This is a travelogue which, like Dr
Who, journeys in both time and space. Higgins tours the country
visiting Roman sites but their physical presence is not the focus.
The heart of this book is the journeys through the relationship that
successive generations have had with our Roman past.
This is partly the story to the
developments of historical and archaeological practice over the last
300 years or so, a story filled with some delightfully colourful
characters. But it is also the story of the wider social understand
of the Roman Empire and its lessons for the contemporary self
understanding.
The dominance of a “Classical”
education during the 18th and 19th Centuries
drove a desire to make links between the Classical world and our own
origins. There was a need to show that we had a share in the
inheritance that was being privileged as the gold standard of
education and civilisation.
And then during the 19th and
early 20th Centuries Britain’s own Imperial status
patterned our reading of life under Roman rule, that Roman brought
civilisation to these islands became a justification for the export
of British civilisation to other parts of the globe. After the
initial resistance the Ancient Briton was seen to have settled down
and embraced the benevolent rule of Rome, so the story went.
And today in our “Post-Colonial”
age we tell different stories. We are more ready to see the
diversity of the “Roman” population, that there Africans and
Arabs stationed on Hadrian's Wall becomes politicised, in both
positive and negative ways. We are less certain that Roman rule was
benevolent, or that the native population was in such need of
external “civilisation”, Rome did not arrive on a blank canvas.
The main lesson is that the past is not
as static as we at first imagine, “History” is not a closed book
but one that is under constant revision. And the Histories we write
often tell us more about ourselves that they do about our ancestors.
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