Suetonius Paulinus

Suetonius Paulinus was made in Africa’s heat. Serving under Claudius in the 40s, he campaigned in Mauretania and won renown as the first Roman commander to push across the Atlas Mountains, a feat of audacity and endurance that stamped his reputation. That grit—cold, pragmatic, and unforgiving—carried him into high office. By AD 58 he was governor of Britain, a province still knitting together its conquered south and its restive west under the weight of forts, taxes, and new gods.

He set to work in Wales, where mountain and marsh bred resistance. The druids on Mona (Anglesey) offered sanctuary and spiritual glue for anti-Roman insurgents. In 60, Suetonius gathered a mobile force and drove across the straits. Tacitus lingers on the spectacle—black-clad priestesses, raised torches, curses flung over Roman shields—before the legions cut them down and toppled sacred groves. But victory opened his flank. Behind him, Boudica and allied tribes erupted through the southeast, sacking Camulodunum and its Temple of Claudius, torching Londinium and Verulamium, and slaughtering tens of thousands. Suetonius pivoted hard. He made the most controversial call of his career: he sacrificed Londinium, evacuating those who could flee to save his army intact. On Watling Street he chose ground with a narrow approach, heavy with tactical advantages. There his smaller, disciplined force destroyed the rebel mass in a battle that rescued the province from collapse.

Suetonius’s strength carried shadows. His scorched-earth reprisals after victory—punitive levies, executions, devastation—triggered a backlash. Nero sent the powerful freedman Polyclitus to investigate. Suetonius was relieved and replaced, his severity judged bad politics after good soldiering. The decision stung a man who prided himself on results. During the Year of the Four Emperors (69), he reemerged as Otho’s general and won a sharp victory at Bedriacum, only to be outmaneuvered by the tide of civil war. He fades in the record thereafter, his date of death unknown.

Even stripped of office, Suetonius left a hard imprint on Britain. He was the governor who, when the Claudian settlement failed its stress test, refused to lose his army to save a city, then won the battle that mattered. In the argument at the heart of this story—can Rome hold Britain?—his answer was yes, but at a price in blood and goodwill. After him, Rome rebuilt London, tempered tax abuses, and learned to pair the legion’s edge with administrative tact. Without his ruthless, calculating nerve in 60–61, there might have been no province left for later governors to improve.