5 - The location of Britain in the Roman world

Summary

Introduction

The previous chapter demonstrated that there is a strong congruence between the political imagery of the Augustan revolution and the imagery on British coin. It corroborates the idea that the sons of British kings may have been brought up in Rome, as were other obsides recorded in the Roman annals. This chapter seeks to explore the impact this experience could have had on the impressionable mind of a child. Before their departure to the big city, they would have learnt something of how their peers viewed the world around them. Stories and repeated practices would have taught them something of Iron Age British cosmology. Yet on their arrival in Rome, whilst some of these beliefs could possibly have been accommodated, many others would appear totally alien in a classical context. I want to explore this inevitable conflict between cosmologies that would have raged in the minds of these children, taken away from their circular hearth and home, and transported to the rectilinear world of Rome. They would have had to assimilate and cope with the conflicts between belief systems as British and classical cosmologies collided.

The evidence for a clash of cultures in the minds of people who died two thousand years ago is of course going to be tenuous, but two areas can be explored. First, certain aspects of Graeco-Roman myth appear on British coin which were outside the repertoire of Augustan imagery, and this can be understood in terms of a particular British reading of classical myth.