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A God's Name on a Doomed Roman Colonia

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A God's Name on a Doomed Roman Colonia

The town that carried Camulus's name into recorded history had a violent later chapter that has little to do with the god directly but everything to do with the place he named. After the Roman conquest of Britain in 43 CE, the legionary base at Camulodunum was refounded as a colonia, a settlement of retired Roman soldiers, and it became the site of a great Temple of the Deified Claudius, built to celebrate Roman rule and, to British eyes, to celebrate it in a provocative way: as a temple to the emperor as a god, its upkeep funded through taxation of the local British elite.

In 60 or 61 CE the town was the first target of the revolt led by Boudica, queen of the Iceni, and, according to the Roman historians Tacitus and Cassius Dio, the ill-defended colonia was overrun and burned, its inhabitants killed and the temple itself the last refuge where the defenders made a final stand before it too was destroyed, an episode consistent with a layer of burned destruction debris found beneath modern Colchester. The god Camulus's own worship continued after this catastrophe; inscriptions to Mars Camulus are known from later in the Roman period. But the fate of his namesake town is a reminder that a Celtic war god's name could end up attached to a very Roman kind of political and religious symbol, one that provoked exactly the martial fury Camulus himself was thought to embody, only this time turned against Rome rather than for it.

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