Tea at Trianon: The Romans and the Irish

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, April 23, 2020

The Romans and the Irish

From The Irish Times:

The Romans never conquered Ireland. They did not even try. The closest they came was 20 years after the invasion of Anglesey, when Agricola, another governor, eyeballed the north coast of Ulster from the “trackless wastes”of Galloway. According to Tacitus, Agricola’s son-in-law, the governor brazenly remarked that Ireland could have been conquered and occupied by a single legion with a few auxiliaries.

An exiled Irish prince was among Agricola’s entourage, giving rise to the possibility that this was Túathal Techtmar, the son of a deposed high king, who is said to have invaded Ireland from afar in order to regain his kingdom at about this time. Some archaeologists have suggested that Agricola established a bridgehead at Drumanagh, an Iron Age promontory fort that juts into the Irish Sea near Rush, some 20km north of Dublin. The notion that Drumanagh was, at the very least, some form of Roman trading depot was boosted by the discovery of Roman coins, metalwork and tableware at the fort, including fragments of amphorae (pottery) from Pomponius Mela’s homeland in Baetica.

Whether Agricola went on the offensive or not, he certainly fortified parts of Britain’s western shore against attacks from Ireland. Among the many reveals of the 2018 heatwave were the remains of a watchtower on the Llyn Peninsula, just south of Anglesey, complete with barracks for a coastal garrison. In AD 150, some 60 years after Agricola’s death, the Greco-Egyptian writer Claudius Ptolemy devised what is ostensibly the first known map of Ireland, published in Geographia, an atlas of the Roman empire and beyond. Ptolemy pinpointed a number of coastal settlements in Ireland, as well as royal settlements such as Emain Macha (Navan fort) in Co Armagh. He also named 16 Irish tribes, including the Voluntii, or Ulaid, of Ulster and the Gangani of Munster, who may have been connected to what Ptolemy calls the “promontory of the Gangani”on Anglesey. (Read more.)