Agricola: Invader by Simon Turney

Author:Simon Turney [Turney, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2024-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

PART 2

REBELLION

Inter quae nulla palam causa delapsum Camuloduni simulacrum Victoriae ac retro conversum quasi cederet hostibus

(Meanwhile, without any evident cause, the statue of Victory at Camulodunum fell prostrate and turned its back to the enemy, as though it fled before them)

Tacitus, Annals 14.32

13

They had played it Agricola’s way in the end. The failure at the rock fortress had tarnished Emeritus in the commander’s eyes, and the man had lost sufficient credibility now for Agricola’s voice once more to rise to the top. He’d laid out his plan using that map, following the very same strategy with which Ostorius Scapula had suppressed the Silures: starvation.

The winters in these western lands were known to be hard, and the evidence of the advancing cold months backed that up. To survive such winters, Luci had explained, the tribes harvested their crops and stored them in granaries, just as Romans would. Their livestock would either be brought to high winter pastures where they would rely upon stored fodder until spring, or turned into lowland pastures where they would find sufficient food. The problem was that they’d had too little notice of Rome’s intent to invade, and the other two prongs of the attack were in Ordovician lands long before any attempt could be made to stockpile. The tribes had been forced to do what they had done here, retreating from their villages and lesser forts and taking refuge in their most defensible places, leaving behind most of the supplies they would need to carry them through the winter. They had taken what they could carry, and had driven their flocks before them.

But as autumn turned to winter, the meagre stocks they had brought to their refuge wore thinner and thinner. With Luci’s native insight, the various routes of passage the tribe could take to any reasonable food source had been identified. Small garrisons had been installed at the entrance of every valley, across every useable trail, blockading even the roiling grey sea. The Romans sat tight in their garrisons during the hard winter, eating well, fed by both a regular supply train from the south-east but also by seizing all the stored comestibles and animal fodder that the Ordovices had been forced to leave when they retreated to the rock.

That the plan was working became more and more evident as winter progressed. The defenders from the rock began to probe the Roman garrisons, looking for ways to known storehouses, to good pasture, to the sea and its abundant fish that the Roman invaders were enjoying. Each time, they were fought back and contained. Occasionally, patrols would locate small groups of farmers driving their flock along tiny hillside tracks, seeking ways to get them to good grazing land. They too were turned back or destroyed outright, their animals taken.

By the time Saturnalia came, a rather drab affair held in camp in the rain and snow, the Ordovices of the rock fortress were becoming desperate. Agricola had made his position with the garrison nearest to the fortress, and watched the place daily from a small, rocky viewpoint.

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