Arvee and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a podcast looking at the lives of some of the ancient world's most famous figures.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me as always is Dr.

Rianna Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Lottrobe University.

This is episode X-V-I-I-I-Cauter conquers Britannia. When we last left the story of ancient Rome,

the unlikely figure of Claudius had been made emperor, and while he has the background of a scholar he's got no

military track record of his own and this is a problem that he is quick to address

he's Rhianna Evans. Famously Julius Caesar went to Britain twice in the 50s B.C.

while he was in Gaul.

He went there the first time was really very quickly and the landing was very bad the second time he was there for a little

bit longer and fought with some of the locals but there's no invasion there's no idea

that there's going to be any permanent Roman presence there and if you think about the context

when we get to Claudius that's a hundred years ago so Julius Caesar went there and nobody really has made any

inroads into Britain I prefer to call it Britannia since then. And it's a really big deal conceptually for the Romans because if you look at a map now you think of the distance between Northern France and southern England

as being very, very close. It's just the English channel and at its narrowest point, it's not that far.

It's a few hours on the train. Yeah exactly there's a tunnel but for the

Romans they described it as crossing ocean they thought of the ocean has been circling

the earth and Europe was obviously this big landmass which they were most familiar with, but going over to Britannia was crossing ocean.

It's almost like going to another world and so whoever conquers ocean as it were is going to get a lot of prestige from this

It's a sort of double-sided being quite scared of doing it, but also if you actually achieve it, then that would be amazing.

It seems a bit surprising then that it took 100 years until Claudius to actually attempt it.

Well, of course, the Romans had been a little bit sidetracked

by things like civil wars in the meantime.

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