1 | Why Julius Caesar Invaded Britain | The One With Greedy Romans - A Pillock's Guide To British History

Roman Britain might have kicked off in 55 BC when Julius Caesar planned his invasion. Why exactly did Julius and his Roman friends want to invade Britain? It turns ancient political leaders are just as selfish and twatty as their modern descendants. This episode goes over the reasons that the Romans wanted to launch that important era of British history; Roman Britan. Transcript – Julius Caesar & Britain In our first episode of the history of Britain, we look at Rome’s first crack at taking over the British Isles. Rome was founded in 753 BC, but it wasn’t until 55 BC that they found themselves at the English Channel looking over and thinking, ‘fuck it’ we might as well have that bit as well.     And the bloke doing that high-quality strategic thinking was non-other than Julius Caesar. He wasn’t at the height of his powers in 55 BC, and frankly, he bollocksed the whole thing up. Before we stick the boot into one of the most famous generals in history, let’s look at why Rome fancied attacking Britain.   We covered one reason already. It’s just what they did during that period. They had spread from a town in Italy to having control over a chunk of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. They were bad neighbours to have.   The second reason is incomprehensible to modern ears. We are far too used to our current political systems, but we will do our best to explain. It was a question of personal prestige, power and legacy. Unbelievable isn’t it?   Exactly what power was on offer for Julius? Well, the top job in Rome was called a Consul. They were a republic, so they didn’t have a king or a chief, and a Consul was like a president and in fact, a Consul was like two presidents, as there was always two of them. That was so if one of them went power mad, the other could veto their crazier decisions.   Each pair of Consuls had the job for one year at a time and they couldn’t be reelected straight away. Julius Caesar had already been Consul in 59 BC, and after that, he did what Consuls traditionally did, they went and ruled a province for a bit. A province was a bit of the territory that the Romans ran, so it could be anywhere from Spain to Syria. Usually, they did that for 1 or 2 years then headed back to Rome. That wouldn’t have worked for Julius. He had spent a lot of money to become Consul, and since he spent a lot of other people’s money, he had seriously pissed off a lot of people on his way to the top. Roman politics could be a bit less forgiving than British politics. There are not just sarcastic comments at Prime Minister’s Question Time. As Julius would later find out, spoilers, folk were getting stabbed. He needed cash and a bit of distance between him and his stabbier enemies, so instead of running a province for a year or two, he set himself up to run 3 of them for a decade. He went big and became governor of Cisalpine Gaul (which is Northern Italy) Illyricum (which is a bit of the Balkans, around Albania, Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia) and Transalpine Gaul (basically, what is now France and bit of the Benelux nations).   What does this have to do with Britain? Well, like we said it was all about personal glory. The way to get elected to Consul was to have loads of money, but more important was to have a massive reputation, which in Rome meant military success. Rome was basically an army with an empire hanging off it. As much as we all like to laugh at British politics, our American friends will be more familiar with how Roman politics worked. Cash was crucial, fetishising the military was essential and backstabbing was all the rage, although Romans were occasionally a bit more literal about that than Americans. Romans also had crazy men occasionally rise to the top, who looked like they were going to bring the whole thing crashing down.     Anyway,