"Legions of the Eagle" by Henry Treece

Gwydion, the son of a Belgic lord, the right-hand man to King Caratacus, and his Silurian slave Math, are captured by the Romans invading Britain. Math escapes but Gwydion is sent to Gaul as a slave to be the companion of centurion's son Gaius. Following a plague, the boys return to Britain seeking Gwydion's mother and the father of Gaius. They also find Math and a whole lot of trouble.

I loved this boys' adventure story when I was nine. Now I don't. Gwydion is the typical Treece hero (see his Viking books): brave, boastful, and reckless. His experiences as a slave don't seem to have changed this. He doesn't seem to learn. He's also blond and Treece seems to have favoured flaxen hair: the dark-haired (and dark-faced) Math might be cunning but he is despicable. Although there are moments when Gwydion catches glimpses of Math's resentment of the master-slave dynamic (despite the author's protests that Gwysion and his mother treat Math like one of them) this doesn't spill over into justice in terms of the story arc and I have to conclude that Treece, like Gwydion, never properly understood that a favoured slave is still a slave, that power can only exist with powerlessness, and that conquest does not give the conquerors the moral right to belittle the conquered in any way, even by patronising them. At the end, Gwydion says: "Life isn't given to us just so we can exert our strength on other men and turn their lives inside-out for our own advantage." (Epilogue). But there is no evidence, in his character, or in that of his best friend Gaius, that he understands this. The lesson is learnt by Math, perhaps, but by this time Math is the antagonist.

Furthermore, the history seems surprisingly sloppy for such a well-known author. "Then Gwydion saw his mother do a strange thing; she suddenly stood in her stirrups" (4.1). This would have been strange indeed during the Roman conquest of Britain (43 CE).  Although rope loops may have been used as early as 200 BCE (in Asia, perhaps reaching Rome but probably not Britain) there is no evidence for the stirrup as such before 500 CE. Furthermore, Gwydion travels through "Londinium" (2.1) but there is no evidence for pre-Roman settlement in London and Londinium as such was founded by the Romans after their invasion.

A very disappointing read.

Selected quote:

• "When men go to war, they do not think of their opponents as being of the same nature as their own families." (2.5)

August 2021

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Ancient Paths" by Graham Robb

This is one of those books that uncovers ancient mysteries .

Before the Romans came the Celts. They were a migratory people who lived in tribes. Their heartland was Gaul although there were lots of them in Britain and Spain and Northern Italy and Eastern Europe but they definitely weren't the Germanic tribes. The Romans portray the Celts as being barbaric (and the human sacrifice bit of their religions is a little uncomfortable) but they had roads and chariots and metalwork and jewellery and clearly a reasonably coherent society.

So far so good.

They built long roads that were aligned with lines of longitude and latitude and along the directions of the summer and winter solstices. These roads were immensely long but incredibly precise. They built sacred centres, many of which later became centres of population all along these roads but particularly where two roads crossed. These crossings had such sacred significance that when they came to do battle with the Romans they insisted on battling them on sacred sites despite sacrificing many advantages. Presumably they thought that the immense advantage of having god on your side would do the trick. They were wrong. They lost heavily and were conquered; tens of thousands were massacred and sold into slavery.

Lots of maps accompany this fascinating thesis and the straight lines join many historic sites. One line, for example, goes from the site of the last Celtic resistance in Gaul through Milan to Delphi. Another, parallel to this one, goes through three towns named Mediolanum (also the original name of Milan), Bratislava, Budapest and Ankara.

But there are a lot of these lines and you might expect that some would travel through a few cities. After all, you can draw an infinity of lines that travel from south west to north east along the solstice line, or north-south for longitude or east-west for latitude.

A key east-west meridian is that which passes through a French town once called, you guessed it, Mediolanum. This is at a latitude that has a longest day length of 15 hours and 54 minutes. This is exactly one hour longer than the longest day at the latitude of Delphi. Delphi was believed to be the centre of the Greek world therefore this Gallic town is the centre of the Celtic world. Robb is asking me to believe not only that the druids could measure in minutes, which he explicitly suggests they couldn't, but also that 15h54m is somehow significant.

This is a reasonably well written book and Robb does his best to put real science and real archaeology into it and to keep mystics, hippies and ley line hunters out of it. But in the end it doesn't quite convince.

March 2015; 298 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God