'And what may Britain be?' - The fiction field of Roman Britain: Part One

Abstract

In his short poem, 'Caesar at the Straits', Charles Williams imagines what was in the mind of Julius Caesar in 55 B.C. as he assembled his troops for the first incursion into Britain... In the later 19th century in the British Isles there was a widespread if somewhat naive interest in the four hundred year period of Roman occupation. This was a natural sequel to the rediscovery of Pompeii in April 1748, the focus on the need for the preservation of its treasures by Johan Winckelmann (1717-1768), and the controversial removal to England of the Elgin Marbles. Initially this concern was largely with the surviving material artefacts and with actual ruins. ... But there was a further interest in matters Roman in the rise of history of language studies, notably in the interest in the early word borrowings from Latin into the Germanic languages, and in the early Celtic borrowings into English, via Latin.