Ferdinand Addis
Apollo (UK); Pegasus Books (US), out 5 January 2027
In Virgil’s Aeneid, the god Jupiter promises the Romans imperium sine fine – an empire without end. Britain, perhaps more than anywhere else, is where such ambition was humbled.
It would be easy to start in 55 BC, when Julius Caesar attempted to invade Britain, or in AD 43, with the longer-term occupation under Emperor Claudius. But Ferdinand Addis, a former journalist who now writes about history, is as interested in the road to Roman Britain as the destination. His first book, Rome: Eternal city, explored the empire’s heart; this journey is to its near-mythic hinterland.
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The chapters of his new book, , are linked by theme, including ink and gold, bone and earth, and ruin and echoes. It expands on the story of ancient Britain up to the invasion, interspersing it with the campaign’s historical chronicle. We meet Neanderthals, whose foothold was repeatedly undone by shifting weather, Mesolithic migrants heading to Britain via Doggerland, a vanished landmass, and Beaker people, so called after the drinking vessels in their tombs – the legacy of what Addis calls “stones, bones and pots”.
The Bronze Age, says Addis, was marked by demand for metals – tin, copper and gold – and the rise of more sophisticated agriculture. Later, Iron Age Britons built hill forts and, in at least some cases, practised matrilocality, with husbands joining the family units of their wives rather than vice versa. There are many intriguing details here, spanning the insights gained from studying DNA, climate change, trade routes and the spread of the Celtic language. Addis evokes an interconnected system, one undersold in accounts that centre only on the Romans.
Addis’s insights into the daily grind make this lost world feel, in many ways, downright relatable
There is shocking and ritualistic brutality, too – on both sides. Conquest, which is ultimately about a military operation, finds frequent common threads: Lindow Man, stabbed, garrotted and deposited in a British bog in the 1st century AD, or the Roman prisoners buried alive in the Punic wars (which raged across the western Mediterranean nearly 300 years earlier) as a sacrifice to stave off disaster. Killing is, if anything, universal.
Rome, however, could stake a claim to be “the ultimate killer… the perpetrator of the most spectacular cruelties”, says Addis, When it needed to drive this message home in Britain, there was no stopping “until all arms were exhausted and all sword hilts slippery with blood”.
Such background helps Addis contextualise the complex British world the Romans encountered. At the same time, there is the opposing perspective: the utter strangeness of Britain and what the experience of it must have wrought in the Roman psyche. Conquest succeeds at flitting between the two perspectives, favouring neither.
Take Agricola, the Roman general who completed the conquest of Britain and was appointed its governor from AD 77. His legacy was burnished by his son-in-law, the historian Tacitus, but Addis offsets such brilliance with accounts of the sombre dignity of the defeated Caratacus, the chieftain who resisted earlier Roman attempts at conquest. And for every Boudica, the Icenian queen driven to vengeance against Rome, there is a Cartimandua, the pragmatic, collaborative queen of the Brigantes, a Celtic people living in what is now northern England.
Addis’s descriptions of the military clashes between the Romans and Britons, from the wily, unconquered Caledonians to the doomed druids of Anglesey, give the invasion an urgency and read almost like a novel. But it is when the Romans have settled in to govern (insofar as they could) that the tangible history resonates.
From barracks to villas, Addis excels at using physical remnants to create an idea of everyday life and community. Nowhere is this more evident than at Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, the very embodiment of the ideological divide between civilisation and barbarism. Just south of it was the Roman fort Vindolanda.
Rome’s military infrastructure often gives most away. We can pin down the date a fortification was built by examining its timbers’ tree rings, for example. And anoxic soil has preserved letters written on thin tablets of birch or alder, giving insight into language (a rough form of Latin) and everyday life – a trader worried about getting paid, or a party invitation. These tablets, or tilia, also reveal surprising literacy in those living at and around Vindolanda.
Much of what has been discovered is comfortingly domestic: cumin and pepper in a kitchen, sandals belonging to women and children, pawprints of cats and dogs pressed into the tiles of Vindolanda. Addis’s thoughtful synthesis of insights into the daily grind makes this lost world feel, in many ways, downright relatable.
The line between Roman and Briton ultimately blurs. “Were they so much less British, then, than the painted warriors of the hills?” asks Addis, referring to the descendants of Roman legionaries who found themselves staffing the same outposts on which they had been born and raised. It was a society diverse in population and beliefs – Gauls, Batavians, Syrians and Sarmatians lived alongside Britons, while old religious rites persisted in the form of carved emblems and, perhaps, even the odd ritual human sacrifice.
Of course, it didn’t last, and Rome’s final withdrawal from Britain in the early 5th century came without fanfare. It is hard to think of anything more telling than Addis’s anecdote about a late 4th-century resident in an Oxfordshire villa lighting a fire directly on a pricey tiled floor.
From the margins, Saxons, Franks and Picts threatened. Eventually, the western empire was no more. This is, fittingly, where the book loses steam. When Rome’s time in Britain ended, “no writer at the time felt moved to tell us so”, notes Addis. We get a glimpse over the horizon of the hazy, legendary 6th-century battle of Badon Hill between Britons and Anglo-Saxons, and the onset of Anglo-Saxon England. It is hard to see what’s coming without thinking back to what was.
After evaluating this centuries-spanning friction, Addis is clear that picking a side – “Whom do we favour, the Roman or the Briton?” – is futile. Instead, we should think of what we share with both.
Three more books to bring the ancient world to life
by Peter Ross
This book celebrates the British Isles’ archaeological sites and makes a passionate case for their preservation. Peter Ross gives equal weight to the grand Stonehenge and to tiny, intimate structures like cist graves.
by Mary Beard
No one knows the Romans like Mary Beard. For an accessible, sweeping introduction to the Senate and to Rome’s people, from the dawn of the Republic to the early 3rd century AD, this is as comprehensive as it gets.
by Duncan Mackay
Duncan Mackay traces Boudica’s rampage of AD 60-61 against the Romans in devastating detail, from the birth of her revolt to its doomed stand. What happened at Colchester especially is so vivid you can almost smell the smoke.
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