When the Emperor Claudius launched the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD, Caratacus was a prince of the Catuvellauni - a tribe centred north of the Thames, whose father Cunobelinus had been the most powerful ruler in pre-Roman Britain. His brother Togodumnus died in the early fighting. The Catuvellauni were defeated. Most British leaders submitted; eleven kings reportedly knelt before Claudius at Colchester in the summer of 43, and the emperor went home with the prestige of a conquest. Caratacus did not submit. He went west, gathered the Silures and Ordovices - the warlike tribes of what is now southern and central Wales - and fought a guerrilla campaign in the hills that pinned Roman forces in Britain for seven more years. By 50 AD he had become, in Tacitus's word, *clarissimus*, the most famous Briton in the world. His name was known in Rome itself. The new governor, Publius Ostorius Scapula, had to break him.

Tacitus knew, broadly, what happened. The battle was fought in the territory of the Ordovices, whose boundaries are now lost - probably central and northern Wales. Caratacus picked his ground with care: a river that was fordable in places but not everywhere, a steep hillside backing the British position with loose rocks like scree, and stone ramparts (*muri congesti*) built at the choke points. He gave a speech before the battle that Tacitus translates as freedom or death, evoking the ancestral right of Britons to live unconquered. His men cheered. The Roman troops, who had been chasing Caratacus around Wales for years, were tired of it and wanted decision. Ostorius worked out which of the slopes had gentler gradients. He forded the river. The Romans came under a rain of missiles - slingshot, javelins, anything the Britons could throw downhill - and went into testudo formation: their shields locked above them like a roof of tortoiseshell. They dismantled the stone walls and broke through. The Britons withdrew to the hilltops, mostly without armour or helmets, and the Roman auxiliaries and legionaries pursued them and cut them down.

Caratacus escaped the battlefield with a small band. He had no army left. He had lost his wife, his daughter, and his brothers (Tacitus does not say in what manner, but they were captured at the battle and would later appear with him in Rome). He fled north into the territory of the Brigantes, a vast federation covering what is now Yorkshire and the north of England, and threw himself on the protection of their queen Cartimandua. It was the wrong choice. Cartimandua had bought peace with Rome by becoming a client queen, and her position depended on staying useful to the imperial administration. She had Caratacus put in chains and handed him over. Within months he was on his way to Rome under armed escort - the most famous British chieftain in chains, the trophy of an obscure campaign that the Senate had been told repeatedly was almost over.

Claudius made an imperial spectacle of it. Caratacus was paraded through the streets of Rome with his wife, daughter, and surviving brothers, in a triumph staged for the emperor's prestige - the kind of ceremony Romans normally reserved for the conquest of a major kingdom. Ostorius Scapula was awarded triumphal ornaments. The Senate, in flattering speeches, compared Caratacus's defeat to Rome's victories over kings like Syphax and Perses. The normal outcome would have been execution at the end of the parade. But Caratacus was given a chance to speak first, and what he said survives in Tacitus, possibly close to verbatim. He pointed out that a man with as many noble ancestors and as many armies as he had once commanded was bound to be worth more alive than dead. He pointed out that Rome's empire was the greater story for having defeated him; if he had simply yielded, neither his fame nor Rome's victory would mean anything. He concluded - in a line that English schoolchildren learned by heart for three centuries - that if Rome wished to rule the world, it did not follow that the world should welcome slavery. Claudius pardoned him. So did the Senate. Caratacus and his family lived out their lives in Rome on imperial pension.

British Camp on the Malvern Hills has the strongest local legend - Elgar named a cantata, *Caractacus*, after the chieftain partly because he could see the Beacon from his window. But Tacitus says the river was visible from the battlefield, and the Severn lies eight kilometres away across the plain. Caer Caradoc Hill in Shropshire has the name (*Caer* meaning fort in Welsh, the rest preserving the chieftain's Welsh name *Caradog*), but the Severn is not visible from there either. Coxall Knoll on the Herefordshire border was named as the likely site by the antiquarian Arthur Mee in 1939, citing local tradition and "the support of instructed opinion." Cefn Carnedd west of Caersws has remains of earthworks of the right scale. None has been excavated definitively. The site has become a sort of distributed memorial - a series of hilltops where, on a clear day, you can stand and imagine what the Ordovices' last fighting force saw before the testudo broke their wall. Caratacus himself never spoke about it. He had, after all, lived to give a different speech.