CASSIUS DIO AND THE CLAUDIAN INVASION

That Dio was writing more than 150 years after the Roman invasion of Britain adds to the problem of potential veracity, and what he says of relevance to this study is incredibly brief.Footnote ¹² We are told of the campaign waged by Aulus Plautius, the senior Roman commander of Claudius’ expedition, against the Britanni, from 60.19.1. At 60.21.1, we then read that the Britanni, faced with the death of one of their rulers, Togodumnus, became even further resolved to destroy the invading Romans. Plautius, having already supposedly had a setback at the Thames estuary, where the Britanni used local knowledge to their advantage, decided not to advance any further, but resolved to protect what he had already conquered until Claudius could arrive with reinforcements. Dio (60.21.2) noted that ‘For he [i.e. Plautius] had been instructed to do this in case he met with any particularly stubborn resistance, and, in fact, extensive equipment, including elephants, had already been got together for this expedition’ (εἴρητο γὰρ αὐτῷ, εἴ τι βιαιότερον γίγνοιτο, τοῦτο ποιῆσαι, καὶ παρασκευή γε ἐπὶ τῇ στρατείᾳ πολλὴ τῶν τε ἄλλων καὶ ἐλεφάντων προσυνείλεκτο). And that, surprisingly enough given how salient elephants are in modern accounts of the matter, is all we read of Claudius’ elephants.

From Rome, Claudius proceeded by boat to Massilia (Marseilles), then travelled by road and river to the Channel, where he crossed over and assumed personal command. Dio seems to have followed a rather pro-Claudian narrative here, and more or less ascribes the final Roman victory at Camulodunum (modern Colchester) to the emperor (60.21.4), with no mention being made of any of the other Roman commanders. In all, Claudius was only in Britain for sixteen days according to Dio (60.23.1), with Suetonius, who seems to reflect a different source tradition, describing the campaign as being of only moderate importance (expeditionem … modicam: Claud. 17.1).Footnote ¹³ Indeed, ‘victory’ was achieved ‘without any battle or bloodshed within only a very few days’ (sine ullo proelio au sanguine intra paucissimos dies: Claud. 17.2).Footnote ¹⁴ This tradition also appears to be reflected by Josephus (BJ 3.4–5), a Flavian supporter who not unexpectedly attributed most of the victory to the later emperor Vespasian, already a notable Roman commander in Claudian times.Footnote ¹⁵ The difficulty of the campaign has been much debated. Some have viewed the entire operation as converting an area already under considerable Roman influence into a fully fledged province, the presumption being that much of the groundwork had already been done, more so by the time of Claudius’ arrival.Footnote ¹⁶

What do we learn from the above? First of all, and pace Scullard, we have no clear indication from Dio that the elephants were actually brought across to Britain, much less used in combat against the Britanni at any point, and nor do they appear in any kind of procession.Footnote ¹⁷ Dio certainly said nothing about the emperor riding one. Indeed, he appears to refer to the elephants, among other reinforcements, having been assembled for any back-up expedition that needed to be made. Of relevance, too, is the fact that no other extant ancient author writes of elephants in the context of Claudius’ British campaign. Tacitus, writer of the Annales, was admittedly often more interested in political matters than points of military detail, but the relevant part of the Annales has not survived, and nor have the histories of Fabius Rusticus, Cluvius Rufus and Pliny the Elder, all of whom are referred to by Tacitus in later books (see Tac., Ann. 13.20, 14.2, 15.61). The idea of elephants being used in Britain under Claudius sounds like the sort of thing that Suetonius might have recorded in his Vita of Claudius, given his penchant for recording the bizarre and the unusual to reveal aspects of his subject's character. Alas, we read nothing of the sort. Josephus, as we have seen, added a detail or two, but nothing of real interest to this study. A reasonably compelling argumentum e silentio therefore emerges suggesting that the elephants – if elephants there were at the Roman departure point in northern Gaul – were perhaps never dispatched to Britain.

If the notion of elephants was rooted in some kind of reality, perhaps they had been assembled under Claudius’ predecessor Gaius (Caligula). As Southern has pointed out, assembling elephants ‘was perhaps not something that could be arranged on a whim at short notice’.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, marching Roman elephants into battle speaks more to the supposed Hellenistic extravagance of Gaius than it does to the more pragmatic Claudius – a man who allegedly thought to publish an edict approving of flatulence at the meal table in the interests of public health (Suet., Claud. 33). Of course, Gaius never made good on what seems to have been an ambition to conquer Britain (see Suet., Calig. 46),Footnote ¹⁹ but crushing the Britanni with the aid of elephants might have been something he had considered. This possibility, however, must remain pure speculation. That said, it is difficult to imagine elephants being continually housed and fed at a Channel port over more than three years for a British expedition that might never have occurred.Footnote ²⁰

LOGISTICAL ISSUES AND TIME CONSTRAINTS

An important factor is the difficulty of the passage from Boulougne-sur-Mer, or Gesoriacum in Claudius’ day (Suet., Claud. 17.2), to the coast of Britain. Grainge has discussed the environmental conditions and hazards of the crossing in detail. In particular, he noted that fleets (as opposed to single vessels) move very slowly, and that a single ship travelling from Boulougne to Chichester Harbour — one of the possible sites for the Roman landing if the south coast hypothesis is preferred — would have taken a minimum of 37 hours to complete the voyage, which means that a fleet of ships would have taken anywhere from 2 or 2½ days (or more) to make landfall.Footnote ²¹ Although Chichester Harbour is used as an example, other sites where Claudius could have landed — such as Richborough, if one follows the Kentish hypothesis — provide similar although less extreme challenges, given the closer proximity to Boulogne.Footnote ²² In fact, Bird envisaged Claudius sailing to Fishbourne, located just outside Chichester, whereas ‘the elephants perhaps travel via Richborough’.Footnote ²³

If a south-coast arrival point is indeed preferred for all of Claudius’ forces, the problem, as Grainge has pointed out, is that it ‘immediately raises the question whether it would be possible for the fleet to stay at sea for that long without coming ashore at night’.Footnote ²⁴ Crews had to be fed and had to sleep and, importantly, any animals had to be similarly attended to. The problem here is imagining Claudius’ fleet, with elephants, successfully making a journey of at least 48 hours, and possibly considerably more, from Boulougne to the southern British coast. It is difficult to envisage that the elephant or elephants would then be in a fit state to engage in any battle or indeed expeditious movements any time soon thereafter. Equally difficult to imagine is that sufficient food and water would be available for the animals and that they could remain calm and controlled on such an extended voyage, especially on moderately sized oared ships that were not optimised for extended voyages — unlike the very large and exclusively sail-propelled cargo ships (naves onerariae) used in the ancient Mediterranean, which could sail from northern Africa to the Italian peninsula carrying, for example, large quantities of grain.Footnote ²⁵

Building on Grainge's calculations, Hoffmann observed that Claudius would have had barely enough time to achieve much in terms of actual battles, which suggests, pace Dio, that most of the heavy lifting had already been done — something strongly affirmed by Suetonius’ version of events, and even that of Josephus.Footnote ²⁶ By the time that Claudius had disembarked his accompanying troops, and supposedly his elephants and other equipment, he would effectively have had only 14 days for his campaign. If one assumes that Claudius travelled at the legion's usual marching speed of around 32 kilometres per day (which seems ambitious with possibly unruly elephants stressed from a sea crossing in train), it would have taken at least 13 days to get to Colchester and back from his possible landing points near Chichester or Richborough (the latter being an even greater distance). Hoffmann wrote as follows:

Hoffmann went on to suggest tentatively that Claudius may have disembarked in an ‘unknown harbour’ closer to Colchester.Footnote ²⁸ If we accept, however, the prevailing view that either Chichester or Richborough was Claudius’ point of disembarkation, the notion that elephants comprised part of his retinue seems implausible. Presumably, their utility would have been restricted to somewhere between a day and a half to two and a half days in the Colchester area. Based on logistics and the geography alone, it is difficult to believe that Claudius, who seems to have spent most of his time in transit, was accompanied by slow-moving elephants that would have needed to spend a considerable portion of the day eating, much less used them in battle.

Manley, however, went some way to solving these issues in a novel way by assuming that the elephants had been brought across before Claudius had entered Britain, and that they were waiting on the north bank of the Thames for his arrival, in order to cohere with what Dio recorded at 60.21.3, where Claudius took command of the legions ‘near the Thames’ (πρὸς τῷ Ταμέσᾳ).Footnote ²⁹ Manley argued that the sentence in Dio of interest to us is ‘ambiguous’ regarding who brought the elephants across, and settles on them accompanying Plautius rather than the emperor, or at least being brought over before Claudius arrived.Footnote ³⁰ The citing of ambiguity aids Manley's own narrative of events, more so given his frequent reference to the otherwise unattested animals in his narrative.Footnote ³¹ Yet Dio clearly stated that the equipment assembled at 60.21.2 was something that was intended, in the translation that Manley himself provided, ‘to back up the invasion force’, the condition for the use of this equipment being ‘if there was any particularly stubborn resistance’.Footnote ³² Moreover, the ‘expedition’ (στρατεία) envisaged by Dio at this very locus most likely refers to that which was planned for Claudius, and not that of Plautius. It is, of course, possible that the elephants were in fact sent ahead of Claudius’ arrival at the Channel, and did indeed meet up with him at the Thames, but this is not what Dio appears to have written.

Regardless of the timing of the elephants’ arrival in Britain, it is important to consider that an adult elephant consumes — and this is a conservative estimate based on a variety of Internet sources dealing with the elephant's natural history — roughly 150 kg of fodder per day, which, of course, cannot be consumed very quickly.Footnote ³³ If battle were imminent, it would clearly not make sense to skimp on these significant dietary requirements. It is also important to consider these requirements in the context of an army that, by the time of Claudius’ arrival, was around 40,000 strong, with an additional estimated 5,375 non-combatants, and cavalry horses and pack-animals numbering an estimated 14,750.Footnote ³⁴ For the men alone, this means a requirement of around 45 tonnes of grain per day, if one assumes that each received roughly 1 kg of grain per day.Footnote ³⁵ With so many essential mouths to feed, it is hard to imagine why the Romans would have wanted to tolerate the additional burden of several hungry elephants.

There have been claims that Claudius brought elephants to Britain so that he could ride upon one as a means to show the Britons his imperial power — indeed, a model at Dover Museum even shows an incongruously youthful-looking Claudius astride an African elephant!Footnote ³⁶ Yet Claudius, apparently a frail emperor as the ancient sources attest (Suet., Claud. 30–31), climbing on top of an elephant, or even making his way onto a howdah, seems unlikely. In any case, coins minted by Claudius show that the triumphal arch that was to be built on the Via Lata in the Campus Martius to celebrate his victory over the Britons would be surmounted by a statue of the emperor riding a horse — not an elephant.Footnote ³⁷ It might be argued that, since these coins were minted before the actual arch was built (it was not dedicated until a.d. 51), they might not be accurate. Indeed, the coins in question reflect a reverse coin type that shows a triumphal arch bearing the inscription de britann and an equestrian statue on top of it. Consider, for example, a coin type minted early in Claudius’ reign to celebrate successes over the Germans, either recent ones or earlier victories achieved by his relatives, such as his father Drusus and his elder brother Germanicus.Footnote ³⁸

Perhaps it could also be argued that Claudius, trying to distance himself from the alleged tyrannical or Hellenistic excess of his predecessor Gaius, was loath to introduce an elephant into his iconography, and so settled on an equestrian image.Footnote ³⁹ Nevertheless, early Julio-Claudian numismatic imagery does show elephants, and relatively frequently too. For example, the obverse of a sestertius of Tiberius shows Augustus (now styled Divus Augustus) in a chariot (quadriga) drawn by four Asian elephants, a Roman appropriation of a Hellenistic numismatic trope.Footnote ⁴⁰ In fact, Augustus himself was shown riding in an elephant-drawn chariot (biga) in his own lifetime.Footnote ⁴¹ Moreover, in Asia Minor, at the Sebasteion (imperial cult sanctuary) at Aphrodisias, we see a marble representation of Claudius overpowering a pleading personification of Britannia — but there is no elephant in sight.Footnote ⁴² In Nero's reign (a.d. 55), we find an aureus with Nero and his mother Agrippina the Younger on the obverse, and an elephant quadriga bearing both the deified Claudius and Augustus seated on chairs on the reverse.Footnote ⁴³ Once again, if elephants or even an elephant had been used by Claudius in Britain, here was certainly an opportunity to commemorate that feat – yet we have absolutely no corroborating evidence in any of the usual media designed to advertise the successes of the imperial family.

A CORROBORATING DETAIL IN POLYAENUS?

Discussion of Claudius’ supposed elephants in Britain in a.d. 43. inevitably leads us to consider the curious vignette in Polyaenus (Strat. 8.23.5) of Julius Caesar using a ‘very large elephant (μέγιστος ἐλέφας) with iron scales (σιδηραῖς φολίσιν)’ and a ‘large tower’ (πύργον … μέγαν) on its back to force his way across a river in Britain in presumably his second British incursion in 55 b.c. Some have even contended that Polyaenus’ notice was a mistaken conflation of the two Roman expeditions to Britain, despite these events being some 90 years apart — Julius Caesar and the emperor Claudius could, after all, both be called ‘Caesar’. For example, one of the present authors described this possibility in his brief treatment of the two loci in the broader context of the military equipment carried by ancient war elephants, although he credited this insight to an anonymous reader.Footnote ⁴⁴ If so, Polyaenus’ story could give weight to the idea of Claudius using elephants in Britain. A more frequent view, however, is that the two unusual loci are entirely separate.

Whether the locus in Polyaenus preserves a genuine historical event is a moot point, and it is notable that Caesar never mentions having elephants in Gaul in his De Bello Gallico, much less ferrying one across to Britain. It remains for someone to argue convincingly why Caesar would not have made mention of such an event in his own writings. What should be clear, however, is that the detail preserved by Polyaenus does not suit a Claudian narrative. For example, the locus mentions the British ruler Cassivellaunus, a historical figure attested by Caesar himself, while the overall circumstances are similar to those presented by Caesar himself at BG 5.18.1–5, where Caesar's forces attempt to cross the River Thames to gain access to the territory of Cassivellaunus. But, in Caesar's narrative, it is the enthusiasm of the Roman cavalry and legionaries that ensures a successful crossing – not a large elephant scaring away the opposing Britanni.

In short, there is considerable doubt about Caesar's use of an elephant in Britain. Caesar's later associations with the elephant, as demonstrated by the so-called ‘elephant denarius’ showing an (unarmoured and turretless) African elephant on the obverse crushing a large snake, together with his use of elephants in later displays in Rome (see Cass. Dio 43.22.1, 43.23.2; Suet., Iul. 37.2), may have contributed in some way to the tale that Polyaenus conveys.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even Scullard, who was supportive of the idea of elephants being used in the Claudian invasion, found attempts to associate elephant coinage with Caesar's campaign in Britain to be ‘rather far-fetched’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Such conclusions do not explain away the specific detail provided about elephant equipment in Polyaenus; but, in the absence of any corroborating evidence, the whole vignette seems rather implausible in the context of what we know about Caesar's incursion into Britain. Whether Polyaenus, who was a rhetorician rather than historian in any case, as the Suda points out, was also influenced by Dio's work, or possibly that of his long-lost sources, and deliberately or mistakenly conflated two men who could be referred to as ‘Caesar’, must remain uncertain.Footnote ⁴⁷

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Finally, it is worth recalling the general reluctance of the Romans to employ elephants for military purposes. Indeed, on one of the few occasions that they did, such as at the siege of Numantia (Numancia) in 153 b.c. under the command of Quintus Fulvius Nobilior, the result was a disaster, with the elephants trampling on their own men after trying to topple the city walls and being driven back by the defenders.Footnote ⁴⁸ On other occasions, such as at the battle of Magnesia (190 b.c.), the Roman commander Lucius Cornelius Scipio had a small number of African elephants (16) in his possession, which had been provided by Rome's Numidian ally, but he declined to pit them against the 54 Asian elephants of his Seleucid adversary.Footnote ⁴⁹ So, the Romans suddenly deeming elephants to be useful adjuncts in war in the Early Principate emerges as something of a sticking point. The Romans were well aware of the elephant's propensity to be as much a danger to its own side as to its enemies, having witnessed such behaviour at several points in Roman military history.Footnote ⁵⁰ In addition, elephants, given their aforementioned requirement to eat copious amounts of food per day, were also probably seen as an impediment to moving troops expeditiously around the Empire, and thus were not regarded as viable military assets. By the time of the early Principate, Roman troops had conquered more or less the entire Mediterranean world without elephants, so it makes little sense to suppose that they would suddenly have thought to employ elephants for an invasion of Britain, more so given Britain's distance from the Mediterranean world and the likelihood of needing to land the animals on a beach, or at least a port not designed for transferring pachyderms from ship to shore — and quite possibly during an opposed disembarkation. This would have been especially tricky if the elephants were not the small forest elephants once thought to have been used in the Mediterranean world, but were large bulls of the bush elephant or Asian elephant species.Footnote ⁵¹

Given that the Romans seem, for the most part, to have eschewed the use of elephants in warfare given their greatly troublesome nature, it remains for us to consider how it was possible for Claudius to have had elephants at his disposal in any capacity. It is unduly facile to presume that these were beasts that were due to have been slaughtered in the ring, and which were repurposed for military use at the last minute. Training an elephant for war was surely an expensive and time-consuming undertaking, and so elephants destined to be slaughtered in the ring would probably not have the training required for military operations, or else would have been animals captured from Roman enemies that were deemed surplus to requirements. While trained military elephants captured from enemies might have been available during the period of the Republic, that clearly does not hold true for the early Principate, when all such enemies had been defeated (the Parthians do not appear to have been very interested in using elephants in warfare, unlike their Sassanian successors).Footnote ⁵²

By the imperial era, it seems that there was an imperial elephant herd of sorts. Juvenal is probably not the most reliable source for such matters, but he does state that there was an imperial elephant herd located ‘in Rutulian forests’ (arboribus Rutulis). More telling, perhaps, is an inscription dating to the first century a.d., and specifically to the reigns of either Claudius or Nero (CIL 6.8583 = ILS 1578). Addressed to one Tiberius Claudius Speclatorus (sic), an imperial freedman (as denoted by the appearance of Aug. lib.), the text carries the words procurator Laurento ad elephantos, which suggests that an imperial procurator was tasked with looking after elephants at Laurentum. This was a coastal town towards the south of Ostia near Ardea, the town of the Rutulians referred to by Juvenal with regard to an imperial herd, and, moreover, a location only 26 km from Rome.Footnote ⁵³ Dio (74.16.2–3) and Herodian (2.11.9) have provided further assurance that, in a.d. 193, an imperial herd was kept for processions and that, when the ephemeral ruler Didius Iulianus was faced with the invasion of Septimius Severus, he tried to have these elephants equipped with turrets – which they promptly threw off! This vignette provides us with some sort of indication that, if Claudius did indeed have an imperial herd, these animals would not have been very suitable for warlike endeavours, such as wearing armour or carrying a turret. The tradition of imperial elephants seems to have continued into the late empire, for Symmachus (Rel. 9.5), writing in the late fourth century a.d., described ‘royal elephants’, as denoted by elefanti regii, being paraded through the capital in one of his letters. In short, if elephants were indeed taken across to Britain, however unlikely that may seem from the arguments mounted supra, their use would have been more for the purposes of theatre than for war.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In sum, the evidence for elephants serving in a military or even ceremonial capacity in Britain in a.d. 43 is not at all compelling. So how to explain the association of Claudius with elephants in a broadly military context? Edmondson, one of the few scholars to have cast doubt on the notion of Roman elephants in Britain, is probably close to the mark when he wrote that Dio, or at least Dio's source, ‘garbled a report that elephants were used in [Claudius’] … triumphal procession at Rome and erroneously transposed the elephants to the war-zone’.Footnote ⁵⁴ As we have seen above, elephants were located close to Rome in imperial times and, given that such animals would not have been expended needlessly on account of the cost of procurement and maintenance, they were mainly used in processions, such as imperial triumphs. Such an explanation cannot, of course, be proved. Yet this explanation does seem, prima facie, more plausible than elephants, being relatively slow-moving and hungry beasts, making their way from Italy to the northernmost coast of Gaul, much less being transported across the Channel to accompany Claudius on a whirlwind tour of duty. This is especially the case if the standard interpretation of Dio's text at 60.21.2 is preferred over Manley's novel reconstruction of events, which did not, at the very least, quite capture the timeline envisaged by Dio.