The edge of the Empire A journey to Britannia : from the heart of Rome to Hadrian's Wall

I AM WELSH. I live in Wales, and I sometimes go down to Bath, Aquae Sulis, the ancient Roman spa city in the southwest of England. The modern town contains celebrated remains from the days when the Roman Empire annexed much of the island of Britain, suppressing the varied tribes of the place, and during my visits I have become familiar with a well-known sculpture from Roman times that has been adopted in reproduction as a sort of badge of today's municipality. It resembles the ferocious head of a Gorgon, one of the awful monsters of Latin legend, and you come across its reproductions everywhere in town. I always thought it a quintessentially Roman symbol of domination until I was recently informed that the "Gorgon" was not a Roman grotesque at all but a powerfully mustachioed Celtic deity. It was not an invader that was imaged there but a native - not a symbol of mythological dominance but a token of common experience. I have learned this, and much else, from Bronwen Riley's erudite and fascinating work concerning the Roman occupation of Britain. The shape of "The Edge of the Empire" is complex. It purports to reconstruct the journey, in A.D. 130, of a particular official, Sextus Julius Severus, from Rome to the island of Britain and on to the empire's remote northwestern frontier, just south of what is now the Scottish border. The editor of several scholarly guides to Roman relics in Britain, Riley has chosen a route that takes Julius Severus among many of the region's best-known sites, allowing her to tell us all about the experience of traveling through Britain in Roman times - what to pack, what to look out for, what to eat, what to read on the road (detailed tourist maps are available). She suggests one should take some smart clothes in case of posh dinner invitations. She warns us of possible dangers, Britain being full of brigands and hostile tribes, and she tells us the best places to stay (there are perfectly adequate official lodgings, mansiones, along the way). With her and Julius Severus we cross to the island (in a private cabin, of course) on a sail-and-oar-powered vessel from Gesoriacum (Boulogne) to Rutupiae (Richborough), where a gigantic memorial arch welcomes us ashore. And then we are away, to Londinium, of course; to Aquae Sulis; to Roman civic and military fulcra in what are now southern England, Cumbria and Wales. We travel through farmland and wasteland and cattle country, through several tribal territories, ending up at the ultimate frontier, the emperor Hadrian's defensive wall, still being built on the border of distant Caledonia. The whole experience is explored for us, from the food to the public entertainment, from the industries of the province (iron-working, shoemaking, brine extraction, the production of wool) to the illustrated route-planning papyrus cylinders that alert the traveler to the locations of inns, temples and spas. Much of it seems vestigially familiar to a traveler in Britain today. The modern motorways often follow Roman routes. Those planning cylinders sound much like sites on the Internet. The tourist industry was hard at it then, as now - the health-giving baths of Aquae Sulis drew Roman visitors, gastronomes relished British oysters, and even the fabled mysteries and menaces of the island, I dare say, tempted a few Adventure Tourists to cross the Oceanus Britannicus. Those of us who live in Britannia now, anyway, are never far from Roman reminders of one sort or another. Up the road from my home is the site of the very battle by which the legions exterminated the mystic druids of Mon. For myself, though, as a historian and late citizen of the British Empire rather than the Roman, it is when I travel among the overseas territories of the late Pax Britannica that the two dead empires seem to me most alike. I imagine Bronwen Riley's travel companion, Julius Severus, to have been not unlike some upper-class English functionary on his way to a distant imperial posting a century ago - cool, confident, well educated, well mannered, sometimes arrogant and perhaps rather too pleased with himself. He was probably welcomed along his route by hospitable colleagues and Romanized locals, just as his British successor very often met people he was at school with or native bigwigs of properly Anglophile tendencies. The welcoming mansiones of the one empire were the innumerable dak bungalows of the other, and if the bleak highlands surrounding Hadrian's Wall were the last frontiers of the Roman imperium, the fierce Northwest Frontier of Afghanistan was the allegorical rampart of the British Raj. Time and again, as I read "The Edge of the Empire," I recognized symptoms of my own British imperialism. Racism? Of course, it's inevitable between conquerors and conquered, but just as the Celtic warrior spirit found itself immortalized in that sculpture of Aquae Solis, so Sikh, Punjabi and Afghan fighters found their honored way into the mythology of Kipling's British Empire - as the poet himself put it, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" Many a Roman legionary settled in Britain with a local wife and family when his term of duty was done. And in the late days of the Pax Britannica, soldiers and functionaries of the Raj often preferred to end their days in the sunshine - "somewhere east of Suez" (Kipling again), "where the best is like the worst,/Where there aren't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst." They had much in common, after all, those two dominions. Both were based on greedy injustices of conquest, both were inevitably doomed, but both did good in their times too, and made many friends and converts among the conquered. Dear reader, if you live like me in some long liberated colony of one or the other, consult this fascinating volume for a guide not merely to its physical relics but to its meanings and its attitudes, which may perhaps be your own. If not, read the book anyway to find what your destiny has missed. JAN MORRIS is the author of some 40 books of travel, fiction, memoir and history, including the Pax Britannica trilogy.

Riley, head of guidebooks at English Heritage, imagines a second-century C.E. travelogue based around Sextus Julius Severus's journey from Rome to Britain upon assuming his post as governor of Britannia in 130 C.E. Making clear that much is based on conjecture, Riley builds on documentary and archaeological evidence, and borrows relatable information from other areas of the empire or adjacent time periods in Britannia to provide a logically plausible scenario. She begins with a sketch of the Eternal City itself, moving northward across Gaul to Britannia and taking time along the journey to describe various aspects of life for a Roman citizen of the time. Once in Britain, Riley follows the course that Severus might have taken on his first tour of the province, giving precise distances between stops as well as including known features of each settlement and both Roman and modern names. A postscript delivers a further brief history of Britain under Roman rule and an idea of what a modern visitor might see at the various sites. There are maps and diagrams scattered throughout that help to bring this journey to life. Riley gives readers a reasonable snapshot of life as it might have been in second-century Britain. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.