Camulus

Camulus is a Gaulish and British war god whom the Romans identified with their own Mars, worshipping him under the combined name Mars Camulus. He is a good example of a Celtic deity known almost entirely from the archaeological and epigraphic record rather than from any body of myth: no stories about him survive, and what we know comes from inscriptions and place-names left across the Roman-period Celtic world. Those traces show that his cult was genuinely widespread, dedications to him have been found in Gaul, in Roman Britain, and in the Rhineland, set up by soldiers and others across the north-western provinces of the empire. His name is preserved most durably in a great city: Camulodunum, the fortress of Camulus, was the Roman name of what is now Colchester in England, the earliest Roman capital of Britain, so that a war god otherwise lost to us is remembered in the name of a town.

The equation with Mars tells us that the Romans, who habitually matched foreign gods to their own, recognised in Camulus a deity of war and martial power; the many dedications by military men point the same way. Beyond that, honesty requires acknowledging how little is known: Camulus belongs to the large class of Celtic gods whose worship is attested but whose character and stories have not come down to us, glimpsed only through the Roman lens that renamed him and the stone that recorded his name.

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.