Thread 17934445

They should have annexed all of Britain and Ireland or stayed out of it all together. Either course of action would have been a better decision. Going half way up and stopping along a difficult frontier was a massive waste of military resources. Discuss and let’s have a general Roman Britain thread.

>>17934445 (OP)
Julius Caesar's 55 BCE and 54 BCE mistake.

>>17934445 (OP)
It's not like they didn't try you retard
Wouldn't help them even if they succeeded, pretenders would still strip garrisons, uncivilised (but controlled) britons(and now picts/irish) would still revolt and angloseax would still raid and conquer the island

>>17934475
They would have to rule Scotland and Ireland with a fairly light hand. Keep taxes low and give a lot of power to local warlords. Might work though. The alternative is to never invade in the first place. The channel would be fairly easy to defend against pirate raids. That free’s up a lot of resources to use against Persians and Germniggers. Maybe the conquest of Mesopotamia is more sustainable because of it.

>>17934492
They conquered England for its tin deposits, which Scotland didn't have.

>>17934445 (OP)
Septimius Severus took an army into Scotland and killed so many people and destroyed so many settlements, it caused previously near extinct forests to grow back.

>>17934445 (OP)
No one ever went broke conquering England. Its been done dozens of times.

No I don't think this follows
1. without taking over Britain there will be constant pirate raids into Gaul
2. Britain was very rich in minerals, particularly gold and tin, which the romans ruthlessly exploited
3. It was a convenient place to park reserve legions that was very out of the way so commanders would be less tempted to use them to overthrow the state (though this didn't always happen as planned I'll admit)

Though I will say I was surprised when I learned that Hadrian's Wall was barely used. It was just a vanity project for the emperor that only a few years after being built was gutted and abandoned as the Romans moved on to the next vanity project for the emperor. I had always assumed it was this super important frontier defensive line that was relevant for centuries like the Ming great wall, because of how often its talked about, but in reality it was just a blip.

>>17935718
Problem was that the Caledonians would just fuck off back to the mountains and continue fighting a guerrilla style war against the romans. There were no big central kingdoms or cities with existing bureaucracies that the romans could just co-opt like with the Civitae in Gaul and southern Britain, just loose warrior bands of Caledonians that wouldn't stayed in one single place enough to be taxed. Likewise, there were no rich resources or agricultural lands in Caledonia that the romans could send in their settler veterans to set up Coloniae.

So after Septimus died, and the campaign ended, everything went back to the same as before.

>>17934445 (OP)
>Going half way up and stopping along a difficult frontier
It wasn't a difficult frontier, it was objectively easier to defend there than take the highlands, hence why they defended there.
Also, leaving Southern Britain to the natives would lead to them raiding across the Channel

>>17934445 (OP)
The couldn't annex it so that's it

>>17935718
>it caused previously near extinct forests to grow back.
Uh no Roman invasion is associated with a decline in forests and his invasion was an utter failure leading to his own death

The Romans did attempt to conquer the whole islands with a genocidal campaign against the Caledonians, it was a massive effort but the scotch highlands were too rough. Mathematically speaking the cost of the expedition increased exponentially, so that even if you had the beefiest legionaries they'd still shit themselves to death of dysentry.

>>17936874
Sad autistic post

>>17934445 (OP)
Annexing northern scotland would have just been a massive effort to annex uncontrollable mountain wasteland with nothing going on there.
They could have annexed Ireland, but that pretty much would've been a completely separate invasion.

>>17936954
And yet Switzerland was conquered....

>>17934445 (OP)
>stopping along a difficult frontier was a massive waste of military resources.
Huge numbers of slaves

>>17936954
They could've just deported the picts and other caledonians somewhere more managable, it's not like there isn't a precedent for that in roman history up to that point