, with a mingled wailing of men and women, dragged off their wounded, called out to the unhurt, abandoned their homes and in their fury set them ablaze with their own hands, chose hiding-places and at once forsook them; now they took counsel together a while, then broke apart; sometimes they were unmanned at the sight of those they loved, more often goaded to fury. And it was well established that some turned their savagery upon their wives and children, as though in pity. The next day disclosed the face of the victory more widely: everywhere a vast silence, the hills deserted, houses smoking in the distance, no one meeting the scouts. These being sent out in every direction, when the tracks of flight were found uncertain and it was learned that the enemy were nowhere massing—and, the summer being now spent, the war could not be carried wider—he led the army down into the territory of the Boresti. There, taking hostages, he ordered the prefect of the fleet to sail round Britain. Forces were assigned for it, and terror had gone before. He himself, leading foot and horse by a slow march, that the spirit of the newly subdued peoples might be cowed by the very deliberateness of his passage, settled them in winter-quarters. And at the same time the fleet, with weather and report alike favourable, made the Trucculensian harbour, from which, having coasted along the nearest side of Britain, it had returned entire.

This course of events, although Agricola’s dispatches enlarged it with no boasting of words, Domitian received—as was his way—glad in countenance, anxious at heart. There was in him the consciousness that his recent sham triumph over Germany had been a thing of derision, men bought through traders, whose dress and hair were got up to look like captives: whereas now a true and great victory, with so many thousands of the enemy slain, was being celebrated with vast renown. This he dreaded above all, that the name of a private man should be lifted above the emperor’s: in vain had he driven into silence the pursuits of the forum and the lustre of the civil arts, if another should seize military glory; other things might somehow more easily be passed over, but the soldierly excellence of a good general was an emperor’s own. Tormented by such cares, and—what was a token of his savage thinking—glutted in his own seclusion, he judged it best for the present to lay his hatred by, until the rush of Agricola’s fame and the army’s favour should slacken: for even then Agricola was holding Britain.

And so he orders to be decreed in the Senate the ornaments of triumph and the honour of a laurelled statue and whatever is given in place of a triumph, heaped up with much verbal honour; and a rumour to be added besides that the province of Syria was being marked out for Agricola—then vacant by the death of Atilius Rufus, a consular, and reserved for men of the highest standing. Many believed that a freedman from the more confidential service was sent to Agricola carrying the letters by which Syria was given him, with the instruction that they be delivered only if he were still in Britain; and that this freedman, meeting Agricola in the very strait of the Ocean, returned to Domitian without so much as addressing him—whether that is true, or invented and put together to suit the emperor’s character. Agricola had meanwhile handed over to his successor a province quiet and secure. And, lest his entry be conspicuous through the throng and concourse of those who would come to meet him, avoiding the dutiful attendance of his friends, he came by night into the city, by night to the Palace, as he had been instructed; and, received with a brief kiss and no word, he was lost in the crowd of courtiers. For the rest, that he might temper his soldierly name—a weighty thing among the idle—with other virtues, he drank deep of tranquillity and leisure, modest in his dress, easy in his speech, attended by one friend or two, so that most people, whose habit is to gauge great men by their display, having seen and looked Agricola over, asked wherein his fame lay, and few could read it.

Frequently in those days he was, in his absence, accused before Domitian, and, in his absence, acquitted. The ground of his danger was no charge, nor the complaint of any man wronged, but an emperor hostile to the virtues, and the man’s glory, and the worst kind of enemies—those who praise. And there followed times for the commonwealth that would not suffer Agricola to be passed over in silence: so many armies lost in Moesia and Dacia, in Germany and Pannonia, through the rashness or the cowardice of their generals; so many men of military rank, with so many cohorts, stormed and taken; and now the doubt was no longer over the frontier of empire and the river-bank, but over the winter-quarters of the legions and the keeping of what was held. So, as loss was heaped on loss and every year was marked by funerals and disasters, the voice of the crowd called for Agricola as general, all men comparing his vigour, his resolution, and his spirit tried in wars with the inertia and the timidity of the rest. By such talk it is well established that Domitian’s ears too were lashed, while the best of his freedmen, out of love and loyalty, and the worst, out of malignity and spite, kept goading an emperor already inclined to the worse. Thus Agricola was swept headlong, by his own virtues no less than by the vices of others, into glory itself.

Now the year was at hand in which he should draw by lot the proconsulship of Africa or of Asia; and, with Civica lately put to death, Agricola did not lack a warning, nor Domitian a precedent. There came to him certain men versed in the emperor’s mind, to ask Agricola, of their own accord, whether he meant to go to his province. And at first, rather covertly, they praised quiet and leisure; soon they offered their own service in getting his excuse approved; at last, no longer veiled, at once urging and frightening, they dragged him before Domitian. He, ready with dissimulation and composed into arrogance, both heard the entreaties of the man begging off and, when he had granted them, suffered thanks to be rendered to himself, nor blushed at the odiousness of the favour. Yet the proconsular salary, customarily offered, and granted by himself to some, he did not give to Agricola—whether offended that it was not asked, or out of a guilty conscience, lest he seem to have bought what he had forbidden. It is a property of human nature to hate the man you have wronged: but Domitian’s nature, headlong toward anger and the more inexorable the more hidden it was, was nonetheless softened by Agricola’s restraint and prudence, because he did not, by defiance or by an empty parade of liberty, provoke his fame and his fate. Let those whose habit is to admire what is forbidden know that great men can exist even under bad emperors, and that compliance and moderation, if energy and vigour go with them, reach that height of praise which most men have attained only by a steep and headlong path, winning fame—to no profit of the commonwealth—by an ostentatious death.

The end of his life was grievous to us, sad to his friends, and not without concern even to strangers and to those who never knew him. The common people too, and this populace busy with other things, both kept coming to his house and spoke of him in the forums and the gatherings; nor did anyone, on hearing of Agricola’s death, either rejoice or straightway forget. A persistent rumour that he had been carried off by poison deepened the pity: for us there is nothing ascertained that I would dare to affirm. For the rest, throughout his illness, more often than is the custom of a principate that visits by messengers, the chief of the freedmen and the most intimate of the physicians came—whether that was solicitude or surveillance. On the last day, at least, it was well established that the very moments of his failing were reported by relays of couriers posted along the road—no one believing that he would so hasten the news of what he would hear with grief. Yet he wore the show of sorrow upon his face, secure now in his hatred, a man who could more easily dissemble joy than fear. It was well established that, when Agricola’s will was read, in which he made Domitian co-heir with his excellent wife and most dutiful daughter, the emperor was delighted, as though at an honour and a mark of esteem. So blind and corrupted was his mind by ceaseless flatteries that he did not know that by a good father none is named heir but a bad emperor.

Agricola had been born in the third consulship of Gaius Caesar, on the Ides of June: he departed in his fifty-fourth year, on the tenth day before the Kalends of September, in the consulship of Collega and Priscinus. And if posterity should wish to know his appearance too: he was comely rather than commanding; there was no fierceness in his face; a graciousness of expression prevailed. You would readily believe him a good man, and gladly a great one. And he himself, indeed, although snatched away in the mid-course of an unbroken prime, so far as glory goes completed the longest span of life. For he had fulfilled the true goods, which are seated in the virtues; and to one endowed with consular and triumphal honours, what else could fortune add? In excessive wealth he took no pleasure; a respectable fortune had fallen to him. With his daughter and his wife surviving him, he may even be thought fortunate—his dignity untouched, his fame in flower, his kinsmen and friendships unharmed—to have escaped what was to come. For as it was not granted him to last into the light of this most blessed age and to see Trajan emperor—which he used to forebode in our hearing by omen and by prayer—so of his hastened death he drew this great consolation, that he escaped that final time in which Domitian drained the commonwealth dry, no longer by intervals and breathing-spaces, but continuously and as if at a single blow.

Agricola did not see the senate-house besieged and the Senate shut in by arms, and in one carnage the slaughter of so many consulars, the exiles and flights of so many of the noblest women. As yet Mettius Carus was credited with a single victory, and within the Alban citadel the voice of Messalinus was loud, and Baebius Massa was even then a defendant: soon it was our own hands that led Helvidius to prison; the sight of Mauricus and Rusticus shamed us; Senecio drenched us with innocent blood. Nero, at least, withdrew his own eyes, and ordered crimes but did not watch them: a chief part of our miseries under Domitian was to see and to be seen, when our very sighs were being noted down, when, to mark the pallor of so many men, there sufficed that savage face and the flush with which he armed himself against shame. But you, Agricola, were fortunate—not only in the brightness of your life, but in the timeliness of your death. As they report who were present at your last conversations, you met your fate with constancy and gladness, as though, so far as in you lay, you would make the emperor a gift of your own innocence. But for me and for his daughter, besides the bitterness of a father torn from us, it deepens the grief that it was not our lot to sit beside his sickbed, to cherish him as he failed, to take our fill of his face and his embrace. We should at least have caught his charges and his words, to fix them deep in our hearts. This grief is ours, this wound is ours: by the condition of so long an absence he was lost to us four years before. Everything, beyond doubt, best of fathers, with your most loving wife at your side, was there in abundance for your honour: yet with fewer tears were you mourned, and in your last light your eyes missed something.

If there is any place for the spirits of the dutiful, if, as the wise hold, great souls are not extinguished with the body, may you rest in peace, and call us, your household, from feeble longing and womanish laments to the contemplation of your virtues, which it is not right to mourn or to beat the breast over. Let us honour you rather with admiration, and with undying praises, and, if nature supply the power, by our likeness to you: that is true honour, that the piety of each nearest kin. This too I would charge his daughter and his wife: so to venerate the memory of a father, of a husband, that they turn over within themselves all his deeds and words, and embrace the form and figure of his mind rather than of his body—not that I think any ban should be laid on the likenesses that are fashioned of marble or of bronze, but that, as the faces of men, so the images of a face are frail and mortal, while the form of the mind is eternal, which you can hold and express not through another’s material and art, but only by your own character. Whatever in Agricola we loved, whatever we admired, abides and will abide in the minds of men, through the eternity of the ages, in the fame of his deeds; for oblivion has overwhelmed many of the ancients, as though inglorious and unknown: Agricola, told of and handed down to posterity, will live on.