]than you to be soldiers."
The army now proceeded to "sit on the fence"; some legions, notably
the famous Fourteenth, slightly inclined to Otho, others to Vitellius,
till their hesitation was ended by their own special hero, Vespasian,
fresh from his Judaean victories,[182] coming forward as Pretender.
Agricola, now in command of the Twentieth, at once declared for him,
and the other legions followed suit--the Fourteenth being gratified by
the title "_Victores Britannici_," officially conferred upon them by
the Emperor's new Pro-praetor, Petilius Cerealis.

F. 2.--We now enter upon the last stage of the fifty years' struggle
made by British patriots before they finally bowed to the Roman
yoke. The glory of ending the long conflict is due to Agricola,
whose praises are chronicled by his son-in-law Tacitus, and who does
actually seem to have been a very choice example of Roman virtue and
ability. The Army of Britain had been his training school in
military life, and successive commanders had recognized his merits by
promotion. Now his superiors gave him an almost independent command,
in which he showed himself as modest as he was able. Thanks to him,
Cerealis was able in A.D. 70 to end a Brigantian war (of which the
inevitable Cartismandua was the "_teterrima causa_" now no less than
twenty years earlier), and the next Pro-praetor, Frontinus, to put
down, in 75, the very last effort of the indomitable Silurians. Yet
another year, and he himself was made Military Governor of the island,
and set about the task of permanently consolidating it as a Roman
Province, with an insight all his own.

F. 3.--The only Britons yet in arms south of the Tyne were the
Ordovices of North Wales, who had lately cut to pieces a troop of
Roman cavalry. Agricola marched against them, and, by swimming
his horsemen across the Menai Straits, surprised their stronghold,
Anglesey, thus bringing about the same instant submission of the whole
clan which through the same tactics he had seen won, seventeen years
earlier, by Suetonius.

F. 4.--But Agricola was not, like Suetonius, a mere military
conqueror. He saw that Britons would never unfeignedly submit so
long as they were treated as slaves; and he set himself to remedy the
grievances under which the provincials so long had suffered. Military
licence, therefore, and civil corruption alike, he put down with
a resolute hand, never acting through intermediaries, but himself
investigating every comp