Atrebates

The Atrebates of southern Britain were founded by a refugee. Commius had been Caesar's own client, installed as king of the Gaulish Atrebates around Arras and used as an envoy to Britain in 55 BC on the strength of his standing there; he then joined the great revolt of 52 BC, survived an assassination attempt by Roman officers, fought on after Alesia and finally escaped across the Channel, where he established a kingdom among people of the same name in Hampshire and Sussex. His descendants ruled from Calleva, now Silchester, and minted coins with Latin legends: Tincomarus, Eppillus and Verica all styled themselves rex. The kingdom was the principal counterweight to the Catuvellauni north of the Thames, and it lost. Cunobelinus and then his sons pressed the Atrebatic territory steadily, and around AD 42 Verica was driven out and fled to Rome to ask for help. That request gave Claudius the pretext he had been looking for. The invasion of AD 43 was launched formally to restore an expelled ally, and the Atrebatic lands were duly reconstituted, not as an independent kingdom but as the client realm of Cogidubnus, who took the name Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus and was described on an inscription at Chichester as great king in Britain. The palace at Fishbourne, the largest Roman residential building north of the Alps, was probably his. The territory became the civitas of the Atrebates with its capital at Silchester, which was abandoned entirely in the fifth century and never built over, which is why it is one of the most completely excavated Roman towns in Britain. Silchester's street grid is visible from the air in a bare field. Its amphitheatre and walls survive. No modern town sits on it.

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