Though the Silures, thus headed, did everything that became their martial reputation, both in the choice and defence of their posts, the Romans, by their discipline and the weight and excellence of their arms, prevailed over the naked bravery of this gallant people, and defeated them in a great battle. Caractacus was soon after betrayed into their hands, and conveyed to Rome. The merit of the prisoner was the sole ornament of a triumph celebrated over an indigent people headed by a gallant chief. The Romans crowded eagerly to behold the man who, with inferior forces, and in an obscure corner of the world, had so many years stood up against the weight of their empire. As the arts of adulation improved in proportion as the real grandeur of Rome declined, this advantage was compared to the greatest conquests in the most flourishing times of the Republic: and so far as regarded the personal merit of Caractacus, it could not be too highly rated. Being brought before the emperor, he behaved with such manly fortitude, and spoke of his former actions and his present condition with so much plain sense and unaffected dignity, that he moved the compassion of the emperor, who remitted much of that severity which the Romans formerly exercised upon their captives. Rome was now a monarchy, and that fierce republican spirit was abated which had neither feeling nor respect for the character of unfortunate sovereigns. The Silures were not reduced by the loss of Caractacus, and the great defeat they had suffered. They resisted every measure of force or artifice that could be employed against them, with the most generous obstinacy: a resolution in which they were confirmed by some imprudent words of the legate, threatening to extirpate, or, what appeared to them scarcely less dreadful, to transplant their nation. Their natural bravery thus hardened into despair, and inhabiting a country very difficult of access, they presented an impenetrable barrier to the progress of that commander; insomuch that, wasted with continual cares, and with the mortification to find the end of his affairs so little answerable to the splendor of their beginning, Ostorius died of grief, and left all things in confusion. The legates who succeeded to his charge did little more for about sixty years than secure the frontiers of the Roman province. But in the beginning of Nero's reign the command in Britain was devolved on Suetonius Paulinus, a soldier of merit and experience, who, when he came to view the theatre of his future operations, and had well considered the nature of the country, discerned evidently that the war must of necessity be protracted to a great length, if he should be obliged to penetrate into every fastness to which the enemy retired, and to combat their flying parties one by one. He therefore resolved to make such a blow at the head as must of course disable all the inferior members.