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Foreword

Four years ago I wrote a story called Those Old Gods, which told of two boys and their discoveries -- and self-discovery -- while excavating a Roman-British temple near Bath. That tale was set in the present day. Here now is its ancient counterpart, the tale of those who patronised that same temple in Roman times.

It unfolds, for the most part, at the town then known as Viroconium Cornoviorum, whose site near the modern Shrewsbury is marked these days only by the tiny village of Wroxeter and the spectacular remnants of its Roman baths. From the Severn plain nearby there rises, like a whale leaping from the sea, the isolated hill of the Wrekin. On its summit lies an Iron Age hill-fort, one of the centres of the tribe of the Cornovii, which preceded the Roman town. Both names, Wrekin and Wroxeter, derive from the British-Latin Viroconium, which antiquarians formerly and mistakenly spelt as Uricon.

One of those antiquarians was A.E. Housman, whose poem has supplied my title. He was an interesting if melancholy character, not only gay but unfulfilled, who knew full well that no generation, as it comes and painfully goes, has a monopoly of grief and trouble. "The tree of man was never quiet," as he put it. "Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I." How right he was. There is little new, in this respect, under the sun.

None the less it is not easy for us, acclimatised to modern psychological constructs, to understand the Romans' attitude towards homosexuality. Society was, up to a point, highly permissive. There were of course laws, buttressed by public opinion, against rape and to protect the free-born young. Beyond that, sexual activity between males involved, in principle, no shame or disgrace whatever, and it was widespread. Males were expected eventually to marry and procreate, and they usually did. But, from the evidence not only of upper-class literature but of mis-spelt graffiti scrawled by the lower orders, it is perfectly clear that they were free, indeed almost expected, to find pleasure in both sexes. The Romans, moreover, like the Greeks, had no word for sexual orientation as such, because they simply did not think of people as being gay or straight or bisexual. What mattered was not what you were, but what you did with who.

This was the area where the Romans, for all their permissiveness, suffered from the great hang-up which is explored in the following pages. But it must be remembered that this hang-up was largely limited to the traditional culture of Rome and Italy. The make-up of Rome's vast cosmopolitan empire, once it had spread around the whole circuit of the Mediterranean and far up into Europe, was endlessly varied. Away from the centre, conventions were not necessarily the same. Much depended on how far pre-existing local custom was overlaid by Roman custom and even by Roman law. And as the grip of Christianity tightened, yet another and much more rigid brand of morality took over.

Thus in Roman Britain, at the very fringe of the empire, long-established native attitudes to sexuality were confronted by imported ones -- not only by the traditional Roman attitude but ultimately by the Christian. What might have been the situation here is one of the themes of this tale. I say 'what might have been' because hard evidence of the British outlook is minimal. But, by extrapolating forwards from earlier Celtic custom and backwards from the oldest Welsh laws, I have made an informed guess. This is, after all, a work of fiction. But in another sense, as an attempt at a portrait of a fascinating age, it is also factual. The setting is real, and while the central characters are fictitious, all the emperors, most of the governors, generals and churchmen, and some of the minor players, did actually exist. The background, essentially, is history.

But what is history? I am not thinking of definitions like the glorious one offered by the schoolboy in Alan Bennett's play, that history is just one fucking thing after another; although those overwhelmed by events at the end of Roman Britain would no doubt have agreed with it. What I mean is that all history is open to interpretation, and none more so than in this period, where my interpretation is my own. I also confess that to suit my fell purposes I have taken, as experts will spot, a few liberties with detail.

I have regularly employed one Latin term which can hardly be translated. The civitas was the major Roman unit of local government, meaning the territory which (in our case) had belonged to the pre-Roman tribe of the Cornovii, whose centre was Viroconium. The closest modern analogy is the county -- Shropshire, for example, with its county town of Shrewsbury. But the civitas of the Cornovii was far larger than Shropshire, for it embraced adjacent counties too, as well as a fair slice of central Wales. The Cornovii in their turn were but one civitas in the province of Britannia Prima, whose capital was Corinium (Cirencester). There were four provinces in Britain at the time, each with its own governor, and over all four governors was the Deputy Prefect, based at London and answerable to the Prefect of the Gauls.

The story spans the years between AD 360 when Docco was eleven and 411 when Roman Britain had collapsed around its citizens' ears. To help readers of historical bent, I have added to the title of each chapter the date when its events took place. All the quotations at the chapter heads are from late Roman authors, many of which themselves inspired aspects of the plot. But all those translated in italics in the text are from Vergil, whose standing in those days, even in distant Britain, was immense: higher even, perhaps, than Shakespeare's is with us today. Some translations are wholly my own, some draw to one degree or another from those -- notably the incomparable Helen Waddell -- who have gone before. As for ancient place-names, a geographical appendix converts them into modern equivalents and locates the British ones on maps.

This tale sees the light of day at a not inappropriate time. One of its threads is slavery, and we have just celebrated the bicentenary of the abolition, on 25 March 1807, of the slave trade in British territories. Another of its themes is the spread of Christianity, and last year we marked the 1700th anniversary of the acclamation, at York on 25 July 306, of Constantine the Great as emperor of Rome; an event which proved, for better or for worse, one of the most fundamental in the whole history of Christianity, of Europe, and indeed the world.

My thanks are due to the multitude of unwitting authors from whom, in the course of much magpie reading, I have filched facts, fancies, and even phrases; notably Mary Renault, Ellis Peters, and John Julius Norwich. As usual, too, I owe a huge debt to Jonathan for being with me, and to Ben, Chris, Hilary and Pryderi for reading drafts and making many wise comments. And it is to Pryderi that I dedicate the story, in gratitude for his broad-mindedness, his insights, and his support.

Ante diem IV Kal. Mai. MMVII

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